Designed by: Gerry Locklin W - · PDF fileregard to religion, ethnicity, ... the potential impact of ethical failures upon the military ... The first two groups believe that ethics

ithout entering into the specifics ofindividual cases, I doubt the reader will

argue that noteworthy ethical failureshave occurred throughout Western mili-

tary forces over the past several decades,and appear likely to continue to do so. Incidences ofethical failure have involved military and public servicepersonnel of all age groups, all elements and withoutregard to religion, ethnicity, gender or any other crite-ria. Whether the increasing damage resulting from theexposure of unethical activity is the result of an actualincrease in such activity, or an increase in public scruti-ny of armed forces, is immaterial; damage has occurred,costing militaries badly-needed defence dollars, publicesteem, fragile morale, declining recruiting and even acertain amount of self-respect. Perhaps worst of all hasbeen a minor but measurable decline in national confi-dence in armed forces in general, a phenomenonobserved in the United States in the mid-1970s, and inCanada in the mid-1990s.

Two initial conclusions may be drawn from thesefacts: first, that it is impossible to calculate in advancethe potential impact of ethical failures upon the militaryforces of a nation; and second, that the potential for eth-ical failures is a problem independent of service,branch, unit, group, rank or individual. In this context,minor cultural variations aside, the armed forces of

Canada and the United States are representative of typi-cal Western military organizations, in the sense thatwhat has befallen them as a result of increasing interestin ethical conduct threatens all equally. While theengine of ethical scrutiny may differ from nation tonation, what is of concern to this present work is not theengine, but that behaviour that fuels it.

The term ‘professional’ is often applied to career sol-diers throughout the Western world, and the role of theofficer has been labeled ‘the profession of arms’ by ana-lysts as diverse as Gwyn Dyer and General Sir JohnHackett. In general terms, a profession boasts five ele-ments distinguishing it from other occupations: a sys-tematic theory (how it works); a system of authority(who reports to whom); community sanction (that it isboth legal and acceptable to society); a culture; and anethical code.1 What distinguishes the military profes-sion from other professions is the nature of its ethicalcode, the foundation of which is voluntary subordina-tion of one’s own interests to those of the state. Thisfoundation, however, while necessary, is not sufficientto the ethical standard required of the soldier. The aimof this paper is to define military ethical behaviour inthe context of liberal democratic societies, examine thesources of ethical failure in the armed forces of Canada

Spring 2000 ● Canadian Military Journal 27

ETHICS AND THE MILITARYCORPORATIONQuis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who guards theguardians?)

- Juvenal

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by Captain Donald A. Neill

Captain Donald Neill is Special Assistant (Corporate Issues andSpecial Projects) to the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff.

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and the United States, and from that attempt to definethe fundamental ethical code of the soldier. Boards ofinquiry, courts martial and public censure may in partmitigate the symptoms of ethical failure, but the deter-mination and treatment of the root causes of the alleged‘crisis of ethics’ in Western military organizations is amore complex and longer-term exercise, and is unavoid-ably the task of those organizations themselves.

ETHICAL BEHAVIOUR

epending upon one’s preference for a particularintellectual school, ethical values may be consid-

ered to be either relative, absolute or some combinationof the two. Psychologists tend to adhere to the formerdescription, religionists to the latter, while philoso-phers, perhaps not surprisingly, are distributed evenlyalong the continuum. For the purposes of this paper Ihave adopted a dualist philosophic approach in the sensethat while ethical behaviour is considered relative to thesocial context in which it is developed, learned, prac-tised and contravened, the ultimate aim of this discourseis to develop a generalizable ethical code applicable tothe profession of arms — an absolutist injunction with-in a relativist context, if you will.

Ethical behaviour may be best defined as performanceor conduct that meets the norms established by or for agiven group. John R. Saul describes ethics by means ofa vivid if somewhat irreverent allegory:

It takes less effort to push a little old lady off thesidewalk into oncoming traffic than it does to goaround her....some people do this. Others, afraid ofbeing caught, do not. Both see the law as a meansto control mankind’s unruly or unethical nature. Athird group includes those in positions of powerwho consider the law and its enforcement to be theprincipal barrier between order and mayhem. Theyfear that without the law everyone might beginpushing little old ladies off sidewalks...

A fourth group, which may include as much as 90percent of the population, perhaps 95 per cent,includes those who, even without witnesses, do notpush little old ladies off sidewalks. They don’teven consider it. They simply step aside...

The first two groups believe that ethics are a matter ofmeasurement. The third do not believe in ethics andso replace them with a rationally organized antidote tofear. The fourth seems to understand that ethics are amatter of personal daily practical responsibility.They seem to know this irrespective of education, reli-gion, whether reason is a conscious fact and whetheror not they have access to sidewalks.”2

All groups — state, corporate, cultural, scholastic,religious, military, professional, social or otherwise —possess, evolve or otherwise acquire a fundamentalbehavioural standard, adherence to which is a sine-qua-non of group membership. Codes of professional ethicsserve three principle functions in society. First, theyprotect the members of the society against abuse bymembers of the profession who might choose to exploittheir monopoly of expertise; second, they define the pro-fessional as a responsible and trustworthy expert in theservice of his ‘client’; and third, they “delineate themoral authority for actions necessary to the professionalfunction but generally impermissible in moral terms”.3

In the case of the military profession, the first aspect isnecessary to assure the civilian populace that the army isits servant, not its master; the second, to reassure all andsundry that the army is capable, competent, ready andreliable in time of crisis; and the third, to establish with-in the army precisely when and under what conditions itmay exercise its function — the deliberate and measuredexercise of violence in the interest of the state. Thus, forthe soldier there are established in time of war certainconditions under which he will be temporarily exemptfrom his basic, or societal, code of ethical behaviour.The very exercise of his function places him beyond thenormal barriers of socially-acceptable ethical behaviourrestricting his civilian compatriots. The contradictorynature of military ethics thus lies at the heart of the pro-fession of arms, and will be discussed in depth furtheralong in this paper.

Overlapping and opposing patterns of ethical behav-iour invariably result in conflict. As an example, behav-ioral norms within Canadian society discourage engag-ing in anti-social activities such as vandalism and indi-vidual or group violence — and yet these are prerequi-site behavioural patterns characteristic of the majorityof urban youth gangs. Surgeons, in conflict with boththeir oath of ethical conduct and the ethical standards ofthe average citizen, are often called upon to allow onepatient to expire in order to perform, for example, anorgan transplant operation on another. And soldiers, inconflict both with society’s mores and their own physi-ological needs and psychological fears, voluntarilyengage in behaviour which may require them not only tokill, but to unhesitatingly risk their own injury or deathin obedience to the orders of their superiors.

The conflict resulting from the superimposition ofcontradictory ethical standards is usually resolved byweighting, relativism, and social and individual justifi-cation; that is to say, in the case of the soldier, socialand, in many cases, religious4 injunctions against killingare psychologically dealt with first, by the assurances ofhis commanders that the imperative of his country’sneed frees him of the moral strictures constraining his

28 Canadian Military Journal ● Spring 2000

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civilian compatriots; second,by his commander’s insistencethat his country’s cause ismorally superior to that of theenemy; third, by the argumentthat his country’s cause is ‘just’(and therefore, by corollary,that of the enemy ‘unjust’); andfinally, by reminding him thatwhatever he fails to do unto theenemy, the enemy will surelydo unto him. Given the appro-priate circumstantial context(i.e., a trench at Passchendaele,the gun deck of a ship of theline at Trafalgar, or a shell-bat-tered redoubt at Dien BienPhu), the combination of thesearguments is generally suffi-cient to override social pro-gramming and temporarilyrelease the soldier to functionin a fashion antithetical to thebehavioural standards of hissociety, but appropriate to anenvironment which bears little resemblance to his home-land in time of peace.

