Lying to Ourselves

Motivation to discard the golden handcuffs in exchange for a chance at optimal organizational performance

Leonard Wong and Stephen Gerras’ “Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession,” does a masterful job of drawing attention to a critical challenge facing the Army’s officer corps; it is nearly impossible to make it through a 20-year career without engaging in blatant hypocrisy. This article will discuss the pitfalls that all but require officers to compromise their integrity while serving in the Army Profession and whether or not there is any hope for this situation to improve.

      All Soldiers are taught the Army Values early in their careers. Dedication to these values is often an assumed requisite of any officer or NCO, and is generally reflected on evaluations. It is very easy to live the Army Values under ideal circumstances. Anyone hoping to make it through a 20-year career, however, will inevitably encounter circumstances that are ethically problematic. The up and out policy ensures that those officers who do not attain the approval of their rater and senior rater will struggle to get to retirement. Make no mistake, the only requisite for a solid evaluation is the approval of your rater and senior rater. While competence, approval from peers, subordinates, and leaders outside the rating chain can have an impact on the perception of rating officers, a single departure from expected conduct can be enough to ensure poor enumeration in the senior rater comments. If an officer feels compelled to make such a departure on ethical grounds they must choose between their integrity and their career. As soon as this decision is made for the first time, it is all but guaranteed an officer will continue this trend when challenged as a retirement valued at over two million dollars looms ever closer. As an officer interviewed for this paper explained, “If you’re looking to do this [stay in the Army] for a long period of time, your intent is to appease the person above you. Just like the person you’re appeasing made that decision a long time ago.”

     Another troubling challenge to the integrity of the officer corps is deferral to experts over one’s own judgment and conscience. AR 600-100 para 1-7-6d states it is an officer’s duty “To guard against and suppress all dissolute and immoral practices, and to correct, according to the laws and regulations of the Army, all persons who are guilty of them”. The only way an officer can live up to this standard is to apply their own judgment of what is unlawful and immoral. In practice, however, such determinations are deferred to unit legal representatives. If an officer determines that something is immoral or unjust and aims to stop it, attempting to do so will have severe repercussions without the concordance of the unit’s legal representative, who may in turn defer to some other expert. Even with this agreement and support, officers obligated to perform the above will often find it far more expedient to forget the transgressions of a Soldier that has enough politically savvy to lodge complaints that could degrade the officer’s reputation, especially in the eyes of the senior rater.

    The final distinct challenge I will discuss is the overwhelming utility of self-delusion vs psychopathic personality traits amidst an enshrined set of ethics that the current incentive structure demand be abandoned. Faced with the constant ethical dilemmas outlined in the aforementioned paper, officers can become “numb” to moral transgressions. Far worse with respect to maintaining the trust of subordinates though, is the progression to self-delusion and hypocrisy whereby officers come to fully believe in their virtue while routinely engaging in behaviors that are patently dishonest to impartial observers. This situation is worse because these leaders become incapable of behaving ethically once they redefine the meaning of the term to encompass any behavior they deem expedient. For other officers there is no need for self-delusion because duplicity has never produced any cognitive uneasiness whatsoever. These psychopaths are often prized members of the team consistently able to impress their raters with an uncanny ability to produce “results” regardless of the circumstances. Leaders who fail to investigate results that are too good to be true can also be characterized as delusional. This dynamic results in a senior officer corps pervaded by three basic types of officers, those who have been able to cope with self-delusion, those who have no need to cope because they are psychopaths, and those struggling with deep feelings of guilt, doubt, and powerlessness anxiously hoping that this will all change somehow. (IMPORTANT NOTE: Psychopathy is typically rare in the senior leadership of complex social organisations such as the Army as any benefits in avoiding guilt are greatly outweighed by the liabilities associated with lacking empathy, however in totalitarian command climates/toxic organizational culture this balance can shift to favor psychopathy in an environment where perspectives and beliefs that are not perfectly aligned with current political leadership are not tolerated).

     There are no easy solutions to this endemic problem. Since this paper was published, I am sure many officers have struggled to contextualize this dilemma that we’re all at least partially conscious of. I propose that we focus on making change through sheer force of will. If officers are willing to risk their careers, it is possible to operate within this organization without compromising the principles that we all took an oath to uphold. I can only hope every officer reading this will follow Long and Gerras’ recommendations and assume the tremendous political risk of acknowledging this problem openly and taking the critical first steps to fix it. I am willing to take this step and potentially lose my career in the process (a career that I love, working with people that I love). I think publishing this article while my primary selection zone board file for promotion is open is proof of this. I have no doubt that a cynical reader is confident that I am, in fact, committing career suicide, but I have hope nonetheless.

