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In 2004, I was a boot (translation: brand new) first lieutenant in 1st Battalion, 7th Marines at a retransmission site in the middle of nowhere, al-Qa’im, Iraq. I heard a sudden explosion and small-arms fire two kilometers away. The battalion radio net burst with chatter, with someone saying there were three casualties: two urgent surgicals (send help quickly!) and one routine (no rush to provide aid). Someone in the operating center asked about the status of the routine casualty, and the radio crackled with the kind of transmission that changes everything. “It’s Whiskey Six, he’s KIA [killed in action].” I locked eyes with my staff sergeant, and we both took a moment to process the brutal truth of what happened: The battalion’s weapons company commander was killed in action.
What hit me in that moment was not what I had been prepared for. The Marine Corps trained me well — tactically sound, physically hardened, and practiced in planning. I knew my equipment, my mission, and my men. What came through that radio, though, was something none of that training had touched. It arrived all at once: fear, rage, a hollowness that I had no framework for, a vertigo that no field exercise had ever simulated. I was morally unprepared for war.
The irony is that the Marine Corps’ seminal doctrine, Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1, Warfighting, names this problem explicitly in its very first chapter: “Human dimensions and moral factors.” Clausewitz, from whom the Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1 draws from heavily, wrote that “war is an extreme test of one’s physical, mental, and moral strength.”
“The moral factors,” he argued, “are among the most important on the battlefield.” The Marine Corps’ foundational warfighting doctrine agrees. However, no service has built a program around it. No one trained me for the moral weight of that radio call.
Recent scholarship has addressed this exact gap. In a recent War on the Rocks article, J. William DeMarco argued that the American military has systemically removed productive friction from leadership development, producing leaders who are compassionate but unformed, intelligent but brittle. His prescription is right as far as it goes: Ethics ought to be baked into training — not just taught in classrooms — and the institution must prepare warfighters for the reality that war and their values will pull in different directions. What DeMarco’s crucibles build, however, requires a doctrinal foundation to sustain. The schoolhouse forges the capacity — the operating force is where that capacity is either reinforced or left to erode. Without a mandate that extends the crucible into the units where marines actually serve, the formation the schoolhouse produces dissipates. That is the gap this piece addresses.
On his first day in office, Secretary Pete Hegseth released a message to the force and stated: “We will revive the warrior ethos and restore trust in our military.” That call is right. But a warrior ethos without an ethics doctrine is a slogan. And every service has been producing slogans for 20 years.
Some may note that “warrior ethos” language has appeared in recent debates about military culture and diversity policy and wonder whether this argument is a contribution to that debate. It is not. The argument here rests entirely on operational ground: Clausewitz, Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1, the Government Accountability Office’s own findings, and the empirical record of what happens to units and institutions when moral preparation is neglected. The point is not to adjudicate cultural disputes — it is to replace them with something more useful: A written, mandated, measurable doctrine that specifies what warrior ethos actually requires of every warfighter and holds commanders accountable for building it. If the secretary means what he says about reviving the warrior ethos, put it in writing and make it binding across all services. The doctrine is the proof.
I agree with the secretary when he says the military has a problem, but it is not a lack of values. It is a lack of doctrine — a coherent framework that provides a useful heuristic for ethics in war by answering the three questions that every effective warfighting publication must address: “What, why, and how?”
For ethics, the doctrine must state what ethics is, why it matters in war, and how to build it in people and organizations. Current ethics programs only answer the first question and are often only an opportunity for an academic to show how well-versed they are in philosophical literature. The result is what the Government Accountability Office confirmed in 2015: The Department of Defense had decided to take no further action to establish a values-based ethics program without demonstrating that additional action was unwarranted. The finding did not produce a program. What it produced instead was the same gap the world saw in 2004’s Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal, carried into 2017’s Marines United scandal, and a pattern of moral failures that the institution responded to with investigations and stand-downs before quietly returning to business as usual.
