Ethics and the Quarterly Training Brief

In February 2015, the Army War College Strategic Studies Institute published "Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession." It described the way the Army's incessant bureaucratic demands force Army officers into either lying about accomplishments or admitting professional failure. As one officer put it,

“It’s a systemic problem throughout the entire Army . . . We can probably do two or three things in a day, but if you give us 20, we’re gonna half-ass 15 and hope you ignore the other five.”

Dealing with this reality leads to "ethical fading" – a tendency to dismiss dishonesty as an ethical shortcoming and instead embrace it a necessary quality for success. The Army Times article from February 19th has a good summary.

As I wrap up my last quarterly training brief, the article seems especially poignant. In a few days, I’ll present my company’s training situation to my senior rater along with the plan for the next three months. Yet as I self-report my company’s training status, I can’t help but question what the whole exercise is really about.

Is the purpose of the QTB to report accurate numbers, explain training constraints, and identify areas for professional development, or is it to give higher echelons an opportunity to assess us company commanders? From what I can tell, it definitely isn’t the former – it’s a test, and this is my last chance to get an A.

Consider this: if you were a brigade commander and wanted to know training statistics, you could simply walk over to your S-3 and have them pull up the statistics for any battalion or company. By looking at the numbers like this, you could then determine whether the problem was 1.) A unit is not doing the training, 2.) A unit is not uploading their training data, or 3.) The S-3 hasn’t given the guidance on what specific task people are supposed to upload.

But that’s not how things work. Normally, the brigade S-3 sends out a template and says “fill this in.” Subordinate units fill in their own data and present it to the brigade commander in a big conference. As long as people don’t draw attention to themselves by boasting outrageous levels of success, no one compares the numbers with what’s in the online records.

While this process may allow brigade commanders to test our briefing skills, it sets up a HUGE conflict of interest and almost certainly distorts everyone’s perceptions of reality. Can you really expect people to be completely honest if no one checks and people self-report?

Imagine a police officer pulls you over for speeding, says he didn’t have his radar gun on, and asks if you indeed broke the law. If you say yes, he’ll ticket you; if you say no, he’ll leave you alone. What would you say?

It’s the same thing.

Being completely honest is a particularly difficult issue for me as an HHC commander because the battalion staff all have “day jobs” throughout the week. Roughly half of my company is an E-7 or higher – do these people really need to train on throwing hand grenades or how to react to enemy contact? Officially, the answer is yes.

According to regulation (AR 350-1) and policy, there’s no exemption for senior leaders – you’re either trained or untrained. Yet without higher level inspections on training quality (or hardly anything else, for that matter), it doesn’t really seem worth it to focus on strict training completion when there are 8 million other things to worry about and (as an HHC commander) I don’t have an executive officer.

Plus, there’s this general feeling that “it doesn’t really matter anyway.” We may be one of the most forward deployed units in the world, but that doesn’t mean our equipment shortages are going to get filled. Neither do we get fully trained personnel– instead, we’ll get the soldiers fresh out of initial entry training that require on-the-job training for basic tasks. And despite the fact that NCOs now *must* complete the Basic Leaders Course in order to get promoted, that doesn't mean my people will get class slots. The Army's already chosen its winners.

So should I deliberately inflate my numbers to meet norms within my battalion? As the report quotes another officer,

“You’re a bad leader and you failed if you didn’t get everyone through the hour-long human trafficking thing. All the other company commanders in the United States Army somehow managed to do it and you’re gonna be the only guy that didn’t do it because you [truthfully] reported 85%.”

This need to “feed the beast,” “check the box,” and “pencil whip” one’s way through requirements not only conflicts with efforts to establish the armed forces as a profession but also pushes important risk decisions onto company grade leaders. Do you really want company commanders deciding what they’re going to focus on or ignore, or should those decisions be made by someone higher?

Sadly, as we junior officers in the Army face further reductions in coming years, this generation of leaders is learning not how to show moral courage, but how to survive through deceit. Truth does not matter – it’s making your boss look good with plausible deniability. Sticking out won’t get you promoted, but it can get you eliminated – only those who blend in benefit.

Encouraged by a system of deliberate blindness, we learn to lie to ourselves.