I fear that embracing truth is the only path forward if we hope to improve the performance of our organisation enough to preclude an inevitable institutional collapse. Unfortunately, officers mired in the depths of this bureaucracy understandably have difficulty seeing the true scope of the problem from the inside. I think many hope it isn’t as bad as it seems. This lack of awareness engenders a false sense of certitude that an institution as venerable as the U.S. Army could never meet such a fate. The problem we must overcome is not with the officer corps, nor the requirements that cannot be satisfied. The problem is with the incentives that accompany all bureaucratic institutions.  Ludwig von Mises characterizes bureaucracy as distinct from market run institutions by the lack of profit motive. This lack of profit motive makes leadership at all levels of bureaucracies such as the Army arbitrary. Regulations, however well designed, will never be able to constrain the arbitrariness commensurate with command at every level. The only way to ensure that a large organization is able to coordinate itself in order to produce a good or service effectively and efficiently is exposure to market forces. The absence of the price mechanism is the reason all socialized economies face inevitable collapse.

     How then, can the government harness market forces in order to provide the valuable and demanded service of defense against foreign adversaries? The short answer is that it probably can’t. The only solution likely to produce an officer corps able to retain true integrity is provision of these security services by the free market. Hans Hoppe outlines how security could conceivably be furnished this way in his essay “The Private Production of Defense.” Allowing individual consumers the ability to purchase or forgo insurance against threats to life, liberty, and property is the only way to ensure that producers of security services have an incentive to produce actual security (as opposed to security theater). This contrasts sharply with the threat inflation, security theater, and decades of conflict oriented towards supporting the military industrial complex and technocratic elite that President Eisenhower so articulately indicted in his farewell speech decades after MG Smedley Butler warned us of essentially the same thing.

     Without profit motive there is no assurance that the officer corps can be held accountable save the individual commitment of leaders at each echelon to speak and accept hard truths. In order to accomplish this, officers must doggedly monitor themselves to avoid becoming deluded by the powerful incentives to believe pervasive lies that subordinate leaders come to internalize are expected from both experience and observation. This is much easier said than done and will require an earnest effort to maximize self-awareness. Developing the self-awareness competency of resilience in the MRT framework is critical to safeguarding against the seduction of self-delusion that is omnipresent in our organisation. The MRT skills use to enhance this competency include detecting icebergs and implementing the Actions, Thoughts, Consequences (ATC) model. The key to detecting icebergs is enhancing the ability to identify and evaluate core beliefs and values that fuel out-of-proportion emotions and reactions. This skill is critical in that it allows leaders to identify potentially irrational or toxic beliefs if they, for example, explode in anger when receiving a hard truth from a subordinate. Developing the ATC skill is equally important to control emotions and enhance reactions to information that confront rigid icebergs in order to retain optimal cognitive function and effectively develop solutions in a threat rich environment. To understand more, I highly recommend you seek out your unit MRT.

Unfortunately, for an example of what happens when an officer makes a good faith effort to hold leaders accountable for ethical reasons, we need look no further than the recent separation of LTC Stuart Scheller from the USMC. Instead of taking an opportunity to engage in an honest, productive discussion of the ethical and moral issues surrounding the subject of accountability in the aftermath of the Afghanistan withdrawal, LTC Sheller’s leadership instead issued an (arguably) unconstitutional gag order infringing upon his right to free speech and expression. While it can be reasonably argued that some of LTC Scheller’s comments made subsequent to the linked video were not appropriate, the feelings and beliefs he expressed in his initial plea are likely shared by many service members who fought and lost friends and loved ones in Afghanistan. I very much doubt that this situation would have escalated to incarceration and ultimately separation had LTC Scheller’s leadership engaged him in an open dialogue making a legitimate effort to address his concerns.

The bureaucratic structure of the Army reinforces performance crushing depression, anxiety, hypocrisy, delusion, and or psychopathy (through selection pressure) in the character of its officers, and as an organization funded via non-voluntary means with multiple levels of delegated authority, the Army is, by definition, a bureaucracy. While not a guarantee, I believe that eventually this most venerable of U.S. Government institutions will collapse under the weight of these perverse incentives and human moral failing. That might sound shocking, but the world would go on. Provided society at large still has a critical mass of freedom, liberty, capital savings, and entrepreneurial competence upon the arrival of this contingency, I believe market forces have the capacity to motivate and coordinate capital to swiftly fill the any such void. I for one, am not willing to accept that the Army is resigned to this fate. I truly believe there is hope to conserve this organization. We can recognize the incentives at play driving us towards dishonesty with an ever-increasing pressure proportional to seniority and accrued political favor, and gather the moral courage and self-awareness to do what we must to save this institution. It couldn’t be more simple, but simple doesn’t always mean easy. We must stop lying.