Military organizations, however, do not exist in a vacu-um, and their traditional isolation is rapidly being erodedby increasing public scrutiny facilitated by improvementsin communications technology, resulting — as highlight-ed by Peter C. Newman in The Canadian Revolution:From Deference to Defiance — in an accelerating declinein public respect for public institutions. In the fivedecades since the Western world last mobilized its entireenergies for catastrophic war, Western populations havebecome increasingly less inclined to grant their armedforces privileged status with respect to behaviour and con-duct. Military organizations contravening the standardsof their society either in peace or war must thereforeexpect a response in keeping neither with their own in-group perspective nor in the context of the operationalenvironment in which they perform their duties, but ratherfrom the perspective of their parent society.

Evolving social paradigms are at once simpler andmore complex than those which military institutions aretrained, and expect, to confront. The fundamental ethi-cal question confounding lawmakers in any society isthe determination of when, and under what circum-stances, it is lawful for that society to undertake actionsprohibited the individual. Common examples of thisdilemma are taxation, capital punishment, conscriptionand war, acts which, if performed by an individual citi-zen, would respectively translate as robbery, murder,

enslavement and criminalassault. Yet with the sanction of‘lawful authority’, the termcoined by (or at least attributedto) Augustine in his discussionof just war, the state may under-take these activities in its owninterests without fear of sanc-tion.5 ‘Lawful authority’,which Augustine equated withGod and which to him meant thedivinely-appointed sovereign,signifies to modern Westernman the powers vested in ademocratically-elected govern-ment enjoying the support ofthe majority of the populationcapable of exercising franchise.This distinction is particularlygermane to discussions of jusad bellum, or the right of thestate to initiate war, as ‘lawfulauthority’ is the first and mostfundamental requirement of theprofession charged with the

application of violence — and is the obverse of ‘moralresponsibility’, the second such requirement. The keydifference between the authorities and responsibilities ofthe state and those accruing to the soldier who serves it isthat while military professionalism presupposes an arrayof moral obligations developed and refined over millen-nia, droit d’état, as espoused by inter alia Machiavelli,Voltaire, Clausewitz and Mao, does not.

It is in the métier of the soldier that the ethical stan-dards of society, particularly Western society, and theethical standards of the professional in-group differmost markedly. The Western social behavioural bench-mark is founded in the Judeo-Christian tradition, andespouses tolerance, calm, sobriety, fiscal ambition,political activity, family values and the rational settle-ment of disputes. Military organizations, on the otherhand, have historically tolerated, occasionally insistedupon, and have only recently attempted to restrainaggressive behaviour, intolerance of out-group individ-uals (who may range from friendly civilians to enemysoldiers), occasional abuse of alcohol, in-group bond-ing, contempt for financial goals, political abstemious-ness and the personal (ofttimes physical) resolution ofdisputes between soldiers. The gulf between the twobehavioural patterns continues to expand with increas-ing rapidity as concern for human rights continues topercolate across traditionally impermeable barriers.The social context within which military organizationsoperate is changing rapidly as a result; and the failureby such organizations to recognize and react or adapt to


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social change lies at the crux of the problems of excessivescrutiny, suspicion, and distrust that they are facing today.

Resolving the conflict between in-group ethicalbehaviour and ethical behaviour as defined by society isa complex psychological and operational problem.Professional militaries since the Eighteenth Centuryhave generally accomplished this goal by isolatingrecruits and subjecting them to a deliberately harshprocess of in-group socialization aimed at replacing therestrictive elements of learned cultural behavioural pat-terns with those more appropriate to the soldier’s lot,including but not limited to the willingness to obeylegitimate orders without question, to engage in life-threatening activity without succumbing to fear, and tokill efficiently and without hesitation. This early social-ization continues tobe reinforced afterrecruit trainingthrough a variety ofpatterned stimuliincluding the mecha-nism of barracks life,and is regularly stiff-ened through thedevices of uniqueappearance (hair-styles and uniforms),speech patterns(proper modes ofaddress for superiorsand subordinates,and the use of mili-tary jargon), distinc-tive regalia (medals, insignia, unit flashes and buttons)and pervasive and repetitive modes of behaviour, such aswalking in formation, saluting, freedom-of-the-cityparades and the like. Basic training serves to set the sol-dier apart from his civilian compatriots and inculcate inhim the fundamental behavioural patterns of his profes-sion, while strictly enforced behavioural norms buttressthese patterns throughout his career.

SOURCES OF ETHICAL FAILURE

f we are to attempt to delineate for the profession ofarms an ethical code designed to address the problems

postulated in the foregoing sections of this paper, it isnecessary to first examine the sources of that failure.Where military ethical failures are concerned, thesesources are threefold, and can be traced to pre-inductionsocietal conditioning, the socialization process imposedby military forces themselves, and conscious individualaction — in short, unconscious behavioural standardsimprinted by society, unconscious behavioural standardsimprinted by the profession, and conscious behaviour.

Each of these factors can have a negative influence onthe ethical conditioning of the soldier, and will beexamined in detail in the following sections.

T he Society

ritics of the performance of military personnel gen-erally forget one of the most pervasive elements of

the recruiting process throughout the Western world:that with very few exceptions, a nation’s army is madeup of the nation’s citizens. It is a fundamental tenet ofpsychology that basic sociological conditioning takesplace during childhood, and that any individual is farless likely to acquire behavioural patterns perfectlyafter having attained adolescence. Without exception,Western military organizations recruit civilians well

after adolescence hasbeen attained, andthus it would appearthat, long-service vet-erans excepted, themajority of militarypersonnel will at anygiven moment havespent a greater por-tion of their lives asa civilian citizen thanas a soldier.6 Sincetime spent as a civil-ian is invariably theearlier or primarylearning years, itfollows that societymust bear a signifi-

cant responsibility for the behavioural patterns which itimparts to the citizen before that citizen chooses tobecome a soldier.

A variety of trends unique to contemporary Westernsociety contribute greatly to ethical failures once thecitizen dons a uniform. Among these is a waningrespect for personal rights and privileges, including pri-vacy, individual opinion, and religious convictions, ofwhich the increasing incidence of religious fundamen-talism, hate crimes and acts of ‘home-grown terrorism’are excellent examples. A diminishing respect for prop-erty, evinced by the decay of urban centres largely at thehands of their occupants, may also be postulated, as maya marked lack of respect for cultural differences,whether physical, psychological, or ideological.7

Combined with these are negative societal traitsresulting from growing ideological extremism andexcessively zealous adherence to the ill-defined ideal of‘political correctness’. Increasing media pervasivenessis fostered by the explosion in information technology


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and insistence upon absolute transparency in all publicinstitutions, which encourages members of the fourthestate to question institutions previously immune todoubt. Military forces are only the most recent of publicorganizations to fall under intense scrutiny as citizensdemand accountability in return for their tax dollars.

