What is leadership? For the fighting man this question has the same perennial fascination as Pilate’s famous inquiry, “What is truth?”
We experience a special sort of thrill whenever we hear about the experiences of some real leader. During the last war a lowly American army lieutenent was placed in charge of a small detachment of infantry troops which were moving towards the front in eastern France. Each night the unit would stop and make a temporary camp in the fields. The men were tired and grouchy; they were also apprehensive about moving forward. On several days it rained and the men made camp in the mud. The young lieutenant in charge of the outfit didn’t have much experience, but he was convinced of his obligation to look out for the welfare of his men. Each night after the halt he would spend hours making sure that his men ate a good hot dinner instead of cold K rations and insuring that they were comfortably billeted for the night. Officers in some other units didn’t take the same care of their men but rather concentrated upon making themselves snug for the night. The young lieutenant began to have a hard time. Late each night he would wearily set about raising his tent with the help of an orderly and would afterwards eat a late dinner, usually of cold K rations. One night he felt particularly weary and began to think that perhaps he was something of a sucker. But to his surprise he found his tent rigged, his bed made, and a steaming hot dinner waiting for him. From that time forward the same thing happened every night. His men had discovered that here was an officer who was looking out for them, and, by gosh, they were going to take care of him.
American Marines enjoy an enviable reputation for morale among all services. A small incident which happened on Guadacanal illustrates one of the many reasons why. A colonel recently arrived on the island went to make a call on his general.
“Come into my tent,” invited the general, “and we’ll have a glass of beer.”
The Marine colonel was puzzled because he had seen whisky on the island in the quarters of Army officers. “Don’t you care for whisky?” he queried the general. “There’s a supply of it on the island.”
“Of course I prefer whisky,” snorted the general, “but there isn’t enough whisky on the island for the officers and the men, and until there is enough for my men too, I drink beer.”
A visitor to Japan today who may have heard stories of lax morale among the Occupation forces gets a pleasant surprise when he ventures into the area of Northern Japan controlled by the Eleventh Airborne Division which is commanded by General Joseph Swing. Here is an air of friendly efficiency. The men are neatly uniformed and their paratroopers’ boots have a dazzling shine. Visiting officers are smartly saluted, even including ensigns in the Navy. The venereal disease rate among these troops is amazingly low. They feel and look happy.
Back of this pleasant picture lies the story of a general who is devoted to the welfare of his troops. Early in the fighting in the Southeast Pacific, General Swing made an arbitrary assessment of five dollars from every person in his division. This assessment had dubious legal justification and caused some raised eyebrows. At first the men in his division muttered among themselves. But afterwards when they were fighting in the jungles they didn’t complain. Their division was the marvel of the Pacific. Every day at noon an airplane flew over their fighting area and parachuted packages of fresh ice cream. Every soldier who wasn’t actually on the fighting line had a dish of that wonderful American dessert. The money for the ice cream machines and supplies came from those peculiar five dollar assessments.
Much later when the Eleventh Airborne Division landed in Japan to participate in the Occupation, General Swing detailed a group of officers and men to assemble souvenir Japanese samurai swords. They mailed one to every wounded veteran of the division who had a Purple Heart award. Again a question arose in headquarters about the propriety of these shipments. However, the hundreds of grateful letters which poured in from veterans who had never imagined that they would have any other souvenir besides a scar or an artificial leg, well justify the man whose simple explanation for all such acts is the statement, “I thought that my men would appreciate it.”
Leadership of the quality illustrated in the foregoing stories springs from an inner recess of the soul which is scarcely touched upon by books on the psychology of leadership. Psychological techniques and principles of leadership are not concerned with ethical values and cannot, therefore, by themselves provide us with an adequate solution for the leadership problem. We need to comprehend the basic premises and organization of a military society and the rights and duties of the members of such a society.
Inasmuch as a military social organization is so foreign to the organization of a democracy, even the best American naval officers become incoherent when they endeavor to express the basic premises of our military or naval life. Our regular officers possess an intuitive mastery of the leadership problem which is clearly discernible in their statements and actions. This mastery must be derived almost completely from long experience and not from a systematic philosophical appreciation, because, if there existed in the Navy or Army a convincing intellectual formulation about the facts and relationships of military society, we should have had more success in converting raw or inexperienced civilians into military leaders.
