Hazing vs. leadership: Some thoughts on getting my arm broken at West Point

I found this essay, which until now has only been available
on an internal Army website, quite striking. It essentially asks: How could a
place that prides itself on its honor code tolerate sadism?

Just FYI, the author's own title for this piece is "Cool on Honor: Sadism, Cruelty, and
Character Development at West Point."

By Lt. Col. Peter Fromm, U.S. Army (Ret.) 

Best Defense department of military ethics

Cool on Honor: Sadism, Cruelty, and
Character Development at West Point

          I have had one serious unanswered
injustice done to me in my life, and it occurred when I was 21 years old. I
mean "unanswered" in the sense of reciprocity-there has been no accounting for
this injustice. I have always wanted to write about it, not because of
self-pity but because of something I learned from it that has grown on me over
the years. This personal essay describes it as a snapshot from the Army's
troubled times in the 1970s. The story surfaces one important aspect about
leadership and stewardship in the modern Army: the antithetical relationship
between gratuitous cruelty and honor and the duty to do something about it. In my experience as an Army ethicist,
having been sent to graduate school for that purpose, I have seen this
antithetical relationship as potentially the most important ethical failure the
institution faces. I say this because the institution puts weapons in the hands
of young, inexperienced people and then gives them the power of life and death
over others. If we do not do all that we can to get this part of Army culture
right (the relationship between cruelty and honor), we stand convicted of
hypocrisy of the worst kind.

When the Army educated me to teach
ethics (a sign of health in the organization that it actually does such a
thing), I developed an eye for institutional moral window dressing. That's
mostly what I want to talk about here. In the Odyssey, Homer says that "the blade itself incites to
violence." I want to rephrase that beautiful observation to say that
"power over others incites to cruelty." When one exercises power over
another, if there is a lack of moral sense, of maturity, or of wisdom in the
execution, it inevitably becomes entangled with that most basic of impulses,
sexual dynamics. [[BREAK]]

As Jean Paul Sartre demonstrates in Being and Nothingness, this sexual component to power dynamics
remains a common denominator in human nature, a basic component of our
social-political experience. In the case of power over others, there is a psychological
impulse to see the other as an object, to dehumanize the other, and to attempt
to take action to literally objectify the other through violence or through
institutionalized cruelty. This impulse stems from a need to exert one's
existence at the expense of the other, and in this effort there is a tendency
toward sadistic abuse. This dynamic is what happens when adults abuse children,
as in the case of pedophiles. In power relationships, like rank hierarchies in
the military, sexual impulse arises either overtly or in some sublimated way.
If it arises overtly, it often ends in sexual harassment or assault, such as
what became known at the Air Force Academy in 2005 when several women came
forward to say that had been raped or otherwise assaulted there. Another famous
case occurred at the Naval Academy when women were chained to urinals in the
men's latrines. When this impulse arises in some sublimated way, it often finds
its outlet in violence vented out in some more or less "acceptable" form, such
as hazing. Army leaders have to be knowledgeable of and on guard against this
natural tendency and not minimize it, writing it off as, or justifying it as,
discipline, toughness, or some other thing not daring to name it for what it
is, which is what happens all too often. Such abuses happen primarily at the
lower levels, at the young levels of leadership, though we are all too familiar
with the abuses of more senior and notorious "toxic leaders" of the past.

Click here to view a PDF of the entire essay.