Evaluating and optimizing performance is a perpetual challenge. Tackling this challenge is only worthwhile if undertaken with a thorough understanding of the ultimate purpose of our efforts. When it comes to human performance optimization for military service members, or warfighting generally, there is a temptation to focus on the superficial objectives associated with training and conducting missions above higher order purpose. But what happens when there is no longer a solid connection between the day to day mission and ultimate purpose? Amidst the unfolding of various crises highlighted by an ongoing inability to recruit and retain talent, I posit it is now more essential than ever to focus on our most fundamental unifying purpose: Fulfilling the oaths we all took to the Constitution. Unfortunately, this is much easier said than done.
Oath to What Now?
Supporting and defending the Constitution is nearly impossible for federal employees, and military service members are no exception. We serve institutions dedicated to various objectives that are often fundamentally opposed to the U.S. Constitution. This puts us into a position whereby doing our duty requires working against prominent factions undermining the Constitution either through malice or incompetence within our respective organizations. This dynamic is captured brilliantly by Commander Rob Green and Dean Lee framing the choice we have as between supporting The Institution or the Constitution. In the article, Rob and Dean make the case that institutional loyalty often supersedes Constitutional loyalty, and that this creates dire problems when conflict arises between the two. The entire article is critical reading if only because it proves beyond a reasonable doubt that service members have failed to support and defend the constitution1 against the institution in the C19 context, and that this has happened multiple times throughout history. My concern is that insofar as it is not always so obvious, the problem is more pervasive than almost any active service members are willing to admit.
The Constitution Won’t Save Us
wrote an insightful essay giving much needed context to the U.S. service member looking to fulfill their oath.To explain our current moment where SCOTUS is split on whether or not the government can unilaterally infringe upon our 1A rights without consequence, he highlights the work of political philosopher Joseph de Maistre summarized by the following four propositions:
1. That the roots of political constitutions exist before any written law;
2. That a constitutional law is, and can only be, the development or sanction of a pre-existing and unwritten right;
3. That what is most essential, most intrinsically constitutional, and truly fundamental, is never written, nor even can be, without endangering the state;
4. That the weakness and fragility of a constitution are precisely in direct proportion to the multiplicity of written constitutional articles.
In other words, an implicit, unwritten constitution carries the real power and influence over a given body politic. In this conception, the U.S. Constitution merely attempted to codify what was culturally pervasive unwritten law. While it did a great job of this, our unwritten constitution has shifted substantially over the last couple hundred years. As Lyons summarizes from observations outlined in his essential essay The China Convergence, instead of things like inalienable rights and political power being predicated on the consent of the governed, the current implicit American constitution
values safety and security over freedom; top-down control over self-governance; empty egalitarian posturing over excellence; material comfort over virtue; entitlement over responsibility; bureaucracy over accountability; narcissistic emotivism over duty; fantasy over reality; global ambitions over national loyalty; [and] dreams of progress over eternal and transcendent truths.
So what does this mean for service members looking to align a sense of purpose with a written Constitution that has lost all institutional support and social power?
Moral Courage
Near the end of Matthew Lohmeier’s book Irresistible Revolution he explains one way service members can fulfill their oaths in this trying environment. Note the way he nests performance with the higher order purpose of defending the Constitution:
if you wear the uniform of your country, do your job well. Learn to perform your unique mission with competence and technical expertise. The American people expect that of you. I am confident that a great number of you already do that exceptionally well. I will likewise always strive to do the same. For example, my units obligation is to protect the Nation and our allies by providing timely missile warning around the clock. That remains true in peace time and war, and it is a service owed to the American people regardless of their domestic political disputes. Faithfully accomplishing that mission is one way I honor my oath to support and defend the Constitution.