In short, military organizations in democratic soci-eties are perforce required to induct citizens that havealready been subjected, on average, to nearly twodecades of exposure to rapidly changing societal atti-tudes which in many cases reflect values different from,and in some cases antithetical to, the core valuesrequired by military organizations in order to be effec-tive. The citizens then moulded into soldiers may pos-sess underlying ethical standards which differ radicallyfrom those which must be imparted during militarysocialization, risking ethical conflicts and all that theseimply. Society must therefore bear a good portion of theburden of blame for ethical failures amongst membersof the military, as each citizen will unavoidably reflectboth the good and the bad characteristics of the societywhich forms him. As Peter C. Newman notes:

...all navies, armies and air forces mirror the char-acter of the societies they are sworn to defend. Ifthe ultimate purpose of our military is hard to pindown, it’s because we as a people lack a definablecreed or even a set of common beliefs.8

T he Individual

discouraging side-effect of the spreading and oth-erwise praiseworthy progress of social democra-

cy throughout Western societies has been the lamentabletendency to shift responsibility for the failures or crimesof the individual to the broader and therefore more dif-fuse shoulders of society as a whole. This tendencytowards abdication of personal responsibility for one’sactions, albeit less prevalent before the all-embracingliberalizing trends of the nineteen fifties, sixties andseventies, if taken to extremes echoes the arguments ofthose individuals charged with having committed crimesagainst humanity during the Second World War, and isenshrined in the spurious legal defence of respondeatsuperior — more popularly expressed as ‘I was only fol-lowing orders’. International law and the law of armedconflict have since put paid to that defence by definingthe moral and legal obligation of the soldier to refuse anorder that is manifestly unlawful (e.g., to murder pris-oners, to rape, otherwise abuse or kill civilians, or toengage in the wilful and purposeless destruction ofcivilian property). Societal indifference notwithstand-ing, therefore, the responsibility for one’s own actionsremains with the individual solider, be he Private orGeneral — as does the concomitant injunction to exer-

cise individual judgement in responding to orders. Theargument posed by the character John Bates during histwilight debate with his disguised monarch inShakespeare’s Henry V — “We know enough if we knowwe are the King’s subjects. If his cause be wrong, ourobedience to the King wipes the crime of it out of us” —is no longer a valid defence. Henry’s response to Bates’charge clearly establishes individual responsibility evenin the context of medieval Christian morality: “Everysubject’s duty is the King’s; but every subject’s soul’shis own.”9 Individual responsibility is likewise estab-lished a priori in courts of law, both national and inter-national, and yet for some reason contemporary Westernsociety has made significant inroads towards abolishingit as a vital social convention.

Notions of personal responsibility are furtherenshrined in the commissioning scroll through whichthe officer is charged by the sovereign both with thedirection and discipline of the soldiers placed under hiscommand and obedience to the orders of those designat-ed his superiors. Obedience to the will of the sovereign,however, has the potential to come into conflict withone’s ethical duty in the peculiar circumstances engen-dered by war, and it is here that the individual judge-ment and moral character of the soldier once again comeinto play. An obvious example is the plight of the FreeFrench during the Second World War, who were facedwith a choice between obedience to the orders of theduly constituted head of state and ceasing resistance toa brutal invader and an odious regime, or in effectchoosing treason by attempting to combat the invader.History has not only exonerated De Gaulle, the FreeFrench and the Resistance, but has raised them to folk-loric (and in De Gaulle’s case, deific) status, whilesimultaneously demonizing the Pétain regime.Disobedience to his superiors and his nominal head ofstate was, in this instance and in the opinion not only ofDe Gaulle and the thousands of his countrymen whoflocked to his banner, but posterity as well, a moralobligation. A soldier lacking solid ethical priorities andincapable of making such a choice could not have cometo the decision made by De Gaulle and his followers.

The second and perhaps weightiest factor determiningthe reactions of the individual in a situation requiring amoral choice are those elements of his character thathave been determined by his environment; to wit per-sonal experience and psychological trauma. Balancedagainst or working in conjunction with these elementsare the motivators of ego and personal ambition. Thesame society that shields or even lionizes individualswho refuse to accept personal responsibility for theiractions is simultaneously encouraging a self-indulgentstandard of amorality in business, professional andsocial affairs worthy of a Borgia. Such attitudes are


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antithetical to the profession of arms; individual accept-ance of responsibility for one’s actions and accountabil-ity for those of one’s subordinates is and must remainone of the pillars of military service.

T he Mil i tary

Deeds for which they would atone with their lives ifcommitted in peace, we praise them for having doneunder arms. (Seneca)10

inally, we must focus our attention on the roleplayed by the military institution itself in engender-

ing, fostering and perpetuating socially questionable stan-dards of behaviour among their personnel. In a recentbook, astronomer Carl Sagan examined the increasingeffectiveness of operant conditioning in producing sol-diers willing to fire their weapons in combat, which hasresulted in a decrease in instances of combat inactionfrom approximately 85-90 percent during the First WorldWar to less than 40 percent during the Vietnam War. Healso cited a corresponding and well-documented rise inthe incidence of battlefield stress casualties and post-repatriation traumatic stress disorders among returned sol-diers. It would appear that while military training tech-niques are becoming increasingly effective at producing

aggressive soldiers, they remain less efficient at anticipat-ing, averting, ameliorating or treating the psychologicalside-effects of their own success.

Problems with training methodology are as old as mil-itary organizations themselves. When Churchill charac-terized the traditions of the Royal Navy as consisting oflittle more than ‘rum, sodomy, and the lash’, his intentwas to ridicule the stultifying effects of tradition — andhe spoke, in effect, for all services. The military man,

according to Sir Basil Liddell-Hart, is a most conserva-tive creature, who will not adopt an idea until it is obso-lete, and will not abandon it until it has nearly destroyedhim. This innate conservatism is in large part the resultof the role of the military as guardian of the socialorder, and is itself a not unnatural response to anythingwhich might unduly threaten that order — such as sud-den and drastic social change, whether evolutionary orrevolutionary in nature.

While such conservatism is not an entirely negativetrait in moderation, when carried to extremes it mayprove the undoing of the profession of arms. The prac-tice of safeguarding legitimate tradition invariablyspills over into the retention of outmoded operationalprocedures, the ultimate cost of which usually onlybecomes apparent when exorbitant casualty statistics areenumerated. The oft-quoted example of the light caval-ry charge at Balaclava points up the futility of deploy-ing chasseurs against infantry supported by cannon, alesson that one might suppose ought to have beenpainfully evident to the army that had employed the reg-imental square to such devastating effect at Waterloo.Nonetheless, the dash and gallantry of the cavalrycharge, however out of place on a battlefield whererifled musketry and breech-loading artillery were fastbecoming the rule, remained to plague armies well intothe Second World War — a triumph of dogged conser-vatism over common sense.

