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Old 07-13-2003, 08:03 AM
thedrifter thedrifter is offline
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07-10-2003

A Failure of Our Ethos

By Raymond Perry

Recent revelations of criminal behavior at the U.S. Air Force Academy are serious by themselves, but pose even more serious implications of senior service leadership more interested in appearance than the profession.



How could the alleged criminal behavior occur over such an extended period? These are just not isolated incidents of criminal behavior, but something far more troubling ? a long-term pattern that suggests something in the culture of the Air Force itself that enabled such behavior.



How this can occur was revealed in a psychological experiment conducted at Stanford University in 1971, known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Its revelations and power were dramatic and startling. Critical reflection on this study leads directly to how an absence of senior leadership in an organization is the enabler.



Chapter Eleven of the book, Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm (by Philip G. Zimbardo, Christina Maslach and Craig Haney), reviews the Stanford Prison Experiment in today?s context. The experiment, the authors found, ?[demonstrated] the evil that good people can be induced into doing to other good people within the context of socially approved roles, rules and norms, a legitimizing ideology, and institutional support.?



A prime purpose of the U.S. military profession, and the raison d??tre of the service academies, is to pass on long-standing values to a core of our commissioned officers that will ensure combat victory while enabling decisive action to prevent raging behavior on the battlefield.



Mere disagreement is not enough. We want the nation?s future military officers to have a sound basis to recognize and the strength of conviction to stop such things, to be able to say, ?This is just not right ? stop.? Such values, wisdom and courage are of vast importance to society in the case of the virtually unassailable ?power? professions of the military, police and judiciary.



One only need recall the March 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam to recognize what must be stopped. The service academies are there to ensure a core of officers with the capability to forestall this behavior is woven into the fabric of the services.



A recent DefenseWatch Guest Column by Gerald Rowles ? ?Bring Me Men? No More,? Apr. 4, 2003), castigated those who would believe the charges of young women from the Air Force Academy as na?ve and uncritical in the worldly realm of women, men and hormones.



Having observed some legal proceedings associated with similar crimes during my military career, I have come to realize that there are characteristics that tip one off to a real crime: isolation of the intended victim, demonstration of power over the victim to gain acquiescence, followed by efforts to silence the victim afterward, either by comforting them or demonstration of opprobrium that can be brought on them.



The bottom line: Many of these charges just ring true.



We have heard these words: ?Zero tolerance? and ?This is limited to just the academy.? These are buzz words for unthinking leadership. Making the readily visible signs disappear appeases the most vociferous but submerges the leadership problems without solving them.



The Stanford Prison Experiment lends insight. It was a psychological experiment designed to observe the behavioral changes in normal young men, randomly assigned to the roles of prisoner and guard in a mock prison. The following quotes are from this work:



An advertisement was made for participants. ?Two dozen of those judged most normal, average, and healthy [in all respects] were selected [and] randomly assigned to the [roles] of mock prisoner and mock guard.? Those selected for the role of prisoner were surprised when arrested by Stanford Police. They ?were brought to [the] simulated prison, where they underwent a degradation ceremony, [typical of prisons and the military] as part of the initiation into their new role.?



It was ?observed and [videotaped] that the guards steadily increased their coercive and aggressive tactics, humiliation, and dehumanization of the prisoners day by day ?. The worst abuses by the guards came on the late-night shift, when they thought the staff was asleep and they were not being monitored.?



The entire staff was so surprised at the powerful human forces released that the experiment was terminated before the planned halfway point. ?The [actions of the guards] that ordinarily would be constrained by law, norms, morals, and ethics, were cloaked in the mantle of apparently good, virtuous, valued moral imperatives?? After all they were the guards of these miscreants.



The ?use of normal individuals to explore the boundaries between normal and abnormal behavior? reinforced the notion that extreme situations and not deviant personalities or aberrant dispositions were often at the root of collective evil, social pathology, and societal dysfunction.?



The staff sought to explain away the behavior of the first prisoner to erupt in irrational behavior by working through the thought that they must have inadvertently selected someone who had a personality defect. They blamed this prisoner and assessed that he must have had some problem that slipped through their screening. That the behavior of the guards was then spinning out of control was not even considered by the staff.



In retrospect, analysis has also shown that ?the propensity of supporting organizations to explain away such things becomes stronger the higher up a chain of reviewers something goes.? The university staff was as much a part of the problem as anyone.



This experiment ?demonstrated the extraordinary power of authority and the potency of socially defined roles. Good people and even good intentions are not enough. This is especially true in a complex institutional context.?



As a nation, we require our service academies to train future leaders so that they will have the wisdom to recognize situations that are beyond the pale of their ethos and act immediately to stop them. The repeating history of scandals at the service academies, seen in this context, gives one pause.



A particularly blatant incident occurred several years ago where the Air Force Academy was conducting Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape training on cadets. It progressed to the point where female cadets were forced to submit to simulated rape. At one point the report noted, ?The grandfather of one abused female cadet, himself a World War II hero, said, ?I can't believe that all these men, these elite boys, could stand around and watch a young woman get degraded and not one had enough guts to stop it.? ?



The point here, directly applicable to the service academies, is not whether any cadets had the guts to intervene ? guts was simply not the issue, but rather that cadets were neither able to recognize that they had gone far beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior nor capable of stopping their classmates.



In a troubling vignette at the Naval Academy, a midshipman, accused of an honor violation that did not pass the common sense test, had to plead his case all the way to the superintendent. At every level of review, where critical consideration of the charge would have revealed the nonsense of the case, it was sustained.



The midshipman was beaten into submission by the system. The superintendent, having heard this young man out face to face, would only tell him that he would let him know his decision by e-mail. E-mail leadership, imagine that.



I am encouraged by the legislation recently enacted expanding the scope of the Air Force Academy review panel beyond merely finding guilt or innocence among those accused. Certainly, there are those who must be held accountable for their acts or for ignoring clear indicators of these acts. But as discussed above, there is a clear leadership issue far bigger than the individual allegations of criminality at the Air Force Academy.



This is a systemic problem. The history of the service academies indicates that this review must span all services. Several years ago, the establishment of Ethics Chairs was offered as a fix. But these are really a symptom, not a cure. The solution will come by day-to-day examples of leadership and perspective demonstrated by senior leaders.



One example of effective leadership comes from Vice Adm. James F. Calvert, Naval Academy Superintendent in the late 1960s. He periodically spoke personally to the classes on leadership. These talks were viewed curiously by many midshipmen during the Vietnam era, but his experience and perspective were effectively transmitted to hundreds of midshipmen.



Over the next decades, a peer opponent to the U.S. military will emerge. We must not fool ourselves into thinking that the rapid collapse of Iraq was preordained. Our commissioned officer corps must be ready to lead forces facing a capable opponent and absorbing significant casualties.

I believe the President himself, acting as Commander-in-Chief, must take a personal interest in this panel. The recent revelations of the ineffectiveness of the Air Force Academy Board of Visitors calls into question the entire process by which the services monitor the academies.



There is no other way to ensure that the product of such a panel will not end up a whitewash. The ongoing investigation must also go beyond the Air Force Academy itself and contribute directly to substantial and longstanding changes in the professional ethos of our commissioned officer corps.



Lt. Raymond Perry USN (Ret.) is a DefenseWatch Contributing Editor. He can be reached at cos1stlt@yahoo.com

http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/c....1747901865907


Sempers,

Roger
__________________
IN LOVING MEMORY OF MY HUSBAND
SSgt. Roger A.
One Proud Marine
1961-1977
68/69
Once A Marine............Always A Marine.............

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