A Credibility Gap

I wrote last week about how the 90s Army wasn’t all that and a bag of chips. It wasn’t. And lest I get sucked down the rabbit hole of fond memories, I’m going to caveat this post by starting off with: I was a young soldier and junior NCO in the 90s army. But we as leaders today have a credibility gap with our young soldiers and it shows.

Now, what do I mean when I say we have a credibility gap. If you read the Army times on any given week, you’ll see a litany of stories about soldiers, junior or senior who make the news for some tragically horrible reason or another. You’ll see stories about senior leader misconduct and stories of said senior leaders being exonerated by a jury of their peers for said senior leader misconduct.

But I’m not talking about “serious misconduct” in this post. I’m talking about army leaders’ most basic and potentially most pressing problem: we don’t believe our own bullshit. And neither do our soldiers.

Every week we give safety briefings about don’t drink and drive, don’t do drugs, practice safe sex, drunk sex is not safe sex (or maybe that’s just me). Either way, company commanders, first sergeants and a wide array of army leaders stand in front of their formations and talk about all the bad, dumb and just plain ignorant things we really don’t want our soldiers doing over the course of the weekend.

And then we go out and we text on our cell phones, we go to bars and get hammered and make as ass of ourselves, we sleep with our subordinates, we use our rank and our position to avoid doing things that we ask our junior soldier to do.

In the Gold Book, it talks about how the junior enlisted soldiers in our army commit more than 60% of our misconduct and it also mentions the stark demarcation between offenses committed by SGTs and higher. The demarcation is even stronger when you compare officer misconduct to enlisted misconduct.

So what the Gold Book seems to suggest is that something magical happens when a soldier goes from Specialist to Sergeant. That suddenly, the troubled population of our enlisted folks pins on the NCO stripes and is transformed from potential former problem child to stellar leader.

I call bull. Now there are a number of factors that could be contributing to the demarcation of misconduct but I’m willing to suggest that one of the strongest reasons for it is that we don’t police our leaders the same way we police our junior soldiers. Leaders don’t have to come to formation. Leaders can skip out on urinalysis. Leaders will have their DUIs swept under the rug so long as it doesn’t hit the blotter and the commanding general doesn’t find out about it. Leaders will ride their motorcycles on the weekend without their PPE and nothing will happen to them.

Because they’re a good leader.

We have a credibility gap in our leadership if we as leaders go out and do all of these things and our junior soldiers see it. It makes them want to join the cool kids club, if only so the threat of being punished for these things is reduced. We have an officer corps who is by and large unwilling to write a referred OER, which means that we have lieutenants making captain who should not even be in the army. We have captains making major who damn sure shouldn’t have made captain. These things will change as the army draws down but their legacy continues.

But none of it gets after the simply fact that we have an NCO and Officer corps today that says do as I say not as I do. If we want to reduce the sexual assaults, the DUIs, the motorcycle deaths, then we as leaders need to start living the Army values that we pay lip service to now. They’re our shared collective values and yet, we don’t live them. We give mandatory training about don’t drink and drive but our soldiers are afraid to call us for a ride because they either don’t think we’ll come get them or they think they’ll get crucified. So they get behind the wheel of a car.

Our soldiers don’t trust us. And that is entirely our fault.