A major culprit within Western military organizationsis the bureaucratization of the military profession. Thisphenomenon is now some four decades old, originatingin a series of policy decisions made by liberal bureau-crats and business-trained defence officials during theearly- to mid-1960s, in Canada and the United Statesalike. As Secretary of Defence under Kennedy and oneof the latter’s “whiz kids”, Robert McNamara intro-duced to the military a new theory of managementderived from his experience in the automobile industry.Business management principles became de rigeur, andbusiness management techniques were to be applied byall and sundry to the day-to-day operations of govern-ment, the intricacies of international politics, and theoperations of warfare alike. Business administrationgradually made its way into think-tanks, universitiesand the Pentagon, and resulted in a generation of seniorbureaucrats, politicians and generals who believed in,and attempted to apply to their duties, the rationalistdoctrine of universal quantifiability. Business manage-ment techniques began to trickle down into the lowerranks of the military, and terms and concepts such as‘man-management’ began to replace leadership at unitlevel and below. This proved to be a fundamental andcrucial error, as management is not a substitute for lead-ership, but only a small and subordinate element of it.11


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The gradual encroachment of the business managementfad within Canada’s Department of National Defencehas been admirably chronicled by Douglas Bland.When in 1947 then-Minister of National DefenceBrooke Claxton was examining possible candidates forthe position of Chairman of the Chiefs of StaffCommittee, his leading criteria were that the senior offi-cer in question “must be good at paperwork, a genius atcoordination, and a man in whom the government hascomplete confidence”. Bland goes on to state that:

Brooke Claxton was looking for a new type of offi-cer, not merely a war hero....He needed an officerwho could easily and confidently function in bothnational and international political-military circum-stances and who would act not as an advocate forthe military’s point of view but as a link between themilitary and the government. Such an officer had tohave sharp skills honed...in the corridors ofOttawa’s bureaucracy...a chairman who “[was] morea diplomat than a soldier.”[italics added]12

What Claxton sought was an accomplished bureaucratwith the political savvy to navigate the murky waters of theOttawa establishment, and a bemedalled uniform to com-mand the respect of the military, but without either too dis-tinguished a military record, a hardened military viewpointor an excess of dedication to the military establishmentitself. In short, he sought the quintessental corporate drone;an entity replete with ‘form’, but devoid of substance.

When MacNamara undertook to establish businessmanagement principles throughout the armed forces ofthe United States, he had a willing acolyte in then-Minister of National Defence Paul Hellyer,13 whomBland describes as follows:

Hellyer’s “first love” was macro-economics and hehad earned his way in business, a point he liked toemphasize when confronting government managers.Hellyer, the politician, however, was defined by...azealous need for administrative order, and a critical,almost suspicious attitude, toward public servantsand military officers and their advice.14

Hellyer applied his energy, political ambition and notinconsiderable administrative skills to bring about theunification of the Canadian Forces and the integrationof headquarters,15 a process which, although it will notbe discussed here, has been described as less of a mili-tary operational necessity, than “an act of mayhem com-mitted in the name of administrative tidiness”.16 Whatwas significant was not the fact of unification itself, butthe underlying reasons for bringing it about, none ofwhich had anything to do with increasing the wartimeeffectiveness of the Canadian military establishment.

The process of bureaucratization continued with theappointment in 1970 of Donald MacDonald as Ministerof National Defence. MacDonald established theManagement Review Group (MRG), the mandate ofwhich was “ostensibly to bring modern managementtechniques and organizational ideas into the CF andDND,”17 but the goal of which, according to Bland, wasto accomplish a transfer of decision-making power fromthe hands of military personnel — in particular, theChief of Defence Staff — into those of senior civilianbureaucrats within the Department. Bland’s summary ofthe Group’s recommendations notes that:

The MRG’s preferred organizational solution was toseparate the CDS from his traditional and legalresponsibility to ‘control and administer’ the CF andto assign parts of this function to civilian members ofDND. The leader of this new organization would bethe Deputy Minister [a civil service bureaucrat] actingout of ‘the office of the Minister’ where all depart-mental and military decisions would be taken....

Other acts to limit the power of the CDS followed.The headquarters, amalgamated under the DeputyMinister, would include several civilian deputies toadminister logistics and other functions, duties thatwould require them to give orders directly to themilitary commands in the field. The strategic plan-ning process...would be directed by a ‘politicallysensitive civilian’ acting for the deputy. The CDSin the end was expected to perform a coordinatingrole, although the MRG members...saw no need foran operational command function as such.18

In these recommendations, the members of the MRGwent well beyond McNamara’s or even Hellyer’swildest imaginings by advocating a transfer of theresponsibility for the command and operational controlof the Canadian Forces to a mixed coterie of servingofficers and appointed civilian bureaucrats — in thecase of the latter, a disturbing conferral of de factoauthority over troops without assigning concomitantresponsibility, as civilians are by definition neither sub-ject to the chain of command nor bound by the same eth-ical code as members of the profession of arms. Whilethese recommendations were poorly received by theCanadian Forces and government alike, they neverthe-less serve as an excellent indicator of the way the man-agement winds were blowing. The end result of thisprocess was and remains a bifurcated senior commandstructure19 in which the Deputy Minister and the CDSfunction in essence as a single individual, and in whichfully half of the ‘group principal’ or Lieutenant-General-equivalent positions are occupied by civilianbureaucrats possessing the de facto but not the de jureauthority to issue orders to uniformed personnel.


Paul Manson — who later served as Chief of theDefence Staff — raised the troubling issue of the civil-ianization of headquarters in his 1973 article, posingquestions such as “Where exactly does the civilian fit inwhen it comes to giving direction to the CanadianForces? Precisely what authority may the civilian holdover his military counterpart?,”20 questions which wereastute for his day, and which in our own have yet to beanswered satisfactorily. The civilianisation of the sen-ior command level of the CF remains a matter of seriousconcern, not least because appointed civil servants arenot bound by the same oath of service, chain of com-mand, or, through the device of the commissioningscroll, the same ‘royal injunction’ as their militarycounterparts. They follow differing career paths, aresubject to a different remunerative philosophy, are notrequired to adhere to the same work ethic as soldiers,may join unions, are not obliged to serve in hazardouscircumstances, and — perhaps most significantly — areprohibited from exercising operational command of mil-itary personnel. In short, their circumstances are suffi-ciently different from those of the soldier that it wouldbe unreasonable to expect them to adhere to the sameethical code — and yet they are, at the national com-mand level at least, required to perform the same func-tions as their military co-workers. These problemsnotwithstanding, as of 1 October 1972, the makers ofmilitary policy in Canada were “not only not selected bymilitary officers at large, they [were] drawn in largemeasure from the civil service.”21

In Canada, the impact of the management fad appearsto have engendered a significant degree of inconsisten-cy of thinking at the highest levels of the nationaldefence organization, not through failing to effectchange, but through effecting change aimed elsewherethan at increasing the operational effectiveness of theCanadian military organization in its primary function— supporting government policy by force of arms.This is in large part the result of the inevitable blurringof the distinction between senior soldiers and seniorbureaucrats that came about with the restructure effortsof the early 1970s. As one writer put it, “To give civil-ians positions of authority in the military hierarchy isto create civilian generals, a contradiction of terms anda combination of incompatible concepts”.22

Organization theory focuses not on the moral responsi-bility of a particular individual, but on the decision-making authority he or she wields. By this measure,executive-level civilian ‘generals’ eventually came tooutnumber their military counterparts at headquartersas successive governments sought to create equivalen-cies between disparate branches of the public service.

Misperception of the role of the soldier in modernsociety lies at the root not only of the ethical drift cur-

rently afflicting the military, but of the military’s poorpublic image. It is also a critical problem within theranks of the military itself, because the ethical standardsof the soldier and those of the businessman that soldiershave been and are being encouraged to emulate are notonly not mutually reinforcing, but in point of fact mutu-ally exclusive. To paraphrase Saul, the ethic of thebusinessman is self-interest, while that of the soldier isself-sacrifice. Blurring the distinction between the twoleads not only to a misidentification of goals, but a mis-interpretation as to how those goals should be achieved.The business ethic espouses not only different ends, butdifferent means. It is entirely insufficient to publish a‘statement of military ethics’ or similar beast, andexpect soldiers to understand and adhere to it when theyare on a day-to-day basis expected to emulate businessmanagers; and a fool’s errand at best to try to develop an‘ethos’ designed to serve, guide, and extract the bestefforts from soldiers and civilians alike when the twoprofession bear so little in common.

