There are many reasons the U.S. Navy achieved victory in the Pacific in World War II; an important one was the Japanese flag officers’ misguided obsession with Alfred Thayer Mahan’s doctrine on the preeminence of “big-gun” capital ships.1 Mahan spoke of the importance of heavily armored battleships acting in a concentrated unit and delivering a stunning victory in a single decisive battle. But by the 1940s, victory no longer could be achieved within a limited battlespace by means of a cumbersome concentration of power. The war would be won on a stage of interconnected fronts where smaller, more lethal battlegroups would keep the enemy on the defensive. U.S. military strategists read the writing on the wall. They adapted. They engaged. They overcame.
The lesson is clear: when leaders are faced with a new pace that outruns conventional approaches to problem-solving, they must replace older, less-effective models with newer ones. This is especially true in the realm of character education.
The Navy’s typical response to behavioral problems is to launch top-down training initiatives supported by robust budgets, highly advertised campaigns, and training deadlines. These campaigns are capital programs in the truest sense. They are backed by the concentrated firepower of naval leadership and aimed at bringing moral muscle to bear on a given issue. One Team–One Fight, Chart the Course, and Full Speed Ahead are a few recent examples.
These programs are effective at some levels. They give the Navy language for identifying challenges and measuring intervention. They provide forums for meaningful conversations and help leaders see where discrimination and harassment lie uncontested. But this does not go far enough. Like the battleships of yesteryear, capital programs will be most effective when they are used in a supportive indirect-fire role, and not as the main effort. Fundamental change is overdue. The Navy cannot stage one or two decisive battles a year in the moral theater of war and think it will win. Human growth does not work like that.
The SAPR Program
Consider one of the Navy’s biggest-gun programs, Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SAPR). Millions of dollars have been allocated to SAPR to raise awareness and encourage prevention. Because it’s backed by the concentrated firepower of Navy leadership, most SAPR training relies on a one-size-fits-all approach. It is androgynous in tone and speaks in terms that are accessible to all: “consent,” “bystander intervention,” “dignity and respect.” However, in an effort to reach everyone, it ends up lacking what it needs to be most effective—precision.
For example, SAPR speaks about sexual assault as if the assaults are the enemy, but it says little about the use of pornography among sailors.2 Thus, the enemy is the illusive predator “out there” rather than the guy in the mirror. SAPR rightly comes to the aid of victims of assault, but says little about populations that are more at risk for becoming victims or measures related to peer choice and drinking that could minimize incidents. We hear about consent, but nothing about living better than consent. Navy leaders are charged to promote a culture of dignity and respect, yet rarely are there discussions about the reality: sailors (men and women) often are complicit in a culture of promiscuity that objectifies one gender in disproportionate ways and gives men and women very different scripts for how to act.3
The Mahanian doctrine of the big-gun, top-down-only, capital program has proven too blunt an instrument to be effective. Behavioral changes can come only by scalpel. That’s because underneath outward behaviors often are habits that have run silent and deep for years. No one who ended up on the front page of Navy Times for sexual misconduct did so out of the blue. Lines were crossed well before anyone ever knew about it. But the Big Navy programs don’t go there. It is a slow burn, or as seen in the news, a full-blown scandal.
A Promiscuous Age
In early 2017, it was discovered that tens of thousands of people were members of a closed Facebook community that was a forum for posting explicit pictures of female members of the Navy-Marine Corp team. Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral John Richardson addressed the crisis in a message to commanders. “Despite a steady effort to get after this,” he wrote, “we’re not making any progress.” He challenged Sea Service leaders to no longer “put a Band-Aid” on the issue, not “white-wash over it,” “not look the other way.”4 One could hear the CNO’s frustration, not only with the egregious nature of the problem, but with the apparent ineffectiveness in dealing with it. The stunning thing is not that the site existed, but that Navy leaders were so surprised by it.
This is a highly promiscuous era, where men are taught from adolescence to view women one way. Young men today are given an arousal template that is instant and can be viewed by the roll of a thumb on a five-inch screen. Without sustained moral or spiritual pressure in a teenage boy’s life, by the time he is a man he already will have walked down an airbrushed-erotic corridor that can be hard to leave.5 Women have been harmed by this culture and harm themselves. In 2007, the American Psychological Association studied the “sexualization” of girls—where girls as young as 8 to 12 years old are taught to equate their value to their sex appeal or behavior. Donna Freitas writes:
There is an emerging cultural trend where many young women learn to trade sex and its allures for popularity. . . . Eventually they come to believe that by allowing guys to objectify them in various ways they can earn enough social capital to become popular, desirable.6
Freitas also makes the connection between sexualization and sexual assault, suggesting that as respect for personal boundaries dissolves and disappears online, the boundary between consent and assault is vanishing too.7
Where in the Navy is character training that deals with this?
