Professionalism is the Foundation of the Army and We Will Strengthen It
In my nearly 37 years of service, I’ve seen the strength of the Army profession in action — in the courage and dedication of our soldiers, leaders, and army civilian professionals on the battlefield and in garrison. I observed that strength watching a company commander display his professional competence and leadership while driving conversation during a National Training Center after action review. I experienced it while shaking the hand of Staff Sgt. Ashley Buhl, the embodiment of the character and soul of our profession and the 2023 drill sergeant of the year. And I felt it, just a few weeks ago, watching Pvt. Jamavius Curry (pictured above) lead his formation in reciting the “Soldiers Creed” at his basic training graduation. Our profession allows us to maintain trust; construct cohesive and disciplined teams; train our soldiers, leaders, and civilians; and build climates that don’t tolerate harmful behaviors. In a changing world, our profession undergirds all our strengths; but it must be continuously tended, or it will atrophy.
The Army is a part of American society at large and will always reflect its attributes — we cannot assume that the dynamics operating in America won’t affect our profession. Changes in generational preferences and worldviews impact the way our profession manifests across our ranks, but that diversity in thought can also lead to novel ideas. While social and sensationalized media put a spotlight on every misstep and sometimes overlook efforts to improve, it also presents an opportunity to highlight the value of service. Perhaps most importantly, our adversaries grow stronger every day and seek any seam to erode our advantages, but also provide us with a renewed sense of purpose. As we work to transform our Army, we will rely on our people to keep us ahead of potential adversaries. Our profession will continue to produce unparalleled soldiers and leaders who serve as the foundation of America’s relative strength.
Indeed, it is our people that give us our greatest advantage. No other army can boast the U.S. Army’s disciplined, trained, and fit soldiers capable of operating independently, making difficult decisions, and working as part of cohesive teams. All of that — all our advantages — stem from our unique version of professionalism.
Over the years, generations of Army leaders have stewarded that strength. Our professionals have always taken lessons from ongoing wars and conflicts to improve the way we educate and train, adjusting our culture and systems to reflect a changing society. In the mid-20th century, sociologists like Samuel Huntington and Morris Janowitz considered how a democracy could maintain a large, standing army and established the foundational concepts of the profession that we still use today. In subsequent decades, Army leaders such as Gens. William DePuy and Donn Starry, and the newly formed Training and Doctrine Command and Forces Command, worked to deal with the effects of the Vietnam War and build professionalism and discipline in the nascent all-volunteer force.
Today, it is our duty — our professional obligation — to account for the impacts of a generation of war, the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Israel, and other hotspots around the globe, current recruiting challenges, and various societal factors to determine how our profession may need to adapt to maintain its vitality in a tumultuous world where many advantages we once took for granted seem illusory, the time is ripe to focus on our Army profession. In this article, I intend to stoke such a discussion. As I discussed in a recent episode of the War on the Rocks podcast, it is our obligation as Army leaders to refine and update our understanding of what it is, take stock of what we’re already doing to steward and strengthen it, streamline and rationalize those existing programs, and determine where to go from here. However, senior leaders cannot do it alone. This is our profession, and we need soldiers across the entire Army —active, guard, and reserve— to generate ideas and move it forward.
The Army Profession and the Professional
Before we can determine how to strengthen our profession, we need to agree on what it is. This is well-trod territory, and I can’t claim to have some new, visionary definition that will fundamentally alter our trajectory. However, this topic is a personal one and we all have a viewpoint. A common understanding and some accepted lexicon will go a long way to advancing the conversation.
Army doctrine defines the profession as “a trusted vocation of soldiers and army civilians whose collective expertise is the ethical design, generation, support, and application of landpower; serving under civilian authority; and entrusted to defend the constitution and the rights and interests of the American people.” That’s probably a good enough starting point, but it is especially important that our current understanding of the profession has two primary components: the profession itself and the professional it produces. These two components are heavily interrelated, feeding off one another to sustain and improve themselves. The split may seem unnecessary, but I find that it enables us to zero in on specific aspects of each and tailor potential solutions to where they will make the biggest impact.
Our profession is more than the competence, character, and commitment of individual soldiers, non-commissioned officers, warrant officers, officers, and Army civilian professionals in our ranks. It must also encompass the systems with which we develop expertise, accountability, and responsibility. It is a complex system that builds professional warriors who fight and win our nation’s wars within the legal, moral, and ethical bounds of our profession.
The objective expertise that we provide to our nation, that no one else can, is in warfighting. The Army is obligated to have well-trained soldiers and competent leaders to meet this requirement — and the systems that our profession uses to generate that competence are vital. These systems should start with encouraging and moderating diverse discourse on war and its related fields through writing and publication, research, experimentation, and conferences among our professionals and associated parties (think tanks, academia, industry, etc.) However, this is not simply an intellectual exercise. Our purpose is to produce expert warfighters and competent professionals. As such, our system of knowledge generation ought to go further, to turn that discourse into knowledge (doctrine, programs of instruction, training scenarios, etc.) and then transmit that knowledge to developing professionals through training and leader development.
Our profession also requires a system of self-policing that qualifies who we access, retain, and promote. We are trusted with the survival of our nation and the lives of its youth. We are rightly held accountable for that trust. Grounded in our oaths, the “Warrior Ethos,” and the “Army Values,” our profession produces soldiers and leaders of character through well-established systems of selection, promotion, retention, training, and leader development. Through these accountability mechanisms, we build individual character to produce better soldiers and citizens.