The suggestion that Western military forces haveallowed themselves to become overly fascinated withthe ideals of business methodology is neither a new nora frivolous one. Richard Gabriel in his 1985 study ofthe armed forces of the United States observed that:

...in the 1950s the Army Command and GeneralStaff College devoted 665 hours to tactical andoperational skills. By the late 1970s, only 173hours were spent on these skills. The rest of thetime was taken up...with courses and instruction inmanagement, finances and general politics.23

While this type of classroom instruction had yet topermeate more junior staff colleges, it soon become therule rather than the exception at the senior levels. TheNational Defence University in Washington DC, forexample, boasted in the early 1980s a curriculum whichoffered courses on how to testify before a Congressionalcommittee; Gabriel notes wryly that “apparently, thesimple injunction to tell the truth to one’s political supe-riors no longer suffice[d]”.24 He goes on to make thefollowing observation:

It is a frightening fact that a staff psychologist atthe National Defence University who has beendoing personality testing on the university’s classessince 1979 can find no differences between the mil-itary men at the university and the executives ofbusiness corporations whom he also tests. If theofficers and executives all wore similar clothes, henotes, it would be impossible to tell them apart.25

As one of the principal themes of this paper is theargument that soldiers should be held responsiblefor their own actions and accountable for the actions


of their subordinates, it would be inappropriate not tobring to light the difficulties experienced by militaryleaders at all levels in setting and enforcing universalcodes of behaviour. Whether set out in a ‘code of con-duct’, an ‘honour code’, a ‘statement of ethics and val-ues’ or some other morally binding admonition, behav-ioural standards for any sub-societal group aspiring tothe status of a profession must be clear, unambiguous,universally understood and universally adhered to, orthey are by definition not standards at all. They mustcarry enforceable professional penalties for non-compli-ance if they are to be considered credible. Most impor-tant, however, they must be designed to be relevant tothe profession in question.

The obligation borne by military leaders to develop andpresent such standards is twofold; they must enforce thestandard in their personnel, but must also demonstrate itthrough their own actions. The traditional characteristics ofcourage, loyalty and mercy are perhaps the mostobvious indicators in this light, as no professionalsoldier, regardless of the implied punishment, willfollow into action a leader who is manifestly dis-loyal, brutal or pusillanimous. A final indicator isintegrity, a concept which the Oxford ConciseDictionary describes variously as ‘uprightness’and ‘honesty’, but which is perhaps betterexpressed as the willingness to forego a potential-ly beneficial act simply because it is forbidden byone’s ethical code (or “wrong”); or to carry onwith a potentially harmful one simply because it isdemanded by one’s ethical code (or “right”).

Which of course begs the definitions of ‘right’and ‘wrong’. This distinction recalls the conun-drum of the amoral individual that contemporaryWestern society seems bent on creating, andwhich Western military organizations are per-force required to mould into soldiers. Whereas amoral individual is assumed to be capable of distinguishingright from wrong, and usually chooses to do right, and animmoral individual, capable of making the same decision,usually chooses to do wrong, the amoral person is intellec-tually incapable of distinguishing between the ethical poles.

One of the goals of basic military training is to alter theconventional morality ingrained in an individual sincechildhood by replacing militarily problematic segmentswith a selective amorality in which otherwise immoralbehaviour is under certain circumstances not only permit-ted but required — or, as Seneca has noted, even laud-able. For a definition of amorality, we must again turn toSaul who, tongue firmly in cheek, defines it as:

A quality admired and rewarded in modern organi-zations, where it is referred to through metaphors

such as professionalism and efficiency...one of theterms which highlights the confusion in societybetween what is taught as a value and what is actu-ally rewarded by the structure. Immorality is doingwrong of our own volition. Amorality is doing itbecause an organization or structure expects us to doit. Amorality is thus worse than immorality becauseit involves denying our responsibility and thereforeour existence as anything more than an animal.26

The problem is that humans, as complex and fairlyintelligent animals, are capable of learning in a greatmany ways beyond the simple conditioning of basic sol-dier training. Observation is the commonest form oflearning, dominating the formative stages of childhoodand remaining active throughout adult life. Leadershipby example therefore becomes less a rhetorical injunc-tion and more a paramount responsibility of the leader-as-teacher. It is ‘only human’, for example, in the

absence of instruction to the contrary, to assume that anaction permissible to one’s superior is permissible tooneself. While in the grossest sense it is unlikely that,for example, a manifestly disloyal officer will encour-age the display of manifest disloyalty by his subordi-nates, imitative behaviour is the hallmark of all pri-mates, and learning by observation is rarely gross oreven conscious in scale and nature. It is far more like-ly that fleeting or morally nebulous instances ofimmoral behaviour by a senior will encourage individu-als in whom amorality has been encouraged by societyand the corporate system alike to adopt immoral behav-ioural standards. The military tendency to wink at sup-posedly minor offences with phrases such as ‘boys willbe boys’ or ‘he’ll straighten out in the field’ exacerbatesthis structural weakness and has a costly impact on sol-dier effectiveness as well as on the public image of the


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military in general. The Nelsonian admonition to ‘neverpass a fault’ is gaining adherents as the cost of laxitycontinues to climb.

Not surprisingly, one of the problems with creatingand sustaining an attitude of professionalism throughoutthe officer ranks of a bureaucratized military is evaluat-ing and rewarding ethical behaviour. Linn notes that:

...in a 1977 Army War College study on profession-alism, one-third of US Army officers surveyed stat-ed that they believed that unethical behaviour wasrewarded by ‘the system’, while two-thirds believedthat ethical behaviour went unrewarded.27

Establishing a system of rewards for ethical behaviouris, however, a two-edged sword; on the one hand, doingso implies that ethical behaviour represents superiorrather than standard performance, and rewarding itwould therefore be akin to rewarding a private soldierfor having laced his boots properly. On the other hand,the lack of a system of ‘carrots’ to offset the ‘stick’ ofsanctions may render it difficult to re-establish ethicalbehaviour as the norm in the first place. As an aside, itis interesting to note how the complaints of Americanofficers of two decades past echo those recentlyexpressed to the Standing Committee on NationalDefence and Veterans Affairs.

The idea of ‘the system’ as a random, headless bureau-cratic juggernaut bent on overwhelming the honest whileremaining open to exploitation by the crafty is hardly a newone; what is novel is the fact that distrust of ‘the system’has become so widespread. Gabriel sums up his analysis ofthe American military ‘system’ of the early 1980s in thefollowing rather hyperbolic but heartfelt terms:

The officer who succeeds within the militarybureaucracy is more often not a trained combatleader who has studied and practised the arts of warbut more likely an experienced bureaucratic infight-er who has studied the art of management andknows how to survive in a bureaucratic system thatrewards non-inventiveness, compliance, a willing-ness to follow rules without question, an ability toprotect bureaucratic turf and, above all, not to rockthe boat. These are not the qualities of successfulcombat leaders or the qualities of successful mili-tary planners.28

Saul in Voltaire’s Bastards agrees, and suggests thatthe decline of Western military organizations intoparagons of the bureaucratic ideal is attributable toWestern bureaucracies taking rational political philoso-phy to the uttermost extremes of absurdity; to the pointat which self-interest supersedes self-sacrifice as the

principal engine of human activity, the place where thebusiness ethic overpowers and erases the social ethic.The risk in adapting business methodology to the pro-fession of arms risks encouraging soldiers to adopt a“similar outlook to...other government departments. Asa consequence, the need for military discipline is nolonger obvious, [and] management and business admin-istration supersede leadership...”.29 While this processmay make pragmatic good sense for profit-oriented cor-porations, it is the death knell of armies.

