Military Review English Edition September-October 2013 | Page 5

IDENTITY CORROSION

in the context of the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment of the 21st century, they could result in significant damage to readiness. Set in the context of an impending period of resource reduction, the Army must find efficient solutions to prevent the bureaucratization of the institution and its decay as a profession.

The Army as a Profession

The Army’s senior leadership envisioned the purpose of the campaign as facilitating “an Army-wide dialog about our Profession of Arms.”1 The Army’s senior leaders took a fresh look at the Army as a profession and the impacts that a decade of war had on it. The campaign sought to answer three critical questions: ? What does it mean for the Army to be a profession? ? What does it mean to be a professional soldier? ? After nine years of war, how are individual professionals and the profession meeting these aspirations?2 The campaign, headed by the Center for the Army Profession and Ethic (CAPE), answered these questions and yielded important definitions and concepts that are the basis of the work laid out in chapter 2 of Army Doctrinal Publication 1 (ADP 1), The Army, and Army Doctrinal Reference Publication 1 (ADRP 1), The Army Profession. Both are now the accepted standard by which the Army measures itself as a profession. ADRP 1 describes four aspects that must be met for any occupation to be considered a profession. First, it must provide a vital service to the society that the society cannot provide for itself, but that the society must have to flourish. Second, it must provide the service by working with abstract knowledge and practice developed into human expertise. Such work is rarely routine or repetitive and generally takes years of study and experiential learning to master. It is measured by effectiveness, not efficiency. Third, a profession must earn and maintain the trust of its clients through the effective and ethical application of its expertise. Finally, based on trust relations with the clients, the clients must grant relative autonomy to the profession in the application of its art and expertise. They expect the profession to continuously exercise discretionary judgment as individual professionals self-regulate the profession.3
MILITARY REVIEW ? September-October 2013

ADRP 1 further describes the essential characteristics of the Army profession:4 ? Trust. ? Military expertise. ? Honorable service. ? Esprit de corps. ? Stewardship of the profession. The American people trust their Army as a profession. Trust has always been the bedrock of the Army’s relationship with the American people.5 As Snider describes it, “Because of this trust relationship, the American people grant significant autonomy to the Army to create its own expert knowledge and to police the application of that knowledge by its individual professionals. Nonprofessional occupations do not enjoy similar autonomy.”6 In the Army, military expertise equates to the “design, generation, support, and ethical application of landpower.”7 Honorable service alludes to the fact that the Army exists to support and defend the Constitution and the American way of life. Army professionals do so by adhering to Army values.8 Esprit de corps refers to the bond between Army professionals that provides common purpose and the perseverance to overcome obstacles and to win wars. Finally, stewardship of the profession is about the Army being “responsible and duty bound not just to complete today’s missions with the resources available, but also those of the future to ensure the profession is always capable of fulfilling whatever mission our nation gives us.”9 As long as the Army’s leaders, soldiers, and civilians maintain their commitment to these five characteristics, the Army remains a profession. For the sake of this paper the following assumptions apply. First, the Army is a profession by the definitions outlined above. Second, as Snider and others effectively argued, while the Army is inherently a profession, it also possesses many of the characteristics of a bureaucracy. The challenge for the Army to remain a profession must be to strike the appropriate balance between both. When trust erodes, autonomy declines, and the military looks more an obedient government bureaucracy than a profession.10 That “the Army [strives to be] . . . a vocation comprised of experts certified in the ethical application of land combat power, serving under civilian authority, entrusted to defend the Constitution and the rights and interests of the American
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