Abstract: The US Army currently faces challenges not unlike those of the post-Vietnam era and the post-Cold War period. Subsumed within these challenges is a more critical overarching one; simply stated, will the Army that emerges from this transition period in 2025 be an effective and ethical military profession, or just another large government bureaucracy? The former can defend the Republic and its interests abroad, the latter cannot. How to understand and think about this challenge is the topic of this commentary. ********** The new understanding of modern, competitive professions holds that, contrary to what we might have learned from Huntington's Soldier and State, the idea that once a profession, always a is not true. In fact, modern, competitive professions in the sense they might still exist as organizations, but their culture and behavior, and that of their individual members, becomes other than that of a profession. Applying this fact to the US Army as a military profession, we must recall it is by design an institution of dual character--a bureaucracy and a profession--with constant and intense tensions between them. The Army has only been a military profession for roughly half of its two hundred and forty-year existence. For example, in the early 1970s, after Vietnam, the Army was not a profession mainly because it had expended its corps of non-commissioned officers who were later so instrumental in professionalizing the junior ranks of the new all-volunteer force. A decade later, however, the Army of Desert Shield/Desert Storm was the world's model of military professionalism. So, in the case of the Army Profession, to means the institution would duplicate the behavior of a large, government bureaucracy, treating its soldiers and civilians more as bureaucrats than as professionals. As a result, soldiers would be unmotivated by a personal calling to honorable service, being instead micro-managed within a centralized, highly-structured organizational culture. Sadly, were this to occur it would be the antithesis of the Army's current doctrine of mission command within a professional culture. The current potential for the Army to lose this internal struggle for cultural dominance, and for the profession to die as such, is heightened by ongoing defense reductions. All defense reductions are pernicious toward the military's professional character. They will, as they have in the past, strongly reinforce the unremitting de-motivations of the Army's bureaucratic character and undermine the essential professional character, e.g., with highly centralized, impersonal micromanagement for force and personnel cuts, and fiscal resources allocated to do more with less. Further, beyond current defense reductions, if other recent events are accurate indicators--the too frequent moral failures of senior leaders, the institution's as yet unsuccessful campaign to expunge sexual harassment/assault from its ranks, the necessity for Secretary of Defense to appoint a new flag officer as his Special Assistant for Military Professionalism, attempts within the Congress to reduce commanders' legal authorities, etc.--the Army Profession is already struggling to maintain its professional character, at least from the perspective of the American people and their elected representatives. Given this confluence of events, the best chance for Army 2025 to come through this post-war transition as a military profession lies in the renewal of the motivational power of its ethic. Only professions can use a normative, principled ethic, which is far more than compliance-oriented rules and regulations, as the means of social control for the performance of both the institution and its individual members. Thus, the power of the ethic, its internalized attitudinal and behavioral expectations shared Army-wide, is critical to effective and ethical practice at both the individual and institutional levels. …