For units with well established and easily measured performance standards, this kind of thing is a lot easier. I bet early warning missile systems fit this description, but maybe not, totally outside my wheelhouse. What I do know is that when proficiency is self-certified by commanders who tend to be promoted based on the perception of their performance, moral hazards emerge. This effect is compounded in an environment where equipment maintenance and personnel issues are manifest. It takes moral courage to be candid about readiness and capability when such candor is unflattering to your image and status within an organization, but to be as technically proficient as you can be, such candor is indispensable. Outside of your technical field, there is no shortage of other norms that infringe upon Constitutional rights. Standing up for these rights tends to take tremendous courage as norms both ubiquitous and perverse scream to your hindbrain that resistance is futile. Whether standing up and disagreeing with mandatory training infused with Marxism that violates the clear letter of long established EO policy or refusing to conduct a targeted search of a service member’s personal property without probably cause, you’ll get nothing but grief and a reputation for not being a “team player.” Regardless, if you don’t have the moral courage to do what you believe to be right in these circumstances, your oath doesn’t mean much, and there is little reason to think yourself worthy of the paycheck you draw courtesy of the American people.2
Discernment
When exhibiting this moral courage, you might get asked “is this the hill you want to die on?” It is a reasonable question. After all, if we want to apply the standard of the 18th century implicit American constitution in full, the idea of having a standing Army with hundreds of installations across the world would be a regarded as preposterous and likely inherently anti-American. Using myself as an example, I was confident that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan were a waste of lives and treasure as early as 2010. Strong arguments can be made that such operations, and really all kinetic conflict since WWII has been inherently unconstitutional without a formal declaration of war by Congress, but this is really just another example of the extent to which the written Constitution is a dead letter. There are situations and decisions where the Constitution still has a pulse, and places where it doesn’t. Discernment is required to understand the difference and engage accordingly. This is where seeing the situation as it is and not as you’d like it to be can be helpful. Believing patriotic fairytales about the nobility of the military institution sets the conditions to flinch in critical moments. If you haven’t come to accept the bleak truth of what bureaucracy is and what kind of people it empowers as a system, you won’t be ready if a viable opportunity to defend the Constitution presents itself. You’ll instead be overcome by a sense of betrayal and bewilderment, unable to act as you struggle to come to terms with the cold reality that an institution is only as good as its people (and as harsh as it is to say, some of the people who wear the uniform are truly reprehensible). The thing is, if you understand this and accept it, situating yourself to have a positive and beneficial impact on those around you becomes much easier.
Performance
You don’t have to save the entire institution to make a positive impact. You might just need to be decent in a situation where one of your peers wouldn’t be. Hearing about my friends horrifically bad and hypocritical leadership as an undergrad is one of the things that motivated me to be a platoon leader. Put another way, realistic expectations are low expectations. Set them and allow yourself to enjoy any modest benefit you provide to those around you while doing what you must to ensure you never become part of the problem.3 When setting expectations, think about how you can assess your performance honestly. Ideally your supervisor can help with this, but if they’re delusional (e.g. Marxist or enamored with technocratic managerialism) find someone else you trust to give you candid feedback. Consider how meeting your performance expectations nests with your duty to the Constitution. If you can’t clearly articulate a narrative explaining how what you do serves a higher order purpose, it will be difficult to maintain optimal performance, especially when that performance is difficult to measure. As a matter of fact, you’ll probably become so burned out you’re barely functional, at which point you’ll walk out the door (assuming you don’t have an overwhelming financial interest to stay).
Accountability
Hold yourself and others you work with to a performance standard. While it is characteristic of WEIRD societies like ours to factor intent into things, this is exceptionally dangerous in an institution descending into pathocracy (such as the DoD). As
explains in his article Snakes in the Grass:As a society’s norms and values decline during the end of a civilizational cycle, bad behavior becomes more prevalent. The upper classes in particular become more hysterical. They lose their common sense, their worldview becomes bereft of even basic psychological understanding, they become prone to emotional displays, and their decisions are increasingly motivated by emotion rather than reason. They become increasingly hedonistic, arrogant, and self-centered.
And as such behavior becomes more prevalent, the malicious have a much easier time mingling in undetected. It’s easier to take one’s mask off when the distance between what other people are doing, and what comes naturally to you, starts closing. Lower standards open the door to malevolence.
When leaders leave DoD in disgust over the declining standards, they cite many concerns, but I think illegibility between incompetence and malice is the most significant issue. For a variety of reasons there is little accountability for incompetence, and this accountability decreases proportionally with rank and position in the military.
This lack of accountability for incompetence feeds the proliferation of malice, as it is nearly impossible to distinguish the two, especially when you’re dealing with proficient strivers who’ve successfully ascended a bureaucratic hierarchy over some decades.4 There is an especially good explanation of this dynamic in this section of The Gervais Principle referred to as The Hanlon Dodge.
Staying Afloat
The reason I subtitled this article referencing a sea of incompetence is because that is where we find ourselves. Sure, there are still some high performers, but is their performance nested with the higher order purpose of supporting and defending the Constitution? As soon as anyone violates the Constitution, they’re a failure, no matter how well they perform otherwise. Support and defense of the Constitution is what makes our service meaningful. But with institutional norms in the DoD demonstrating a range of apathy to outright contempt towards the Constitution such high performers that are properly nested with this imperative are few and far between. I think Mike Smith is one, but he was essentially fired for it. Same with Matthew Lohmeier. If men like that are punished so aggressively after threading this nearly impossible needle, then who do you expect will stick around?
If we aren’t secure in our inalienable rights, then why have a military? That’s the only purpose of the military that I support, and I think a majority of Americans might still agree. If not, me and those like me will face even more hardship than I care to think about at the moment going forward. No matter. I’ll keep striving to meet the limited expectations I set for myself in performance terms while ensuring everything I do aligns with that old written Constitution capturing an ideal that, while mostly dead, I dare to hope stands chance of resurrection.