Trust, combined with quality training and leader development, is vital to ensuring that we are a ready and professional army. That trust is built from the responsibility that our profession shows to its members and the commitment that our professionals show to their profession. By caring for soldiers’ needs, providing them the skills and resources to live full and healthy lives, and setting them on the path to a better future, we demonstrate that responsibility and earn their commitment. Ongoing programs steered by the Army People Strategy — prevention, quality of life, life skills development, etc. — are great displays of this responsibility and must be continuously improved to enable our commanders at echelon.
The Army’s systems of expertise, accountability, and responsibility build competent and committed professionals of character. However, it is not these systems that together build a culture. Rather, our profession is a complete entity that enables the Army’s commanders to build positive cultures, which I define as climates and environments that do not tolerate eroding factors such as sexual harassment and assault, or any form of discrimination, while fostering cohesion, dignity, and respect for all that raised their hand and took an oath.
What Are We Doing About It?
I remain an optimist. The Army profession isn’t broken; it simply needs to be stewarded more thoroughly. While it is important to note shortfalls such as soldier and leader misconduct, lack of fitness, harmful behaviors, and more, we — as a total team — are obligated to embrace the profession to build soldiers and leaders of character, competence, and commitment, and to foster positive organizational cultures. To do so, we will continuously improve and refine our professional systems to ensure focus, prioritization, and accountability.
The Sergeant Major of the Army — supported by U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, Forces Command, and the total Army — has undertaken efforts to reestablish the primacy of the sergeant in this area through a revised Blue Book and the revitalization of common task training and testing at echelon. But unless leaders at every echelon prioritize the effort, we will continue to be challenged. We must also combine this effort with leader development — delivered through “brick and mortar” schoolhouses and further honed at the unit level — at all echelons to reinforce the basic competence of our profession.
To build our expertise, we are working to improve our professional discourse, which will encourage our leaders to think and write about what we do. We have simultaneously sought to expand the understanding of our soldiers and leaders through direct means. Finally, we are investing to streamline our systems of doctrine and program of instruction development to ensure rapid incorporation of lessons and new ideas.
Even the character of our individual soldiers and leaders should be considered as outputs of our professional systems. It is true that our problems with misconduct and indiscipline are, in part, inevitable, just as they are in any other organized group of human beings. But we cannot and will not simply blame soldier indiscipline on generational values or junior leader unwillingness to enforce standards, nor can we blame continued senior leader misconduct on a “few bad apples.” As we continuously transform, we have the opportunity to examine how we bring people into the Army, acculturate them at initial entry and pre-commissioning sources, train them in our values and culture (across a career, not just at institutional training), assess and evaluate them for their adherence to our norms and responsible behavior, and select them for promotion and positions of increased responsibility. We have begun these processes through more effective acculturation at basic training and by enhancing professional military education, assessing future battalion and brigade leaders, and reinforcing the importance of our oath.
Lastly, we often look at the commitment of our soldiers and leaders to their profession as a one-way street. Individuals should remain committed to our values and to their mission; however, we also have professional responsibilities to care for our people, provide for their and their families’ needs, offer safe and healthy environments for them to work and live in, and set them up for a future in or out of uniform. Continued efforts to improve foundational soldier and leader skills, the provision of resources to commanders to build healthy command climates and reduce harmful behaviors, and increased investment in quality-of-life initiatives are demonstrations of our commitment to these responsibilities.
What Can You Do? A Call to Action
The first, and most important thing, we can all do is exactly what we’re trying to do here: acknowledge that our profession is not a constant. While it is certain that our profession undergirds all our strengths, I again remind you that it must be continuously tended, or it will atrophy. This simple acknowledgement — and the commensurate requirement for each and every professional to think deeply about his or her profession, discuss it with their peers, come up with solutions, and drive them into existence — is the most important thing we can do. Our professionals are obligated to increase their engagement on relevant topics in daily interactions, as well as by writing for expanding outlets to spread lessons learned and generate dialogue. If that is all this article achieves, that will be enough.
Each of us must also work to rebuild pride in service. Wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army is a big deal. That honor and responsibility ought to be reflected in each and every one of us. After a long term of service, especially following multiple deployments, it’s easy to get jaded and cynical — to forget why we joined in the first place. But I challenge each of you to go to a basic training, Basic Officer Leader Course, or Officer Candidate School graduation (or at least think back to your own) and look at the sense of accomplishment in every new soldier’s eyes and the pride of every family member. Attaining membership in our profession is hard — as it should be — and pride in service must be reinforced in every unit, school, department, and section.
We all know that our profession is huge. It is made up of countless units, teams, offices, and departments that are manned with people from all walks of life. I encourage every solider and Army civilian to take responsibility for their piece of the profession. Each of us — no matter our rank, mission occupational specialty, or assignment — can strengthen the whole by strengthening its parts.
This we’ll defend.
Gen. Gary Brito is the commanding general of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command. He is responsible for strengthening the Army profession, building the next generation of soldiers and leaders, and delivering holistic solutions to the future force. He previously served as the deputy chief of staff G-1 at Headquarters Department of the Army and in a variety of command and staff assignments, including deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
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