Ethics is About Doing Not Training

The Secretary of Defense has ordered a review of ethics training for military officers in the wake of the Petraeus affair.  Ethical behavior, however, is not trained.  To be sure, everyone who takes the training will be able to cite chapter and verse of what is ‘expected’ of a military officer.  I'm also quite sure that officers will pay much more attention to the unwritten rules regarding behavioral expectations.

Sometime after the Iran-Contra affair, as the CIA’s Director for Training and Education, I was instructed by a senior CIA official to develop and ethics course of all CIA officers.  In reply I stated that the content of the 'ethics' to be 'trained' had to come from the seventh floor and that senior officials had to be careful in delineating the ethical guidelines they wished to be promulgated.  I pointed out that the first thing people were going to do was speculate whether the Agency’s senior leaders were walking the talk.  Not surprisingly, I never heard back from the requester.   In truth I would have loved to have received a mandate to oversea the generation of a set of ethical norms that could be blessed from the top.  In truth it is probably better to do without a set of written norms than to publish norms which are routinely violated without sanction.  Extramarital affairs by military officers would probably fall into this latter category.

 In the best of all worlds, organizational leaders would establish and maintain ethical norms by walking the talk and punishing transgressors.  Ethical norms do exist, and often these norms serve as the glue that binds and defines organizations.  These norms, however, are a subset of what is often put down on paper.  The review called for by the Secretary of Defense will likely be a paper exercise with little impact on the behavior of military officers.

The ethical rules governing the Petraeus are clearly stated.  The fact that General Petraeus sought to keep his position once the affair was exposed speaks to the divergence between ‘rules’ and acceptable behavior.  He decided to resign only after being told by another former general officer, James Clapper (The Director for National Intelligence) that ”resigning was the honorable thing for him to do", given his former rank and present position as Director of the CIA.