Lacking a reliable system for rewarding ethicalbehaviour, and still uncertain whether such a system, ifone could be developed, would be beneficial or detri-mental in a military context, excellence in the contem-porary bureaucratized military must perforce be judgedagainst another scale. As previously noted, the hallmarkof bureaucracies is the principle of quantifiability; butethics, other than in failure, do not easily lend them-selves to measurement. Linn notes that in a bureaucra-cy lacking a quantifiable ethical standard:

The value of self-interest leads to promotion beingthe standard of success rather than service and con-tribution, and it also leads to ethical disasters.When service to country and corps is forsaken formatters of self-interest, the sense of purpose is lost,commitment to men and mission wanes, and mili-tary competence degenerates...

What is not being understood is that military servicemeans you are morally obligated to competentlyserve the general interests of society even if it meansrisk to your promotion as well as risk to your life.30

The lack of willingness of a leader at any level to riskstatus either by committing himself wholly and unre-servedly to an endeavour or by forthrightly acknowledg-ing responsibility for a catastrophe is damaging not onlyto morale within the services but to the survival of theprofession of arms itself. War, if not the oldest humanoccupation, is without a doubt the most practised andstudied, and soldiers undoubtedly learn best from themistakes of their forebears, and this to a degree paral-leled by few other professions. One of the pillars of theprofession of arms is therefore the willingness of com-manders at all levels to be held responsible for theirown actions and accountable for those of their troopsboth in success and, perhaps more importantly, in fail-ure. Failure is an excellent teacher, and if an army mustendure it, then also must that army learn from it.However, failure is precisely the sort of status-damag-ing event for which bureaucratic organizations avoidrecognition at all costs. Dixon in On the Psychology ofMilitary Incompetence puts the case against avoidanceof responsibility thus:


It is a sad feature of authoritarian organizations thattheir nature inevitably militates against the possi-bility of learning from experience through theapportioning of blame. The reason is not hard tofind. Since authoritarianism is itself the product ofpsychological defences, authoritarian organizationsare past masters at deflecting blame. They do so bydenial, by rationalization, by making scapegoats, orby some mixture of the three. However it isachieved, the net result is that no real admission offailure or incompetence is ever made by those whoare really responsible; hence nothing can be doneabout preventing a recurrence.31

Avoidance of blame remains a prime motivator inbureaucratic thinking and is a natural result of a culture ofcareer protectionism, which is itself an entirely predictableoutcome of the bureaucratization of any profession, mili-tary or otherwise. Unwillingness to accept blame anddenial of accountability are grave and fundamental threatsto the profession of arms precisely because they preventthe profession from learning from its mistakes.

Conventional wisdom, which is the foundation ofGabriel’s work, suggests that the American armed forceswere driven to deal decisively with the management-mil-itary interface as a result of the reverses suffered by theUnited States in Vietnam. It is interesting to note in ret-rospect that the failings identified and decried by Gabrielin his mid-1980s study represented the problems of the1970s which resulted from the missteps of the 1960s, andthat by the time his book went to press, many of themwere well on their way to being resolved. A militaryforce rendered dysfunctional by the slavish application ofbusiness management principles would have not havebeen capable of mounting Operation “Desert Storm”.

THE MILITARY CORPORATION

he swollen officer corps of the West have pro-gressed from the myth of modern organization

to the myth of the modern manager. All the syn-dromes of bureaucratic life are to be found in theirheadquarters. A nine-to-five attitude. Group deci-sions to protect each individual. An inability torespond to information that the system is doing thewrong thing. Leadership rarely rewarded. Businessmanagement systems consciously applied to run-ning armies. It is not an exaggeration to say thatofficers now know more about systems managementthan about fighting wars.32

Despite a penchant for hyperbole exacerbated by alack of direct personal experience in uniform (not tomention an excessive reliance upon the occasionallyirrelevant accusations made by Gabriel), the foregoing

citation from Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards strikes a numberof uncomfortable chords. If one subscribes to Saul, mil-itary staff colleges, which proliferated like fruit fliesduring the nineteenth century, were the forerunners ofthe modern business school. Staff colleges based theirinstructional techniques on the application of the ration-al philosophic approach to staff methodology, and thesynergy produced by this approach when combined withthe mass production techniques of the IndustrialRevolution and the mobility afforded by the steamlocomotive eventually revolutionized warfare.Professionalization of the officer corps, however, servedto dilute the outdated sense of class obligation, replac-ing it instead with fiscal loyalty bolstered by jingoisticpatriotism — uncertain sentiments at best.

Liberalization of military organizations continues tothis day to profess to eliminate ‘class distinctions’whether these exist or not, and in doing so have suc-ceeded in almost entirely erasing the moral obligation ofnational service as a profession, vocation or métier,transforming it instead into a ‘job’, where service is ren-dered solely for pay. This should be the point at whichmilitary service and other forms of employment diverge;apart from a desire to do the best work of which he iscapable, it is doubtful whether one would considerinquiring of, for example, a plumber or a house painterthe nature of his ethical code. This is because no onehas ever given plumbers a license to practice wholesaleviolence in the interest of the state, and because nopainter is expected to be willing to expend his life and thelives of his countrymen in the performance of his duties.

Given, then, that the soldier and the officer who leadshim are obliged by virtue of their choice of professionto set the interests of their country, their duty and theirsubordinates before their own, and that in the case of theofficer, this obligation is expressed as a moral responsi-bility by virtue of his acceptance of the burden and risksof the defence of the state, it is puzzling that for the pastquarter-century Western military forces have deliberate-ly chosen to pattern their institutions of higher militaryeducation and the leadership structures of their respec-tive military forces after the most demonstrably amoralbreed of profession yet to arise — that of the civilianbusinessman, who is himself, ironically, the product ofan institution modeled on the rationalist military staffschools of the nineteenth century. We have in effectcome full circle; business schools are now teaching sol-diers what soldiers once taught them. The danger lies inthe fact that the business schools, in adopting the ratio-nalist approach of their staff college forebears, substi-tuted profit for public service as the fundamental moti-vator in developing their methodology. The goals, meth-ods and ethical standards of business, business adminis-tration and business management are wholly and with-


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out exception opposed diametrically to those of the pro-fession whose raison d’être is the defence of the state.As Gabriel notes in Military Incompetence:

A duly sworn officer carries moral responsibilitiesbeyond anything the civilian business executive canimagine. An officer is given the moral authorityand obligation by his superiors to expend the livesof his fellow citizens in pursuit of legitimate mili-tary objectives. No civilian enterprise confers sucha terrible burden and responsibility.33

A profession demanding self-sacrifice before self-interest by definition can never adopt a profit motive,for there is no material profit in self-sacrifice. The twogoals are mutually exclusive.