This paper is offered in the hope that it may aid to clarify the fundamental issues, both so that our regular officers can have a keener insight into the topic, and more important—that we may forge a tool for the “mass-production” of naval leaders in future wars. There is little question that the next war will have the character of mass-conscription, with countless blows of attrition. As the antagonists bleed their enemies, despair and apathy will mount. The will to surrender will become articulate, and only courage and solidarity will triumph. We shall need a host of real leaders in the middle and lower ranks, leaders of all the small units whose success or failure in the numberless individual conflicts adds up to glorious total victory or general ruin. In order to be able to create quickly such leaders from among the civilian population, our professional appreciation of the military society must be crystal-clear.
In the atomic age our security seems to rest most solidly upon a foundation of technical mastery, upon atom bombs, swift submarines or guided missiles. This is absolutely illusionary since another war will not start until both sides are assured of comparative technical excellence. Blood and valor will be decisive. Therefore we would do well to investigate the conditions and requirements which produce or fail to produce military valor. These conditions are to be found in the examination of the basic social premises of a military society.
It is a fact gradually being brought to light by thinkers that every social order has some sort of a philosophical basis in the form of fundamental assumptions. American democracy, for example, has rested upon the assumptions about civil government as they were expressed by John Locke; namely, the rights of life, liberty, and the acquiring and protection of private property, or as the Declaration of Independence expresses it, “to the pursuit of happiness.” Prior to that the monarchies of Europe were built upon the principle that kings ruled by Divine Right. In our century we have witnessed the emergence of still another social structure in Russia which has the ultra-materialistic assumption of communism that economic goods should be distributed: “to each according to his need; from each according to his ability.” If we turn to religion we observe, for example, the first principle of Protestant Christianity, implicit in all of its teachings, that salvation comes through faith.
Although it at first may seem queer to accuse the Army and the Navy, such eminently practical institutions, of harboring philosophical assumptions, it is none the less true. We have very definite and tangible social premises even though they have remained mostly unconscious, unnoticed, and unspoken. For a moment let us dig into our unconscious social mind and see what sort of a picture of military society emerges.
To begin with, a military organization follows what most American civilians would term a more primitive social pattern than does a democracy. It is more primitive only in the sense of being chronologically antecedent in the history of western civilization, for it was in the Middle Ages that the paternalistic organization of society emerged and evolved its distinctive forms. Fundamentally a military system is a paternalistic system in the medieval sense of a responsible and responsive paternalism, and not in the modern sense of a pseudo-paternalism amounting merely to gratuitous assistance to the needy.
The military unit is like a large family. The commander takes the place of the father or patriarch. The officers are like elder sons or uncles. The enlisted men are the younger sons. As head of the family the commander has a dual role: first to look after the security and welfare of his official family; second to punish transgressors. His position is similar to that of the patriarch of the Old Testament. He protects his people, but he also punishes those who offend. Each officer must show this double featured visage, the smiling face of the protector and the stern countenance of the disciplinarian. The organization of men into such a paternalistic society facilitates waging war better than any other way of accomplishing the same purpose. Therefore, all nations, regardless of their political life, employ a paternalistic system in their armed forces.
The role of the subordinate person in a military society consists mainly in carrying out the purposes and intentions of the leaders in a willing manner, what we mean by discipline and morale. Prior to his entrance into military service, theoretically at least, a man is a free agent. He surrenders many of his democratic civil liberties when he joins a military society and surrenders himself to the requirements of that society. This extends even to the relinquishment of his life if military requirements call for such sacrifice. However, in return for his service and devotion to duty the soldier or sailor receives certain benefits. His security and welfare become the obligation and responsibility of his leaders. By virtue of the fact that a man gives himself up to the demands of a military organization, an obligation for his welfare is incurred.
So much for the general outline of military society. We next have to consider in what spirit such a social structure is maintained. Broadly speaking, only three general classes of social relationships are possible between human beings. The one with which we in America are most familiar is the relationship of contract, the method of democracy. The title of Rousseau’s famous, and for us influential, political treatise neatly illustrates this idea. A contractual relationship is one which expresses an agreement between free parties for their mutual advantage. This is the method of free enterprise. Such contracts have as an object, profit, pleasure or the like. Rights and duties of the contracting parties are carefully specified.