Decentralize the Programs
SAPR is only one example of the limits of the big-gun capital ship approach. Not that top-down programs should be mothballed, but the Navy must adapt and shift to a new main effort—what surface warriors call “distributed lethality.” This will mean smaller decentralized teams engaging sailors across multiple fronts. An effective character development strategy will consist of three facets:
1. Decentralized command teams that focus on character.
In his Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority, the CNO says “the scope and complexity of the challenges we face demand a different approach than offered by a classic campaign.” He calls for “decentralized operations guided by commander’s intent.” He also speaks of the importance of focusing on character. Commands should identify interested khaki to serve on a standing character-development team. This could include chaplains, psychologists, chiefs, and others who have the ability to teach and an interest in character development. The team could be in touch with the Naval Leadership and Ethics Center (NLEC), as well as N17 to align priorities. More important, the team would operate from a character-based model. As Aristotle said, “Character, being as its name indicates [is] something that grows by habit.”8
A character-based model gets left of the problems. Beyond “bystander intervention,” character development explores habits that are at play long before an assault occurs: pornography use, alcohol consumption, peer choice, and destructive relationship models. Character development goes beyond the idea of consent to ask what kind of outcomes one can expect if mere consent is the standard. What kind of life results from repeated, consensual, no-strings-attached sexual encounters? Research shows that casual hookups leave almost seven out of ten young people unhappy, hurt, or ambivalent at best.9 Are leaders sharing this with their sailors?
On board the USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74), the Stennis Ethics Society raises matters of character in monthly forums with khaki leaders. From the society, a board has been formed to implement character-based training at multiple levels: school of ship, petty officer indoctrination, mobile “roadshow” ethics classes, and more. It’s all part of an effort to get left of the problems.
2. Top-cover from the Department of the Navy on data from at-risk populations.
Here is where the big-gun programs can help. If local teams are the main effort, they need to be backed by two batteries of indirect fire. The first battery is the universal all-hands training. This can set broad parameters and encourage intervention. The second battery is data on at-risk populations. For example, if the data shows that sexual assault offenders largely are male and serving their first enlistment, then in addition to all-hands training, command teams might reach into this specific population with tailored education. Research proves the effectiveness of this tiered approach.
In working to prevent chronic disease and substance abuse, the Gordon Medical Model outlines three strata of education: universal, selective, and indicated.10 Universal prevention training is offered to the entire population with the benefit of general education. Selective prevention training is offered to specific subgroups that the data shows to be at higher risk. Indicated prevention training is offered to those who have been identified as having increased vulnerability based on behaviors or symptoms. In the world of character development, this could mean designing a class for those more at-risk for committing sexual misconduct (selective), or those who have demonstrated behavior bordering on sexual misconduct (indicated).
3. Toughness as a way of life.
In his Design, the CNO defines toughness as “the ability to take a hit and keep on going, tapping all sources of strength and resilience. . . . We don’t give up the ship.” However, toughness also is crucial in the moral battlespace. It is the maturity to recognize oneself as a responsible agent. A tough person looks in the mirror and asks themselves if they’ve fallen into habits that place them in moral danger. A tough leader challenges people to confront their own complicity in their choices and address where those choices can lead them. Toughness is accepting responsibility and working to change oneself. This is the heartbeat of character development, and why one of the Navy’s patron saints of character, Admiral James Stockdale, was so adamant about the need for character education in a person’s life. It is the secret weapon that had the power to prevent moral casualties.
Stockdale was right, and the Navy needs voices like his again. While it is true that sailors have always faced tough moral problems, they now face a different environment. The battlespace has changed. New technologies have brought the ability to connect with others in new ways, but also have kicked open the door to destructive behaviors that could spell the collapse of the culture of honor, courage, and commitment that is Navy-Marine Corp history. Without a change to the way the services strategize character, they may suffer the fate of institutions that hold to structure but neglect the soul. General George C. Marshall warned never to forget where the true source of military strength lay.
We have sought for something more than enthusiasm, something finer and higher than optimism or self-confidence, something not merely of the intellect or the emotions but rather something in the spirit of the man, something encompassed only by the soul.11
Character is all about the soul. May the Navy–Marine Corps team learn the lessons from its past, and take up new, more effective strategies in its fight for the souls of its people.
1. Ian Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012), xvi–xix.
2. John Gottman, What Makes Love Last: How to Build Trust and Avoid Betrayal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 59–64.
3. Donna Freitas, Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 126–66.
4. NAVADMIN 062/17.
5. Gottman, What Makes Love Last, 62–64.
6. Freitas, Sex and the Soul, 148.
7. Freitas, 148.
8. Aristotle’s Ethics: Writings from the Complete Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 50.
9. Freitas, 153–54. See also: Donna Freitas, The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused about Intimacy (New York: Basic Books, 2013).
10. R. S. Gordon, Jr., “An Operational Classification of Disease Prevention,” Public Health Reports 98(2), 107–9.
11. George C. Marshall, Speech at Trinity College, Hartford, CT, 15 June 1941.