Military Review English Edition September-October 2013 | Page 64

to create a narrative that makes assent to form fashionable, demonizes the naysayers, and then enforces buy-in with rewards and punishments. Those who possess the proper faith are righteous, those who do not are unrighteous. The result is groupthink rather than a helpful, continuous, living dialectic concerning the problem at hand. Thanks to the unlimited deference associated with rank and command authority, the U.S. military is especially prone to this tendency. Some examples of Army projects that have been susceptible to this dynamic include worthy endeavors like counterinsurgency, mission command, the “warrior project,” and the Profession of Arms campaign. All of these programs have suffered from various degrees of debilitating dogmatism, of which some advocates and participants may be blissfully unaware. The recent fall from grace of counterinsurgency, for instance, seems to have stemmed primarily from its over-zealous execution as the new religion.28

Self-Deception Goes to War

Recent wars have brought moral issues into focus, which is a normal outcome. Acknowledging the good with the bad, we can gauge the force’s professionalism by how openly it addresses failures and takes steps to limit them. Valuing form over substance. Unfortunately, our Army has suffered from mediocre, narcissistic, appearance-obsessed leaders too frequently. As an extreme instance, the book Black Hearts by Jim Frederick documents the downward spiral of one platoon in Iraq, its members so distraught by the deaths of comrades that they became increasingly abusive of Iraqis. Meanwhile, its brigade and battalion leadership remained completely ignorant of the moral cancer spreading within this platoon, focusing its attention instead on soldier appearances and by-the-book solutions to tactical problems. For example: A lieutenant colonel down from brigade headquarters asked the platoon leader, Lieutenant Paul Fisher, why none of his men had shaved. Fisher, after the Alamo bridge incident, after all of the work and all of the loss, couldn’t hide his exasperation. “We drink all the water we have, sir, so that we don’t dehydrate,” he said. “We have been running nonstop since our guys got abducted. We are not really concerned
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about our looks right now.” “I am just trying to keep the heat off of you, Lieutenant,” the lieutenant colonel said. “You guys are not looked upon too favorably these days.”29 Members of this platoon eventually gang-raped a young Iraqi girl, then shot and immolated her, her little sister, and her parents. Months later, senior leaders were shocked at the revelations. However, the reader is left questioning whether this horrendous crime could even have occurred if these leaders and their subordinates had cared less about haircuts and shaves and more about what was really going on inside their soldiers’ heads. Manipulating and ignoring the truth. Probably the most futile, quixotic endeavor in an age of the Internet and ubiquitous hand-held information devices are the attempts by many commanders to control what the media reports. In the authors’ experience, “controlling the narrative” has emerged as the hallmark of Army public relations. Via talking points and feel-good, often unsustainable public relations projects, commanders and their staffs vainly expend energy trying to convince everyone (sometimes themselves included) that, thanks to their efforts, progress is being made. They appear to believe that, if they trumpet something as “true” loudly and frequently enough, this thing will actually become reality. Leading the way in this regard, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld vehemently denied there was an insurgency in Iraq, something he maintained for more than three years as he called insurgents everything but insurgents.30 In such cases, the leader thinks he is right, and if he has a momentary moral epiphany that he is being dishonest, he tells himself how complicated things are and that the end justifies the means. If he has to manipulate appearances of reality to make his narrative “true,” so be it. Of course, such manipulation nearly always backfires, taking away the leader’s credibility and whatever strategic or tactical benefit that may have been at stake. Frustrated by the media’s tendency to emphasize “bad news” rather than “good news” stories (“good news is no news,” w H??Y\??Z?H??^JK?H[?[?\???\?Z\??[YYXH[?????\??Y[?[??[?^?][??\?[??\??X\?Y[?[???H????Y\?][??\?\?H????H??[?\???X?]?B??\[X?\?S???\??L?;?kRSUT?H?U?QU??