On 31 January 2018, the Washington Post published its latest story on the ongoing Glenn Defense Marine (GDMA) scandal. The story offered no new developments in the investigation. Relying on some recent interviews and a newly released tranche of Navy and Department of Justice documents under the Freedom of Information Act, the story did offer some new details about the dinners and parties Francis Leonard lavished on Seventh Fleet officers for many years. Almost all these new details were unremarkable, given what is already publicly known.
One aspect of the article stood out, however: a quote from a former Seventh Fleet Judge Advocate General (JAG) officer (now retired) about an “ethics alert” he sent to all the Seventh Fleet staff on board the USS Blue Ridge (LCC-19) shortly before a fateful February 2006 port visit to Hong Kong. The JAG officer told the Post he was shocked by allegations of his former shipmates flagrantly disregarding the rules. “There was a continuous drumbeat on ethics,” he said. “Anybody who was on the staff, if they took the time to read it, would have been on notice about what the ethics rules were.”
What is more shocking is that any leader believes routine military standards-of-conduct ethics training can prevent intentionally unethical behavior. The implication of the above quote is that the ethical failures and crimes of so many officers could somehow have been avoided if the officers simply read “ethics alerts” emails.
This is not surprising, coming from a lawyer. Lawyers deal in legality and compliance, not ethics in the classical sense, while in the military we focus on rule following, or applied ethics. Ethics in the classical sense is moral philosophy, or how to live a virtuous life. What that constitutes, and if virtue is susceptible to a pedagogical method, is one of the three pillars of philosophical thought and inquiry going back to the pre-Socratics (the other two pillars are the origin and nature of knowledge, or epistemology, and the best political form of governance). At its core, the GDMA scandal is more about classical ethics than rule breaking.
In the mid-1970s, former prisoner of war and Congressional medal of honor recipient VADM James Stockdale engaged in a series of correspondence with Professor Joseph Gerard Brennan, a then-recently retired professor of philosophy from Columbia University. Stockdale became president of the Naval War College in 1977 and asked Brennan to join him in teaching a course that ultimately became The Foundations of Moral Obligation (commonly referred to later as The Stockdale Course, still taught today). As Brennan wrote years later, in their early discussions Stockdale told him he did not want the term ethics as part of the course’s title. Stockdale felt the “ethics explosion” in the corporate world “had eroded the older, nobler sense of the word.” So be it, but the course very much deals with ethics in the nobler, classical sense, and includes readings from the Book of Job, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Sartre, and Camus.
Stockdale’s interest in philosophy well preceded his nearly eight-year Vietnam prisoner-of-war experience. He gravitated to it while a graduate student at Stanford in the early 1960s, and when he returned to the Navy in 1962 he had a particular fondness for the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus. He always credited Epictetus’ Enchiridion with not only helping him endure but thrive spiritually and morally in captivity.
Stockdale’s story is well known to most Navy leaders. But it is worth reflecting upon what Admiral Stockdale had found out about himself at Stanford. Beyond all else, he discovered a deeper desire to know. He needed to know more about why we humans are the way we are, what underpins our so-called core values, what is the best way to live a life, what will prepare one for the crucible of an excruciating ethical dilemma. For him and those like him, this involves reading and thinking deeply about these questions. While concrete answers will never come, it is the serious commitment to the journey that forms a big part of the best way to live a life, and prepares one for the toughest trials.
Thinking at this level about ethics is engaging in what philosophers call metaethics, or trying to develop and refine a more general understanding of the nature of morality itself. This exercise requires a mature mind and nourishes a more systemic, abstract understanding of the importance of ethical prescriptions for a just and fair society or organization. There is no safe harbor from human fallibility, but a metaethics thinker is so regularly engaged in the subject that he or she is better equipped to cultivate a strong ethical and moral character. Contemplation of the higher questions regarding our nature, as Aristotle reminds us, is a service to virtue, not an idle activity.
Most professionals operate in a place where they do try to hold themselves to a somewhat abstract ethical standard, such as being a leader of integrity, but their day-to-day ethical decision making is governed primarily by social conventions and rules. In other words, the fear of being shamed and held in low regard by one’s professional peers, along with negative career implications, is the main bulwark against ethical failings. This is indeed a powerful social force, and one Navy leadership at all levels can continually reinforce with proper word and deed. But it can’t make one truly consider the ethical implications for one’s actions. For that, we’re on our own. And as anyone can see, from GDMA to Abu Ghraib to Enron to Wells Fargo, when the culture starts to rot, this bulwark suddenly becomes a thin wall of defense.
As Dr. Martin Cook, former Admiral James B. Stockdale Professor of military ethics at the Naval War College, told me in conversation three years ago, perhaps the most honest thing that can be said about the Navy’s standards-of-conduct ethics training is that it does not do much good beyond informing those who may be unclear or need reminding on the finer distinctions in ethics regulations. Organizations could order two hours of this type of ethics training every working day of the year and they would be no less vulnerable to a major ethics scandal.
As all Navy leaders, particularly the junior ones, look at the GDMA scandal and wonder why and how it happened, they should take on board something with which I think Admiral Stockdale would agree: it’s not just about those unfortunate others, it’s about you.
Captain Bray served as a naval intelligence officer for 28 years before retiring in 2016. Currently, he is a managing director in the Geopolitical Risk practice at Ankura.