Midlevel Officers Weigh Risk, Reward of Criticizing Army Leadership
02.09.2012 at 12:58am
In a Stars and Stripes article, Midlevel Officers Weigh Risk, Reward of Criticizing Army Leadership, LTC Daniel Davis and COL Paul Yingling are featured:
… The net effect of each man’s article on the Army and its wars – in Iraq then, and Afghanistan now – is hard to assess. But it raises other important issues: How it affected each man’s career, and what it portends for other line officers who depend on the military for their livelihood but who believe they see their leaders failing and want to speak up…
So what is the underlying assumption with this article and many others of the same type over the years that lamented Yingling’s apparent rough treatment by the army for his 2007 article?
Is the assumption that so called whistle blowers deserve to be promoted up through the highest ranks simply because they blew the whistle and if not well that means the army has squashed them and doesn’t get it? Maybe there are other factors involved.
The press loves these kinds of stories like cat nip since they portray the bold, plucky individual set against the big stupid, unfeeling and unmovable army. Maybe what needs to happen is the journos who write these pieces ought to be asking why it took a serving army colonel to tell this story about the lack of progress in Afghanistan and senior officers who are unable to tell things as they really are.
In short why people like LTC Danny Davis and Major Bill Taylor with these articles and not the reporters themselves?
What i think l’affaire de Davis really points too is a greater failure of the mainstream media to do good investigative and critical reporting on these wars.
gian
Gian Gentile and Carl nailed it. I would just like to highlight one other point.
We expect our Soldiers to face fear, danger, and adversity both physical and moral. That is what the “Personal Courage” value means. I still remember that nearly 4 years after ETS, not because I have a good memory, but because it is important.
Whether an action is moral or ethical is an entirely different and unrelated question from whether it will expose you to unfair treatment. Your duty is to do what is moral and ethical, regardless of that unfortunate consequence.
The lesson is not: LTC Davis and COL Yingling did not suffer, so it is okay to blow the whistle.
The lesson is: If your duty is to blow the whistle, then do it.
The title of the article, coupled with a discussion focusing on the consequences of their actions, suggests that the risk-reward assessment is somehow relevant to the decision to act. It is not.
Has it been deterimed if this officer violated any regulations with regard sharing the classified information?
The real problem stems not from solely the existence of those individual leaders who a) put self before mission/unit b)put perceived performance above actual c) use the new promotion schemes. The ideology of the military has become weakened. I realize that there exists successful units and successful leaders, but they are becoming a rarer resource. I do not know how it would be possible to fix this issue, but I do believe that additional initial filters are not the correct way. The training of the individuals needs to not only teach skills but also develop the personality of the individual. Currently, leaders are not made by the military. Those filling the slots either have it in them to lead or not. The current training is not successfully instilling leaders with the ideology of the military. The mission being the fulfillment of orders AND the welfare of the subordinates.
The challenge the military currently faces is thus: the current openness of information, sharing of opinions, and organizations to support them all. This is good for developing well rounded individuals, but a military requires machines. The failures in leadership are proof of humanity. As long as people pulled into the military are allowed to express their own opinions, standards remain less than universal, and leaders are judged on numbers not personality, the song will remain the same.
Allcon: just to build out the idea here of corporate censorship. Last week you may remember the flack generated when SecDef denied the Military Archdiosese the latitude to read a statement concerning Catholic doctrine v. military secularization. In a righteous huff, I fired off an email via AKO to some fellow Soldiers. One day later I received a response from my CDR, advising me to keep my politics local, and with the further advisement that he (my CDR) was contacting BDE/higher ‘just so they won’t get blindsided’.
Gents, I’ve had it. 30 years in and out of uniform, three deployments and now they want me to keep my politics local?
To paraphrase Reagan: ‘big Army IS the problem’
tom