A common attitude among many U.S. Army leaders with respect to ethics and the moral dimension of our profession—deciding, acting and leading in accordance with the law of armed conflict and Army Values—appears to be that of a bread baker who considers flour an optional ingredient. Many leaders similarly consider ethics an optional ingredient in decision-making. It’s as if they think they can make a decision, then see if it’s moral. No one should be surprised at this bifurcated approach in the Army.
The U.S. Army War College, for example, has a core strategic leadership course with one lesson on responsible stewardship of the profession. Ethics, meanwhile, is an elective—if it’s offered at all. Further, the War College has no coordinating entity to integrate ethics into its curriculum, conferences or symposiums—even though one of the college’s “Institutional Learning Outcomes” is “Exercise moral judgment and promote the values and ethics of the profession of arms.”
Professors might weave ethics into their seminars, but my experience teaching in both military and civilian higher education institutions is that many professors feel ill at ease and ill-prepared to talk about ethics and morality. But that’s an essay for another day. The point is that the Army’s institutional binary approach does not match reality—tactically, operationally or strategically.
Integrated Approach
The reality of the past 23 years of war experience is this: Tactical leaders—whether officers or sergeants—could not place the moral dimension of their wartime decisions in a separate bucket. How they responded to an IED attack or an ambush, how they set up a checkpoint or traffic control point, how they cleared a building or a village, how they employed fire support and how they led their unit through war’s trauma demanded they consider the moral, tactical and other dimensions of the leadership challenge they faced as an integrated whole.
This essential integration that challenges leaders was drilled into them, or should have been, during situational training exercises as well as leader seminars during a unit’s “road to war” training. Their mission rehearsal exercise, at whichever combat training center they went to, also took an integrated approach, setting conditions for a unit’s and its leaders’ training. Why, then, do the Army’s professional military education programs not take a similarly integrated approach?
The operational level mirrors the tactical. In war, senior commanders had to integrate moral considerations—usually contained in rules of engagement and other aspects of their campaign plans—into their leadership approach. I watched this happen in both Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in broader counterterrorist campaigns planned by Army special operations forces. I also saw it during my operational deployments to Haiti and Bosnia, and I discussed it with senior leaders involved with Operation Just Cause in Panama and operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in Iraq. Again, in each of these cases, senior commanders integrated the moral dimension with the other dimensions of their operational-level leadership responsibilities.
Facing Complex Issues
Moreover, at both the tactical and operational levels, Army organizations—by design—provide leaders with help in exercising their final decision authority. Squad leaders, in addition to their peers, can turn to team leaders as well as platoon sergeants and platoon leaders to discuss difficult decisions. Similarly, platoon leaders have peers, platoon sergeants, company executive officers, first sergeants and company commanders to help them think through the complex issues they face.
The Army’s troop-leading procedures encourage collaboration, and the echelons of command in addition to organizational design are the means through which tactical leaders can provide or receive help in making difficult decisions. The same holds true for battalion and brigade commanders, as well as division and corps commanding generals who, in addition to peers, seniors and subordinates, have a staff and the collaborative Military Decision Making Process to help them use their decision authority responsibly. The myth of leadership being lonely at the top is not as accurate as it seems at first blush.
Professional education should follow the pattern of established practice and teach tactical and operational leaders how the various dimensions of their responsibilities—not just the battle operating systems—are essentially integrated and how to use the collaborative means available to them.
This same essential integration of the moral dimension with other professional responsibilities exists at the strategic, war-waging level. The three key strategic tasks bear this out.
Deciding and Acting
The first is to identify achievable war aims, then align military and nonmilitary strategies, policies and campaign plans with those aims, thus increasing the probability of achieving the aims set. Such alignment is not a separate, “professional” responsibility. Rather, the alignment serves two important moral purposes: help ensure that the sacrifices—in blood and treasure—made by soldiers and their families, as well as the citizenry at large, are not made in vain, but serve an important strategic aim; and help create a “better peace” at war’s end, or at least improve the geostrategic or regional conditions that led to war.