A second class of human relations are compulsory. This is the method of dictatorship or fascism. Inasmuch as compulsory relationships are coercive, they frequently go contrary to the interests and wishes of the subordinate parties. Unfortunately for the interests of the services, a large number of Americans identify military service with distasteful coercion, forgetting that compulsion is only part of the military system. Ironically enough the famous letter of John Paul Jones to Congress has promoted this misconception. The letter ends with the sentence, “Whilst the ships sent forth by the Congress may and must fight for the principles of human rights and republican freedom, the ships themselves must be ruled and commanded at sea under a system of absolute despotism.” It is obvious from the rest of this letter that Jones did not mean what he seemed to say in that last unfortunate sentence; nevertheless the idea has persisted with woeful effects, within and outside of the services.
The third kind of relationship is sometimes called “familistic” inasmuch as it implies the sort of relationships most frequently found among the members of affectionate families. Here neither contract nor coercion is relied upon for the accomplishment of affairs. Conduct is guided by a spirit of mutual love and sacrifice. Joys and sorrows are shared in a noble unity. Hardships and privations are equally distributed. The novelist Tolstoy noted this agreeable and heartwarming aspect of military life in War and Peace. This is the sort of relationship Lord Nelson had in mind when he spoke of his “band of brothers.” Such an affectionate regard has traditionally led sailors to refer to their captain as the Old Man.
Obviously a Navy or Army does not and can not generally employ any one of these relationships to the exclusion of the others. All three of these relationships are found in varying proportions among the armies and navies of the different nations. Our American forces probably have a bigger democratic component than do the others, a situation that has been conditioned by our civilian institutions. Although the image of a Prussian martinet is a favorite one, study of the German army organization reveals that the Germans enjoyed a remarkable proportion of the familistic relationships.
Compulsion must remain the core of military efficiency for the simple reason that a Navy cannot function according to the dictates of a two-thirds majority. Bargaining and compromising have no place in a military scheme. Any attempt to modify the traditional relationships of command and obedience will have disastrous results in any future war. Organized and effectively directed striking power depends upon the basic arbitrariness of the command relationship.
Because of a vociferous criticism of the services by civilians in the post-war period, various boards and studies have been instituted with the object of improving the relationships between officers and enlisted men. Insofar as military strength and wholesomeness are concerned many of the proposed changes are detrimental. One group of suggested reforms is directed towards a lessening of the coercive relationships in military life. Such a one is the proposal to abolish saluting off duty. Essentially this is a proposal to do away with one of the traditional symbols of discipline. Fundamentally the salute is a symbolic acknowledgement of submission to authority. It is a symbolic act of extreme importance since it marks the junior’s readiness to obey and submit. In a secondary and sugar-coated sense the salute is merely a kind of military courtesy, a slightly irksome custom that we might well relinquish in off-duty hours. However, in military matters an officer or man is always on duty and the salute is pre-eminently a military symbol.
The proposal that enlisted personnel sit as members of courts-martial can be interpreted both as an attempt to weaken the coercive powers of officers and as an attempt to establish more contractual authority for enlisted personnel by granting to them the rights of jurors. Whatever the motive, the suggestion carries ominous overtones of suspicion. The implication is that officers cannot be trusted fairly to try their men for infractions of regulations.
Most officers would agree that the services would benefit by a reform of some kind in order to promote higher morale and general satisfaction. The difficulty lies in knowing what we should attempt to do. The preceding analysis of the military social structure should make clear what our aims should be. Neither by weakening the coercive bonds nor by increasing the contractual relationships within the services will we accomplish the aim of producing loyal and cohesive fighting units. What is really needed is more mutual love, affection and respect among the various members of the military family. If officers do their part, good results will certainly follow. In the last analysis only the fact that the junior officer looks out for his men and the senior officer looks out for the junior officers and men alike give to military leaders the moral right to demand the highest standards of performance and obedience. In order to be successful the system must work equally in both directions. It is self-evident that if officers genuinely attend to the physical, emotional, and intellectual needs of their men in similar fashion to the head of a family, the Navy will be organized on sound principles.
It is easy to suggest this solution and most difficult to realize it in practice. The officer who devotes himself unselfishly to the needs of his subordinates needs to have a strong moral character and nobility of purpose. It means that he must curb his own wishes and pleasures. Such restraint has always been a military ideal. Numerous times the soldier has been compared with the priest. Both of them renounce a large share of worldly pleasures; both of them are dedicated personalities; both of them seek happiness by the ascetic method of limiting and curbing their own personal desires for a higher interest.
William James created a now famous equation.