The inevitable outcome of developing officers whothink and act like corporate managers is to transform themilitary organization into a non-profit corporate entity,displaying all of the characteristics, both positive andnegative, of any other large business. The positive char-acteristics of businesses are that they provide employ-ment, generate tax revenue, and produce some form oftangible good or service. Military organizations, how-ever, are not businesses; they consume tax revenue, pro-vide employment only at the expense of the state, gen-

erate no profit and apart from assisting in riot, flood orfire control, produce in peacetime only the intangibleservice of ‘national defence’ — successful deterrence,the value of which can be measured only in failure.Even worse, in peacetime the side-benefits of the mili-tary ‘service industry’, such as search and rescue,peacekeeping, disaster assistance and aid of the civilpower, take on an importance all out of proportion to thetrue purpose and value of a military force. These ancil-lary and secondary capabilities thus come to be empha-sized at the expense of the primary capability, which iswaging war, thereby creating a greater market for, andexpectation of, sub-maximal performance, and an envi-

ronment more suited to the advancement of individualscapable of performing — and capitalizing on — tasks notdirectly related to the primary purpose of the military.

The end result of the corporate transformation is a mil-itary offering all of the disadvantages of a private cor-poration without providing any of the benefits. Thisapproach risks building, fostering and furthering theadvancement not of military leaders, but of uniformedcorporate managers, the defining characteristic ofwhom, according to Saul, is that their loyalty to the cor-porate entity exceeds, and eventually supersedes, theirloyalty to society at large — an ethical orientation dia-metrically opposed to that demanded of the soldier in aliberal democracy.34

RECALLING THE MILITARY ETHIC

f there is one defining element of the vocation of thesoldier that sets him apart from civilian professionals

within a democracy, it is, as Gabriel suggests, that healone within his parent society is charged by an electedgovernment with the judicious expenditure of the livesof his fellow citizens. As the foregoing demonstrates,there are a number of fundamental ethical principlespeculiar to the profession of arms which, if not entirelymutually exclusive, are at least occasionally mutuallycontradictory. In addition to the somewhat intangibleideals of loyalty, courage, and mercy, the preceding sec-tions of this paper point to four essential ethical imper-atives driving the soldier. These are the national inter-est of the state, the lawful orders of one’s superiors, thewelfare of one’s subordinates, and the obligation tocarry out one’s duties with honour and restraint.

Meeting these criteria demands a process of prioriti-zation. First, it is accepted that in a liberal democraticsociety, the military is the tool — in point of fact, has nolegal raison d’être beyond the scope — of national pol-icy. The service of the interests of the state must there-fore precede all other considerations. Second, in orderto function, any armed force requires a chain of com-mand designed to absorb the orders originating withpolitical authority and translate these into militarydirectives. Without such a structure, the force would beincapable of functioning. Obedience to one’s superiorsin the hierarchical pyramid is therefore the second mostimportant link in the chain of the military ethic.

Third, in order to be able to execute the orders issuedby one’s superiors, one requires an armed body consist-ing of soldiers, subject by law to one’s orders. If lead-ership is indeed the art of influencing human beings inorder to accomplish a mission in the manner desired bythe leader, it is axiomatic that the leader must maintain hissubordinates in such a condition that they are capable of


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responding to his orders in as efficient a manner as possi-ble. The welfare of one’s subordinates, including themoral as well as professional responsibility not to spendtheir lives needlessly, must therefore be the third mostimportant motivating factor within the military mind.

Fourth and finally, the military leader is required,both morally and by international law, to carry out hisduties with ‘honour and restraint’. War is the most vio-lent and destructive of human activities, involving deathand devastation on a vast scale.35 It is expensive interms of the lives, weapons and physical chattelsexpended or lost. Professionalism demands accomplish-ing one’s mission without the profligate expenditure ofresources, and moral and legal obligations demand min-imizing the impact of hostilities upon those notinvolved, the noncombatant population. This ethicalcriterion has no priority relative the other three, for itsstrictures permeate, circumscribe and define them. Theinjunction to carry out one’s duties with honour andrestraint should therefore form the over-riding moralcontext within which the soldier adheres to the otherthree criteria, providing the framework for otherwisenebulous and hard-to-quantify values such as mercy,courage and integrity.

Having thus established a prioritization of the fun-damental ethical criteria of the profession of arms, wecan derive therefrom the outline of an ethical code forthe military forces of a liberal democracy. First, thesoldier serves the interests of his country. Second, thesoldier executes the lawful orders of his superiors,except where these would conflict with the interests ofhis country; third, the soldier safeguards the welfareof his subordinates, except where it is necessary tohazard their interests in executing the orders of hissuperiors or in serving the interests of his country.Finally, the soldier practices the profession of armscognizant of the legal and moral obligation to do sohonourably and with restraint, a condition which cir-cumscribes all of his actions and which proscribes hisacting in an illegal or morally repugnant fashionregardless of what is at stake. This final injunction isnot dissimilar to the Hippocratic Oath of the medicalprofession, and serves as the ethical dividing line sep-arating soldiers from murderers. There can be no jus-tification for breaching the fundamental principles ofhonour and restraint.

This hierarchy of obligation provides a brief but all-encompassing yard-stick against which any prospectiveaction by a soldier, regardless of rank, may be meas-ured. Further, it embraces the requirement for the sol-dier to meet legal, professional and moral obligations inthe fulfillment of his duties without necessarily estab-lishing an ethical hierarchy among the first three.

CONCLUSION

t is intrinsically fundamental to our system thatwhen you place an individual in command, be

that of a regiment or a brigade or an area...he [orshe] is fully responsible in every respect for thewell-being, training, discipline and administrationof the troops under his or her command, andaccountable for his or her actions.36

There is good reason to believe that the ethical hierarchydescribed above is already understood and applied by many,if not most, of the members of the profession of arms inCanada. One of the officers questioned by the Commissionof Inquiry into the so-called ‘Somalia Affair’, when askedwhether his loyalty to his superior might influence his testi-mony, stated by way of reply that such loyalty, howevergreat, would nevertheless remain subordinate to his “duty tothe laws of the land and ethical conduct as an officer.”37 Inspite of the wide range of historically unprecedented pres-sures to which the men and women of the Canadian Forcesare daily subjected, the relative rarity of incidences of ethi-cal failure may in itself be sufficient reason to believe thatthis sentiment represents the rule rather than the exceptionacross the military ethical landscape.

Throughout this paper I have attempted to avoid dis-cussion of specifics and focus instead on the generali-ties of ethical conduct in a military environment. Anumber of possible sources of ethical failure have beenidentified, including the individual, society at large, tra-ditional military culture and the contemporary corpo-ratist structure into whose mould military organizations,to their vast detriment, have at the behest of govern-mental and societal pressures been forcing themselvesfor the past several decades. It remains to be seenwhether any of these sources of failure can be addressedby modern military organizations. Individuals areresponsible for their own behavioural modification; andshort of anti-democratic activity (hardly the hallmark ofWestern armies), the military cannot change society.Volunteer armies are entirely at the mercy of what socie-ty provides by way of recruits; and individuals are them-selves responsible for the ethical choices they make.