Second, develop the organizational capacity to translate initial decisions into coordinated action and adapt those decisions as the war unfolds in unexpected ways. War is the realm of uncertainty, ambiguity, fog, fear and friction—true at the tactical and operational levels. The situation for strategic leaders is no different. They must react to opportunities as well as vulnerabilities at a speed that defies the bureaucracies through which they must decide and act.
Again, deciding and acting at the highest level of war is not a separate, “professional” responsibility. Strategic organizational capacity also has a moral aspect: like the first task, it keeps what happens both on the battlefield and in the capital aligned with achieving the nation’s strategic aim, creating the conditions for a better peace and using the lives of soldiers responsibly, as well as ensuring the risk to the innocent is kept within bounds.
Popular Support Needed
The third and last war-waging task is to create and sustain the legitimacy of the war in the minds of the American people. This takes sustained leadership effort, not only at the start of the war, but also throughout. If a significant portion of the American people does not support employing American soldiers to use force on their behalf, that use becomes both politically and morally problematic.
The core conclusion of the 2006 study “Success Matters,” conducted by three political scientists—Jason Reifler, Christopher Gelpi and Peter Feaver—was that the American populace’s tolerance for the costs of war and support of that war is shaped primarily by the people’s belief in the righteousness of the war and in the war’s likely success. That is, legitimacy from the perspective of the American people is not about “spin.” Rather, it is tied directly to reality—how well senior civil and military leaders execute the first two war-waging, strategic tasks.
Civil-military tasks
And that’s the important point: All three war-waging tasks are civil-military tasks. Both senior political leaders—in the executive and legislative branch—and senior military leaders are co-responsible for their execution. The civil-military dialogue and its associated co-responsibility are the collaborative means available to strategic leaders.
There is no mythical transom wall over which civilians toss policy decisions for military leaders to execute. Senior military leaders have a key role in helping structure policy decisions to increase the probability of strategic success—i.e., winning.
In the same way, there is no absolute role differentiation in execution. Senior political leaders—elected or appointed—have a vital role to play in both initial execution and in adapting military and nonmilitary strategies, policies and campaigns to the vagrancies of war as they unfold. The myth that senior military leaders are mere agents to civilian principals, as well as the false belief that the civil-military dialogue is totally unequal, creates a dangerous model when it comes to executing the three strategic war-waging tasks. For both exclude important information and perspectives necessary to ensure that the president’s final decision authority is exercised responsibly.
The Army War College should consider adapting how it teaches executive and strategic leadership. And no time is more critical than the present. The current global, strategic environment is as unstable and ambiguous as it has ever been.
Numerous Threats
Great-power competition has already brought forth in Ukraine the kind of sustained, large-scale conventional war some strategists and military theorists thought was a thing of the past. Such war could break out elsewhere. Residual threats from terrorist organizations; saber-rattling, rogue nations like North Korea; multiple Iranian proxies throughout the Middle East; an assertive yet unstable China; gray zone operations conducted by all sorts of actors; and any combination of the above—all complicate the security environment around the world, making it both dangerous and uncertain.
Further, formal militaries, terrorists and militias are all racing to use cheap, available and ever-advancing technologies to gain advantages over their adversaries. With a distracted and somewhat divided America, some potential enemy might think, “Now is the time to strike.”
At a time like this, Army institutional leaders—whether in suits or uniforms—must focus on readiness that includes both change and continuity. Regardless of how wars will be fought or how force will be used, and regardless of where or against whom the Army might operate, leadership—the kind that wins, takes care of soldiers and families, and represents the values of our nation—will make the difference between success and failure.
Leaders who integrate the moral dimension with other aspects of their responsibilities and who collaborate properly regardless of level of war remain as essential to America’s Army as any technological development or change in organizational design—perhaps even more so.
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Lt. Gen. James Dubik, U.S. Army retired, a former commander of Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq, is a senior fellow of the Association of the U.S. Army. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and is the author of Just War Reconsidered: Strategy, Ethics, and Theory.