Self-esteem = accomplishments/pretensions
We arrive at an acceptable equilibrium either by reducing our pretensions or increasing our accomplishments. Since a person’s wants are insatiable and are capable of indefinite expansion, accomplishments—wealth, prestige, and so forth-can never equal our pretensions or desires if we allow them to rage unchecked. We get along much better by controlling our pretensions, by the practice of a moderate asceticism. However, the trend of society today is towards getting as much as one can, of getting ahead in the world, making more money, having more excitement, enjoying more pleasure. If we in the Navy can consciously set about the business of self-restraint and can show more real devotion to the other members of our official family we shall be performing a prodigious feat.
What we should fear most in the minds of our officers is a haziness and a feeling of drifting along without purpose. Thus the obvious great advantage of holding forth such an ideal is that it gives a real and substantial orientation to our lives. It gives us a sense of community and common interest. Without a sense of affection and mutual understanding, the naked skeleton of coercion grimly emerges and the individual man becomes isolated and alone. Furthermore, our conception of leadership achieves a nobler form. No longer is leadership a problem of being “successful” or being an artist of human relationships. Leadership is the attempt to measure up to the military ideal of an officer and a gentleman.
The great paradox of armed conflict is that although the antagonists strike out at each other with the utmost ferocity and intent to kill, either side can muster offensive power only by the practice of noble human relationships and traits among its own members. This strange conjunction perhaps explains the nostalgia of demobilized veterans for the spirited days of war. For although in war they made the greatest sacrifices, felt the most fatigue, suffered from the worst boredom and trembled with the deepest fears, yet at no other time of life were they participants in such an exalted team of dedicated men united in a fighting brotherhood.
This aspect of military society leads to another consideration. Quite obviously an Army or Navy does not have the isolated character of a simple paternalistic society, such as a monastery whose members live in peace. The armed services must be instantly ready to give battle. Hence additional traits become requisite for the military man. To the simple requirement of unselfish brotherhood are added the traditional qualities of the warrior: courage, logical thinking, keen perception, technical competence, industriousness, and spartan toughness of mind and body. Only if we add these other traits is the man ready to fight.
Together with the need for increased emphasis upon moral goodness and restraint of the leaders is the problem of molding good subordinates. In the last century there has been a noticeable deterioration of family relationships in America. As can be guessed at by the mounting divorce rate or by the gradual relaxation of parental discipline, the modern youth is not familiar with a rigorous paternal system. Fifty years ago children were brought up under a much stricter family discipline. They were expected to be obedient, dependable, and self-reliant. These demands are oftentimes not made by modem parents who shirk their responsibilities of home discipline and who consider their accountabilities fulfilled when they provide material necessities alone. Consequently when a young man enters the service, the chances are that he has not experienced and at first will not understand paternalism. His reaction, if we may judge by events, will be to shirk his military obligations—those which concern discipline, saluting, neatness of dress and military courtesy. In effect he seems unwilling to perform his part of the dual relationship, to subordinate himself cheerfully to his superiors. Nor is this negative attitude confined to enlisted men alone.
Intelligent and evenly applied coercion is the only corrective. Attempts to improve such conditions usually commence with a drive on enlisted personnel. However, real improvement will come only when the admirals correct and admonish the captains and when the captains get after the commanders, and so on down the line. Discipline first relaxes between individuals who have no great differences of rank or age. Then like an epidemic violations spread over a wider area of the military hierarchy. It is hardest to admonish subordinates who themselves possess considerable rank and authority; however, if we wish to rectify matters the reform must start at the top and not by means of a circular letter.
By this time a reader of this essay may feel that an attempt is being made to hand him a blueprint for utopia and that the principles expounded herein are visionary and impractical. Such is not the situation. Both in Japan and Germany the military organizations successfully achieved an active paternalism of the kind described herein. The amazing fact about Japan and Germany is not that they were defeated, but that they were able to do so much by the exercise of their wills. Anybody who has viewed the homely industrialism and embarassed material resources of Japan cannot but be astonished by the very real successes which the Japanese achieved against the American industrial colossus.
Both in the Japanese and German military forces a great deal of effort was expended upon patriotic habituation. In Germany the ideological conditioning of soldiers was often given more importance than military training. It was said that “work on the drill-ground, although indispensable for the practice of military action and for the habituation to orderliness, smartness and discipline, should take up only a limited time.” The Germans also made attempts to satisfy the intellectual and cultural desires of their soldiers under the direct personal guidance of regular officers. What is important about their efforts is the recognition of the need to give to soldiers the emotional satisfactions and rewards which so many Americans believe are impossible to achieve in the armed services.