What military organizations can and should accom-plish, however, is twofold. First, the Canadian Forcesmust take a long, hard look at traditional military cul-ture with a view to winnowing out its harmful aspectswhile retaining those which are beneficial. And second,the profession of arms as a whole, and its ‘senior part-ners’ in particular, must continue to resist any furtherattempts to force the military to adopt corporatist man-agerial, operational, organizational and above all, ethi-cal models. These are anathema to the qualities thatenable armed forces to fulfill their societal role. The


I

first step in this process, as with any addiction, is rec-ognizing and accepting that there is a problem, and thismay be the most difficult and challenging part of theprocess for a military that is nearly four decades downthe corporatist road. In the words of an ancient Chinesesage, “Fish aren’t aware of water”.

Finally, all members of military organizations mustadopt and demonstrate, from the highest echelons down-wards, the standard of ethical conduct demanded by theprofession of arms; for as surely as no soldier should beexpected to go ‘over the top’ without his superior leadingthe way, no soldier should be held to an ethical standardnot openly and forthrightly adhered to by his seniors.

It is not the intent of this paper to advocate, as have somany others, the division of National DefenceHeadquarters into separate military and civilian compo-nents. The synergies and efficiencies achieved by civil-military integration at the level of senior leadership andmanagement are too valuable to lose, and the interlinkagestoo closely woven to permit easy bisection. Instead, I hope

to encourage the recognition of, resistance to, and —where possible — reversal of the creeping process of civil-ianization that has played so large a part in the gradual butinexorable decline of the profession of arms in Canada.

The four-part ethical imperative outlined above mayappear so simplistic as to seem facile and therefore dif-ficult to apply. At the risk of being accused of reduc-tionism, first principles are rarely complex, and I invitethe reader to make what use of these he will. Integrity,valour, loyalty, veracity, duty, honour and so forth havebeen the touchstone of military service since themedieval evolution of the chivalric ideal, universallyaspired to if not always attained. It is imperative thatWestern military organizations recognize and come toterms with the corporatist mould that has for the pastthree decades been perverting the purpose and structureof the ethic of service. Failure to do so will onlyencourage continued ethical drift at a time when theprofession of arms, throughout the Western world, isdesperately seeking an anchor.


N O T E S

1. Anthony E. Hartle, Moral Issues in MilitaryDecision Making (Kansas: University Press ofKansas, 1989), p. 19.2. John R. Saul, The Doubter’s Companion(Toronto: Penguin Books, 1994), pp. 122-23.Italics added.3. Hartle, p. 26.4. Ramsey notes that “...for many centuries afterparticipation in war was said to be justified forChristian conscience, it still was never allowedthat, when one’s own life or goods were at stake,the evil intention of a clearly guilty assailant gavethe Christian any right to resist or wound or killhim...”. Paul Ramsey, The Just War: Force andPolitical Responsibility (New York: CharlesScribner, 1968), p. 159.5. “The real evils in war are love of violence,revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity,wild resistance, and the lust of power, and suchlike; and it is generally to punish these things,when force is required to inflict the punishment,that, in obedience to God or some lawful authori-ty, good men undertake wars.” Augustine, ContraFaustum.6. November 1996 personnel data compiled bythe Canadian Forces indicate that 58.5% ofRegular Force members were under 35 years ofage, indicating that at least this many had feweryears in uniform than out of it.7. Saul in Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship ofReason in the West lays the blame for the decay ofsocial conscience partially at the doorstep of con-temporary higher education, where “what isencouraged is the growth of an undisciplined formof self-interest, in which winning is whatcounts....” In other words, for the first time inWestern history, our most respected institutionsare preaching social anarchy. (pp. 121-122).8. Peter C. Newman, “Can Young Tame theDemons at Defence”, Maclean’s, 10 February1997, p. 39.9. Both this quotation and the one preceding it are

from William Shakespeare, The Life of KingHenry the Fifth, Act IV, Scene 1.10. Seneca, quoted in Robert L. Holmes, On Warand Morality, (New Jersey: Princeton UniversityPress, 1989), p. 114.11. Lieutenant-General (Retired) Charles Belzile,former Commander Land Force Command,Canadian Forces. From a speech delivered to theConference of Defence Associations, Ottawa,Ontario, on 17 January 1997. It is not necessaryto defend this statement; the sweeping changesundertaken by the American armed forces in thewake of the Vietnam debacle are sufficient testi-mony to the fundamental inapplicability ofMcNamarian management to military operations.This is the same rationalist business approach thatbrought us the nuclear arms race, biologicalweapons programmes and the cognitively disso-nant (some would say maniacal) doctrine ofMutual Assured Destruction.12. Both quotations from Douglas L. Bland,Chiefs of Defence (Toronto: Brown BookCompany Ltd, 1995), p. 48.13. David Detomasi, “Re-engineering theCanadian Department of National Defence:Management and Command in the 1990s”,Defense Analysis, Vol 12, No. 3, 1996, p. 338.14. Bland, Chiefs of Defence, p. 68.15. John Gellner in a review of Vernon J.Kronenberg’s All Together Now, published in theSummer 1974 issue of Canadian DefenceQuarterly, emphasizes Mr. Hellyer’s drive andambition.16. Douglas L. Bland in a speech to theConference of Defence Associations, Ottawa,Ontario, 17 January 1997.17. Bland, Chiefs of Defence, p. 96.18. ibid, p. 97, italics added.19. Paul D. Manson, “The Restructuring of NationalDefence Headquarters – 1972-73”, CanadianDefence Quarterly, Winter 1973-74, p. 11.20. ibid, p. 12.

21. J.E. Neelin and L.M. Pedersen, “On the Effectof the Restructuring of National DefenceHeadquarters on the Profession of Arms inCanada”, Canadian Defence Quarterly, Summer1974, p. 54.22. ibid 7, p. 54.23. Richard Gabriel, Military Incompetence: Whythe American Military Doesn’t Win, (New York:Noonday Press, 1985), p. 195.24. ibid, p. 196.25. ibid, p. 196.26. John R. Saul, The Doubter’s Companion, pp.22-23. Emphasis mine.27. Thomas C. Linn, “Ethics vs. Self-Interest inHow We Fight” in Moral Obligation and theMilitary (Washington, DC: National DefenceUniversity Press, 1988), p. 221.28. Gabriel, Military Incompetence, p. 14.29. Neelin and Pedersen, “Effect of Restructuring”,p. 54.30. Linn, “Ethics vs. Self-Interest”, p. 222.31. Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology ofMilitary Incompetence (London: FuturePublications, 1976), pp. 43-44. Italics mine.32. Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards, p. 225. 33. Gabriel, p. 191. Italics mine.34. Saul, The Doubter’s Companion, pp. 74-79.35. With the possible exception of Communisteconomic planning, which in the 20th Century hasproven more devastating than war. Demographicstatistics suggest that Stalin’s forced resettlementprogramme of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, as well asMao’s Great Leap Forward, each resulted in moredeaths than all of the century’s wars combined.36. Lieutenant-General (Ret’d) Gordon M. Reay,former Commander of Land Force Command.Transcript of Evidentiary Hearing, Commission ofInquiry into the deployment of Canadian Forces toSomalia, 14 February 1996, Volume 46, 9143.37. Testimony of Lieutenant-Colonel SteveMoffat, quoted in Jeff Sallot, “Colonel cites stressfaced in Somalia”, The Globe and Mail (n.d., n.p.).

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Designed by: Gerry Locklin W - · PDF fileregard to religion, ethnicity, ... the potential impact of ethical failures upon the military ... The first two groups believe that ethics