The commanding general of the Maneuver Center of Excellence contrasted today’s Army with the service several decades back and concluded "In the industrial age we could get by with the checklist mentality."As the Army embarks on a yearlong campaign of studying the profession of arms, Maj. Gen. Robert Brown said that the emphasis now is on agility and how to "solve the problem in a timely manner.""[Junior officers and NCOs] are solving complex problems with creative and agile solutions. A [young soldier] is now doing the kind of work a sergeant first class may have done, and a lieutenant is doing what a captain used to do."That has meant empowering young soldiers, noncommissioned officers and officers to act. "We empower. We get these great results! We empower. Oh, oh!"Brown said, "We have to incorporate these challenging situations in our training. The trouble is the op tempo. It’s a hard thing to do." He asked rhetorically, "Are we getting to the next level?" in the Army schoolhouse or "Are we doing a 30-minute class?"For certain aspects of soldiering, "You need the rote repetition" to master a skill such as marksmanship, but quick thinking and understanding of a situation if a certain course of action is taken is valuable in its own right. "Are we giving them the scenarios they are going to face?"Brown then asked whether senior leaders are providing their soldiers with proper examples of ethical behavior or being unfaithful to their spouses and fraternizing with the soldiers they command. "That tears at the profession of arms."For a former brigade commander, "the most important piece of kit that we needed in this fight … is our moral compass."Col. Walter Piatt, the former brigade commander and Army fellow at Georgetown University, told attendees at the institute of Land Warfare Contemporary Military Forum on the profession of arms about how a soldier reacted when a grenade was thrown toward him by an 11-year-old Iraqi boy. When the soldier realized that a child had thrown the grenade, he did not fire because there were too many children around."We found the child’s parents. Their tribe and their village are forever grateful because this soldier knew right from wrong, and it’s hard to train soldiers to do that," he said.Likewise, he described another soldier who was finding it increasingly difficult to work with any Iraqis. "His values were eroding because of the environment we put him in" where he saw comrades and himself attacked, wounded or killed. "I did not train him enough."Piatt added, "We are different [from soldiers in other armies] and the Afghans and the Iraqis got to see this." Yet he expressed concern that strengthening a soldier’s moral compass can take a back seat when the unit returns from deployment. "It seems we start over, back to the range, back to the lethal task. We don’t build this base which we should be navigating from – the moral compass. I think this is what we need to relearn."