I Helped the Army Remember Its Values. I Wish I Could Do the Same for the Country.
The virtues we uphold define who we are as soldiers or civilians, individuals or a nation.
THERE ARE TIMES IN ALL OUR LIVES when we lose our way. Unexpected challenges, fear of the unknown future, absence of role models, a gradual drift away from what we believe, continuous compromises to what we know is right, losing sight of what truly matters—it’s not hard for individuals, businesses, organizations, and even nations to stray from their stated values.
In the spring of 2008, the Army’s 1st Armored Division was winding down a fifteen-month tour as part of the “surge” forces in Iraq. I was the commander. We’d had a tough deployment. Our soldiers, like all those who served in combat zones in the years after 9/11, were fatigued, and we had all changed.
During our last few weeks deployed, I learned the commander of Central Command, Gen. Marty Dempsey, would be detouring from a trip to Baghdad to come to Mosul to visit our troops, which he had commanded a few years earlier. We were old friends, so I wasn’t surprised when told he wanted to walk through the city with me. But his visit was more than a social call; he had some news about both his and my next assignment.
Dempsey had been assigned to lead the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, and he wanted me to join him as soon as my command tour was done. He wanted to create a new organization to oversee all the Army’s basic and advanced training sites, and he asked me to lead it.
Dempsey went on to describe the three key tasks he had in mind for me in transforming the more 160,000 civilians into new soldiers each year. He prescribed a top-to-bottom review encompassing what he thought I should do as a way to consider what skills we were training, how physically capable our newest generations of soldiers were to perform those combat tasks, and then to also determine if those new recruits were prepared to live by their soldier values in the myriad ethically demanding situations we all faced in fighting the unique war on terror.
The first two tasks required a lot of work. But redesigning the physical and skills training for a new era and type of warfare was easy compared with the third—determining if our young recruits from diverse communities across the country could learn, inculcate, and apply the Army Values during the short 10-week basic training course. The skills training and physical training taught new soldiers what to do and how to do it as individuals and part of a team. The inculcation of values would help create a common understanding of expected behavior in very challenging situations.
In our discussion, I was struck by Dempsey’s passion for moral and professional education. “What makes our army different from any other in the world are the values we hold dear,” he said. “We’re a professional force, and one of the elements of any profession is maintaining a strong ethos and a defined set of values. We’re asking a lot of these young men and women, in repeated and increasingly difficult combat environments. We would be doing them, and our nation, a disservice if we did not remind them of the historical principles, standards, and qualities that we consider essential to guiding individual actions and organizational behaviors.”
The Army uses an acronym—LDRSHIP—as a mnemonic device to help soldiers remember our values:
Loyalty: Faithful allegiance to the oath to the U.S. Constitution, the dedication to the Army, the allegiance to their assigned unit, and a devotion to fellow soldiers.
Duty: Fulfilling assigned obligations and accomplishing designated tasks as part of a team, regardless of difficulties.
Respect: Treating all others with fairness, reflecting the belief in human equality and dignity.
Selfless service: Putting the welfare of the nation, the Army, and subordinates above personal interests.
Honor: Living up to and embodying the Army’s values and standards in every action.
Integrity: Doing what is morally and legally right, ensuring honesty and trustworthiness in all actions.
Personal courage: Facing fear, danger, or adversity, whether in the physical or the moral domain.
These values were formally introduced in the mid-1990s as the Army adjusted to the post-Cold War world, but they had roots in Army traditions dating back to the Continental Army under George Washington. Dempsey wanted to ensure we started the learning and training process early, with our new recruits, to ensure our values were foundational as young privates and second lieutenants headed off to their first assignments.
We taught these core values in two ways. Training on our values was intrinsically important because our values defined who we are. Our values—as much as physical conditioning, marksmanship, first aid, battle drills, and wearing the uniform—were part of what it meant to be a soldier in the U.S. Army. But there was also an instrumental reason for them: A law-abiding, professional, responsible Army was a more effective Army. Our standards would communicate how any soldier should act in a tough situation, not only to other U.S. soldiers, but also to allies and civilians.