Most ethics programs take one of three tracks.
The first is the exclusively academic track: instruction on Aristotle, Kant, and Hobbes delivered in professional military education classrooms, which attempts to answer the “what” of ethics, but mistakes sophistication for utility. This often overlooks existing doctrine on warfighting, which leaves an operational gap for servicemembers.
The second is the inspirational track: motivational language such as “keep our honor clean,” which is motivational and inspirational, but not informational. This often overlooks the brutal business of warfighting, leaving warfighters unprepared for the ethical challenges of combat.
The final one is the policy and regulations track: specific prohibitions against specific behaviors. This is too particular for dynamic situations filled with uncertainty, and the nature of war is inherently dynamic and uncertain.
None of these tracks answers all three questions. None of them connect. The deeper reason they fail is that answering the “why” of ethics, operationally, requires an understanding of military doctrine that most civilian ethicists have not developed and most officer instructors have not been empowered to teach. It is in the “why” that the warrior ethos actually lives.
The doctrinal chain runs as follows. Ethics produces reliability, the confidence that a warfighter will act in accordance with their values under pressure, that their word means something, that they will not break. Reliability produces trust. Trust produces cooperation. Cooperation produces cohesion. And cohesion, as Warfighting makes clear, is what maneuver warfare is designed to shatter in the enemy and preserve for friendly forces. An ethically cohesive unit does not simply fight better in a moral sense — it cycles faster. Decision-making accelerates when trust eliminates the friction of uncertainty about how others will act.
In practice, this looks like a battalion commander who encounters an unexpected gap in enemy lines and immediately exploits it without halting to request permission. Because higher command has absolute trust in the battalion’s ethical followership and tactical reliability to operate from intent, the unit does not pause to coordinate — it just acts. Ethical units out-cycle adversaries not because they are more virtuous but because their internal friction is lower. Ethics, properly understood, is a mechanism for generating tempo.
The connection between ethics and tempo runs through Col. John Boyd’s own framework. Boyd identified the bond of trust built through shared values as one of the essential conditions for cycling faster than an adversary. Decades of military cohesion research — from postwar studies by Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz through more recent longitudinal work on deployed units — confirm that task cohesion rooted in shared commitment to mission and mutual trust is a key contributor to unit performance under stress.
Combat accounts reinforce this relationship between trust and performance. Medal of Honor recipient Clint Romesha, describing the fight at Kamdesh, noted that under intense enemy fire, “there was no hesitation” — soldiers simply acted. As Marine Gen. (ret.) and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis observed from his own experience in Operation Desert Storm, “I knew I could trust marines … I was looking for initiative and aggressiveness,” a combination that reflects how trust enables faster, more decisive action on the battlefield.
The second answer to “why” ethics matters operates at the strategic level, specifically, civilian leadership’s insistence that the military remain apolitical and constitutionally aligned. Militaries must support policy. Clausewitz again: “War is the continuation of policy by other means.” Warfighting also states: “The single most important thought to understand about our theory (or war) is that war must serve policy.” An ethically undisciplined force does not merely embarrass its nation — it actively undermines the policy objectives it was sent to achieve and erodes the public trust that gives civilian leadership the authority to send it anywhere.
Abu Ghraib did not just harm detainees — it handed adversaries a propaganda instrument that complicated every subsequent objective in the theater and consumed congressional bandwidth that belonged to other problems. Similarly, when U.S. Marines urinated on Taliban remains — a catastrophic breakdown driven by moral culmination after enduring the combat deaths of their fellow marines — it did not just violate the laws of armed conflict. It severely damaged the strategic landscape for the United States, inflaming anti-American sentiment across the Afghan theater and providing insurgents with a visceral recruiting tool that prolonged the conflict. Ethical failures are not isolated incidents — they are strategic liabilities, and they are incompatible with the apolitical, constitutionally grounded warrior culture the secretary is trying to build.
Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1 describes three factors of friction in war: physical, mental, and moral. The Marine Corps has robust doctrine for the first two. Marines train relentlessly to extend the physical culmination point — the moment at which a force can no longer continue operations. The service invests years in developing the mental resilience and knowledge base that pushes back on mental culmination. But moral culmination — the point at which a warfighter’s ethical framework collapses under the extreme conditions of war — receives no equivalent investment. The Marine Corps names it, then neglects it.
Moral culmination is not hypothetical — it is the mechanism behind virtually every high-profile ethical failure in modern American military history. It operates through Maslow’s hierarchy in ways that are entirely predictable: As war strips away physiological safety, belonging, and esteem through sleep deprivation, hunger, violence, loss, and toxic command climates, warfighters slide down the hierarchy until self-actualization, the level at which moral reflection is possible, becomes an unaffordable luxury.
Clinical research on combat trauma documents the specific mechanism Maslow describes. Jonathan Shay worked with Vietnam veterans for years and found that, “in combat, the social and moral horizon shrinks. The past and future disappear. The soldier’s world is reduced to the immediate moment.” And when a person is reduced to that state, moral reasoning — which requires weighing consequences, considering others, and connecting action to values — becomes functionally inaccessible. Not because the warfighter abandoned their values but because the conditions of combat consumed the resources required to act on them. Maslow’s hierarchy, while contested as a rigid sequential model, offers a useful heuristic for understanding why. Shay’s clinical findings and Maslow’s framework point toward the same operational reality: Moral culmination is not a character failure — it is a predictable consequence of preparation failure.
Values recited in garrison become inaccessible under fire — not because those warriors were bad people, but because no one trained them for this specific form of culmination, and no doctrine exists to guide commanders in preventing it.
In 2017, I submitted a fully written proposed Marine Corps doctrinal publication on ethics to the Commandant’s Innovation Challenge. It won. The commandant’s own process validated the argument that ethics requires the same doctrinal treatment as any other warfighting function, structured around the same three questions every effective Marine Corps doctrine answers.
What?
Ethics is the adherence of one’s actions to their values, not feeling good about choices, not avoiding punishment, not reciting a list of traits; acting consistently while under pressure in accordance with clearly defined values that fulfill the purpose of one’s unit. That is what ethics demands. A warfighter who sees wrong and does nothing is moral but not ethical. The distinction demands action, not just reflection. This is not an academic seminar — it is a warfighting standard.
Why?
The doctrinal chain runs from ethics through reliability and trust to cooperation, cohesion, and combat power. An ethical force is a faster force, a more coherent force, and a force that advances rather than undermines the policy it was sent to serve and the constitutional order it swore to defend. America’s servicemembers must be prepared. Do America’s servicemembers have a codified definition of ethics? Do they know how ethics creates speed and supports policy? Are they aware of what their sources of values are and what to do when they contradict each other? Do they know about moral injuries or how to prevent and treat them? These are operational necessities for ethical warfighters that the Department of Defense has failed to provide. An ethics doctrine is how that commitment becomes more than a phrase.
How?
Creating ethical warfighters requires three things applied in sequence and sustained over time.
The first is ethical education: a clear, honest account of what ethics is, why it matters operationally, and what will challenge it, including the mechanics of moral culmination.
The second is ethical training: The application of ethical knowledge under realistic stress, using the same inoculation logic used in physical training, because warfighters need to practice ethical decision-making when they are tired, afraid, and under pressure — not just in comfortable classrooms. This is the codification of DeMarco’s notion of productive friction; that ethics requires training that brings people to ethical culmination through physical and mental stress. It provides leaders a useful heuristic for DeMarco’s mandate of how to bake ethics into training.
The final is consistent reinforcement: the daily command climate feedback loop that either validates or undermines everything education and training built. How does a command affirm ethical action? Do people see how inaction is passive approval of whatever behavior it fails to correct?