Rob defended it though as recounted in his magnificent book Defending the Constitution Behind Enemy Lines: A Story of Hope for Those Who Love Liberty.
Look, I know it is mostly funded by deficit spending at this point, but everyone pays for the inflationary impacts of that, and we’ll all pay one way or another in the long run (that is if the bill comes due before we die).
How difficult this is will be directly determined by the quality of your immediate leadership for the most part.
Aside from holding ourselves and those we work with accountable based on performance, we can also try to hold flag officers accountable for the incompetence and/or malice demonstrated in the promulgation of the unlawful C19 vax mandate. For more on that check out militaryaccountability.com
Thank you for this.
Sadly this is not reserved for the military, one could write the same essay about medicine and substitute "the patient" for "The Constitution."
It is obvious to everyone....
Representative democracy has failed.
We need something new.
Ross Perot called it The Electronic Townhall.
Citizenship is not about writing letters to elected officials or voting some good person into office.
Citizenship is about the Ratification or Annulment of each line of every law, rule, regulation and supreme court decision on the books or that is on the docket waiting to be turned into law, policy and taxes.
During the 1992 Presidential campaign, Ross Perot observed that: "a general lack of accountability among elected officials and those in the bureaucracy is the one specific reason that the people of America suffered…. and our only means of correction is to inspect their work and hold them accountable.”
Mr. Perot went on to note that this can easily be done with computer programs. He called it: THE ELECTRONIC TOWNHALL.
“It is only logical that it will become our Fourth Branch of Government”, he said.
Objective reality:
the voting members of the US Congress and the State Legislatures do not have enough time to read, comprehend or debate any of the laws they vote on. They vote 100 times a day, every five minutes, while in session.
Approximate absolute facts:
a. Every day that the Congress and Legislatures are in session 100
new bills are introduced and distributed.
b. The representatives are given two weeks to review the laws before they are brought up for the Vote.
c. Two weeks into the session they begin voting on the Laws that were previously introduced, while newer laws are introduced.
d. Many laws are in excess of two thousand pages.
e. The arithmetic demonstrates that they do not have the time to even read the name of the Law much less the content of it.
f. Since the Representative cannot evaluate 200 thousand pages of law speak per day, they vote the way their advisors tell them to vote.
g. Thus, they have all forfeited their delegated obligation to represent us.
h. Representative government is obsolete. It does not work for us.
And the only way to prevent these over worked and fallible people from making even more tragic mistakes, from which we, and the rest of the world, might never recover is to include ourselves, The Citizens, from whom the authority for government comes in the first place, in the final decision making process.
The Electronic Congress
How it works:
1. Before a new law, tax, or expenditure can be put on the books it must first be Ratified by the Citizens.
2. Existing laws can be Annulled by the same super majority required to Ratify them.
This program can be applied to every level of government and will ultimately solve every problem we have.
To prevent chaos, the basic law, our Constitution and Bill of Rights, would be exempt from review.
Mr. Perot speculated that the Founding Fathers would probably have done the same had the technology been available in their day.
Just imagine:
We, The People, could actually direct the priorities and review the progress of the major agencies like the: CDC and NIH as well as the libraries and local police departments.
If our government truly is of the people, by the people and for the people then this is the only way forward.
How to implement it:
We talk about it until it is done.
Have AI parse a recent law or Supreme Court ruling into its actionable elements, apply a Ratify or Annul Questionnaire, then distribute the links.
Can I make money with this?
Use AI to parse the laws you find most egregious into their component pieces. And then have it build the ballot / questionnaire along with some demographic background to make the game especially interesting. Charge a $1 per voter per law and watch the evolution in real time.
The Electronic Townhall becomes an active Petition for a Redress of Grievances.
Ask the local school board for their agenda items, have AI parse the actionable elements, create a questionnaire, distribute it to the concerned citizens and then evaluate the results.
When Human Beings made in the image of God can see the results of their noblest and most sober thoughts, at such a scale, then there will be the moment where Our Benevolence and Good Will shall
overcome Evil and then we all live happily ever after.
Ross Perot publicly promised that if the People of America would elect him to The Presidency, he would give us The Electronic Townhall.
The Fourth Branch of Government will allow us to go from Chaos to Prosperity and a Life Worth Living until the end of time.
We were created by God and in the image of God; we are human beings, not animals in a pen.
The Electronic Townhall
https://teletownhall.com/products/text-to-online-surveys/
https://publicinput.com/wp/online-town-hall/
https://www.govtech.com/archive/introducing-the-21st-century-city-hall.html
https://www.newdemocracy.com.au/2015/06/06/the-electronic-townhall/