The time we devoted to training the Army values was just a fraction of the time we spent on physical and skills training, but it contributed significantly to the development of a stronger professional and ethical culture in the Army.
IT’S BECOME INCREASINGLY CLEAR TO ME since I retired from the military that the problem Gen. Dempsey identified in our ethical education wasn’t just an Army problem. As a reflection of American society, the Army was merely experiencing an issue shared by the country writ large.
The inculcation of personal values, or the understanding of organizational values and values-based decision making, are not as prevalent as they may need to be. I’ve taught values-based leadership and decision-making to healthcare professionals and MBA students. When I begin teaching each class, I ask, “What are your personal values, and do they align with your organization’s stated values?” Every time, I’m met with mostly blank stares.
The same seems to be true in government. A few years ago, I was discussing some issue or another with a member of Congress. I asked him why he held a particular position on the issue, and he responded, “Because I support American values.” When I asked which specific value that policy was connected to, he couldn’t name one.
For the Army, the values are derived from longstanding traditions, principles of military service on behalf of a democratic nation, ethical standards derived from the Geneva Conventions and the Laws of Land Warfare, and the American approach to military service. Throughout my military career, I was also taught our country’s values determine our national interests, and those interests should drive our strategies and how we act on the international stage.
Our national values—the ones the congressman was challenged to name—flow mostly from our nation’s founding documents, inspiring speeches, and the worthy ideals that have shaped our history.
The values found in the Declaration of Independence are equality (“all men are created equal”), inalienable rights (“Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”), popular sovereignty (“Governments are instituted among Men and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed”), and freedom from tyranny (the right of the people to “alter or abolish” abusive governments). Our Constitution lists six key national values: unity, justice, domestic tranquility, the common defense, the general welfare, and the protection of liberty.
These are the values that inspired every future generation of American political thought, from Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan, and up to the present day.
Some people view America as an accident of history—a more or less random selection of people, serendipitously assigned to a land, like every other people in any other land around the world. But even a cursory reading of the country’s founding documents and great speeches makes clear that America is a political organization with a reliance on our values. The speeches by great men and women through our history also provide us with the values we ought to hold dear. There are hundreds of such reminders, but Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, Kennedy, King, and Reagan provide a few examples.
Both Lincoln’s first and second inaugural addresses and the Gettysburg Address repeat the themes of unity, justice, humility, and moral responsibility. All three of these speeches reference to the values found in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Franklin Roosevelt, in his “Four Freedoms” speech, crystalized the critical values of freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear as critical American values.
In his inaugural address, Kennedy offered the values of service and sacrifice— necessary preconditions to the health and viability of a free country—as well as peace and collaboration. Martin Luther King, in his “I Have a Dream” speech, emphasized a nation of racial equality, freedom, justice, and unity. Reagan’s great contribution to American values was his optimism for the cause and eventual triumph of freedom—and we would do well to mind the warning of his farewell address about the value of “informed patriotism” and whether we are “doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world.”
Like the Army values we instill in new soldiers, American values have both intrinsic and instrumental worth. Peace, freedom, and respect for the rights of everyone all stem from the acknowledgement of the universal value of human life. But our inherent values are also necessary tools to allow a large, diverse, energetic population to live as one in a bountiful nation. Americans have always been divided by wealth, education, region, religion, even language, in addition to race and ethnicity and place of birth. But application of our shared values are tools for peace and productivity.
The concepts of establishing and adhering to personal values, and using values for decision-making during difficult times, allows every individual to stand firm during times of crisis or shifting opinion. What one values determines how one acts, as much for individuals as for nations.
These American values have served us well for hundreds of years, just as the Army values served the Army for centuries before they were codified in doctrine. Our problem is not that our values are outdated or obsolete; it is that we haven’t done a sufficient job teaching them to the next generation. If the lessons I learned in the Army are any guide, even a little more time spent explaining what it means to be an American based on our national values would return civic rewards manyfold.
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