This is not complicated. It is not expensive. It does not require new schools or a reorganization of professional military education. It requires commanders to treat ethics the way they treat every other warfighting function. Ultimately, it requires the institutional authority to make that expectation binding across all services.
An understandable counterargument to all of this is that a doctrine cannot replace leadership and moral judgment. It is important to understand, however, what doctrine is and what it is not. Doctrine is not going to eliminate the need for leadership, followership, and a moral compass. Rather, it enhances it. Doctrine provides a philosophical framework, a useful heuristic for warfighters to apply in combat.
Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1 (originally Fleet Marine Force Manual 1) was written in 1989, almost a quarter of a century before cyberspace was a warfighting domain. However, its principles of maneuver warfare, surfaces and gaps, critical vulnerabilities, and centers of gravity are just as valuable at Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command as they are at 1st Marine Division.
Doctrine is a tool to help accelerate one’s understanding of war’s awful nature and how to succeed in spite of it. Ethics has not been reconciled with that nature. What doctrine warns us of moral culmination, or that ethics accelerates operational tempo through trust, or that ethical conduct supports political policy, which is America’s theory of war? That is what doctrine makes possible — not a replacement for leadership or moral courage, but the framework that gives both something to build on.
Here is what should provoke genuine institutional anger: No service chief has solved this. Not one. In nearly a decade of advocacy for an ethics doctrine within the Marine Corps, the blueprint validated by the commandant’s own innovation process sits unused. The Government Accountability Office named the problem in 2015. The recommendation predates that finding by seven years. Abu Ghraib was in 2004; the Marines United scandal was in 2017. Overwhelming tasking of generals and no clear “home” for this project has resulted in stagnation and neglect for a central component in war. It is not unique to the Marine Corps — this applies to every service.
That is why this problem now belongs to the Secretary of Defense. The secretary has called for a warrior culture built on merit, cohesion, constitutional fidelity, and trust. Every one of those things depends on a force that is ethically educated, trained, and consistent. Directives, stand-downs, and cultural messaging alone cannot build that force. Doctrine can codify and institutionalize this model. Doctrine at the joint level requires a directive that no service commandant or chief can issue alone.
My recommendation is simple: By direction or his own initiative, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ought to develop a joint ethics doctrine — one that answers all three questions, connects ethics to cohesion and policy, and treats moral culmination as the preventable operational failure it is. Make adherence a readiness standard across all services. The framework exists. The commandant awarded it in 2017. The Government Accountability Office confirmed the need. The empirical record of what happens without it is written in the scandals of the U.S. military’s history.
Return to al-Qa’im: The radio call came in, and the rage arrived with it. Not the clean, purposeful anger that sharpens decisions, but the kind that narrows them. The hollowness had nowhere to go. The vertigo had no framework to run through. I had a doctrinal framework for enemy maneuver and fires, but no anticipatory framework for my own moral culmination. When the shock of that loss hit, I was entirely unprepared for the profound struggle to anchor my values when the conditions of war threatened to strip them away. I learned the hard way that without an ethics doctrine to clearly explain “why” and “how” values preserve marines in combat, the Marine Corps is leaving its people to navigate their darkest moments by instinct alone.
I was unprepared for that reality. Right now, the young men and women preparing for America’s next conflict are just as unprepared. There is a blueprint to fix this. The Department of Defense can either institutionalize an ethics doctrine that hardwires moral resilience into the military’s warfighting culture, or it can wait for the next generation to discover their breaking points in the dirt of the next al-Qa’im.
The choice is ours. The consequences will be theirs.
Dennis W. Katolin is an active-duty Marine officer, combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and third-degree black belt instructor trainer in the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program. He holds a Ph.D. from Virginia Tech, a master’s degree in human behavior, and is a graduate of the School of Advanced Warfighting and the National War College. He is the author of a proposed Marine Corps doctrinal publication on ethics, which won the Commandant’s Innovation Challenge in 2017.
The views and opinions presented here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.
Image: Midjourney