It would be arrogant to suggest a program dedicated to the non-material welfare of our personnel without first carefully investigating. Significant progress along these lines has been made down in Kentucky at the Fort Knox Experimental Training Unit. There the commanders have recognized the limitations of our traditional preoccupation with and concentration upon the technical aspects of warfare and the material, as opposed to the emotional and intellectual welfare of our personnel.[1] In addition to what has been advocated there and elsewhere, we can find at least one more important point of attack.
First of all we must succeed in communicating to enlisted personnel the same moral idealism expected of our officers. In our tragic era of crisis and dissolution, perhaps the outstanding tragedy is the loss by each individual of a firm and secure grasp of ends and values. The person drifts helplessly without ethical orientation, without wholeness and inner harmony. Within our military society the paternalistic precepts with their sizeable and significant emphasis upon brotherhood can refurnish our men with the orientation which they have lost.
The idea of an officer being a father to his men is not a sentimental metaphor. In good military outfits the “Old Man” is psychologically a genuine father. Following the defeat of Germany a psychoanalyst made a study of the fantasies held by German soldiers towards their officers. In the fantasy life of the soldier the officer was actually esteemed as his father. Any discreditable actions on the officer’s part deeply disillusioned and wounded his soldier son. Here again is evidence of the imperative necessity for noble qualities in officers.
An especially interesting aspect of the father-son relationship is revealed in the instance of an officer’s death in combat. Since the principal function of a father is to protect his children, the officer who dies, in a certain sense, betrays his children. His death is the equivalent of abandonment and the son feels deep resentment. It is a tribute to the empirical wisdom of the American Navy that we have always insisted upon the equivalence and homogeneity of officers who are expected to be very much alike in their official behavior. Thus in battle if one officer is killed, another one steps into his place, and by means of the effective substitution of another father, morale is sustained.
Our exposition began with a search for a definition of the typical or natural military society. Understanding and acceptance of the basic premises and values of such a society have more importance for a strong and healthy navy than does an individualistic approach via numerous psychological rules and insights. The natural and traditional organization of a military group proved to be essentially paternalistic. We have seen that the basic structure of a military organization most closely resembles the organization of a private family. Consequently, of the three general kinds of human relationships, the familistic attitudes of mutual affection and understanding are most necessary and fundamental to military valor. The power of coercion, although indispensable for efficiency, must not be substituted for the former because, without the mellowing influence of family attitudes, coercion is stark and ugly. Democratic contractual relationships, although they pervade our civil life, are not native to the basic paternalistic system and, if introduced in quantity, will cause positive harm.
The emphasis upon familistic relationships led to a consideration of the moral attitude of the officer who carries out the role of a father. In order to succeed, the officer must discipline himself with a conscious and willing realization of his obligations under the social system in which he lives. It was seen that such moral idealism and restraint is contrary to the dominant social trends of the day and consequently becomes extremely difficult to actualize.
Finally it was concluded that familistic relationships and good discipline go hand in hand. The best disciplined military force exhibits the noblest human relationships among its members. Conversely, the military force which honestly and carefully attends to the welfare of subordinate members has the best morale and fighting efficiency. In such a force the officers have convictions of their moral rights to demand proper responses from their subordinates. Because they have faithfully observed their duties as fathers and protectors, they have the right and the courage to fulfill their less agreeable roles as disciplinarians.
There is every reason to believe that a future war will challenge our armed services, as they have never before been challenged. It is our professional duty to prepare in every possible way. If we together strive to improve and exalt the human relationships within the services, we shall succeed in creating the necessary foundation for gallant conduct in the next war. We do not have the national Barbarossa myths or Aryan ideal of the Germans, which sustain their indefatigable empire building. We lack the Russian advantages of semi-religious communistic fervor and of an enormous peasant stock. Therefore, if we wish realistically to face the facts of bloodshed leading to victory or defeat, we must recognize the imperative need of fortifying our service morale by a strict application of paternalistic precepts.
A graduate of the Naval Academy in 1938, Commander Arthur served on the Tennessee and the St. Louis, mostly in Engineering and Communications. From 1940 to 1942 he was in Communications on the Staff of Commander Atlantic Fleet. Later he commanded destroyers in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, and in the final operations at Okinawa. After service on the Staff of Commander Cruiser Division One, and attending the Naval Intelligence School, Anacostia, he is now on duty in the office of the Secretary of the Navy.
[1] This should not be taken to signify unequivocal praise for the Fort Knox program. Contractual relationships have also been introduced which this author considers to be ultimately harmful.