Five Myths about Our Future

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The Army, and many of its professionals, still behave far too much like they are leading, and serving, in little more than a government bureaucracy. To advance the implementation of the new doctrines, old myths must be destroyed. That is the purpose of this article and the next by Dr. Pfaff, to expose the myths as the falsehoods they are and replace them with correct, motivational understandings. ********** In a recent and quite prescient US Army War College publication, Changing Minds in the Army: Why It Is So Difficult and What to Do about It, two faculty members explain a core issue of Army leaders--the ability to re-evaluate personal frames of reference when confronting new information: Unfortunately, shattering or unlearning frames of reference is an action that is easy to espouse, yet incredibly difficult to execute. The authors note one convention senior leaders can use to assess their frames successfully is a red team charged with a direct, yet tactful, challenge. When presented within a culture of trust created by the leader, the team's ability to speak truth effectively to those in power is greatly enhanced. (1) Similarly, Dr. Tony Pfaff, the War College's new professor of the Army Profession and Ethic, and I have collaborated to confront commonly held myths that can rightly be understood as specific frames of reference senior Army leaders, indeed all Army professionals, need to change. This article focuses on incorrect frames of reference still held three years after The Army Profession doctrine was implemented. (2) In each case these frames, these myths, are almost incompatible with the institution's doctrine, thus hindering not only the timely implementation but also the desirable influence on the effectiveness of the Army and its professionals. The Army is and will always be a military profession--not true. The Continental Congress created the US Army in 1775 from the colonial militias and then placed it within a new Department of War before the end of our Revolution against the British crown. (3) It is thus fair to say that since its establishment the US Army has always been a government bureaucracy. Accordingly, since the end of the War of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, both the Congress and the executive have continued to exercise their Constitutional powers to treat the Army just like every other federal bureaucracy. The institutional character and behavior of government bureaucracy, therefore, has been and will be the US Army's default setting. Turning now to the Army's professional status, which was attained by cohort during various periods of the institution's history, the creation of branch schools, consistent terms of service, and promotions by merit rather than patronage slowly professionalized the officer corps during the mid to late-nineteenth century; the noncommissioned officer corps by World War II. (4) But professionalizing the Army did not cause its character of origin--government bureaucracy--to go away. Bureaucracy remains in the background and constantly creates tension within the profession. So the Army is uniquely an institution of dual cultures in which only one culture can be dominant at a given time and Army leaders determine through their daily leadership at each location whether the dominant culture is that of the profession or of the default bureaucracy. (5) Since becoming a profession, the US Army's degree of professionalization has ebbed and flowed. The most recent decline of culture and ethos of profession occurred during the late-Vietnam War period and the morph into bureaucratic behavior caused immense loss of trust by the American people. But trust, with both internal Army ranks and external citizens, is the currency that legitimizes professions and it is ever perishable. In Western democracies, the client--in this case the American people--gets to determine if an institution is treated as a venerated profession meriting the autonomy necessary to do its expert work. …