Content area
Full text
Commanders and leaders must often make decisions the moral correctness and strategic outcome of which are difficult to calculate. Consider the strategic corporal, a relatively new and inexperienced noncommissioned officer, in contrast to the tactical general, an experienced leader who through technology can control, or even micromanage, events on the battlefield that traditionally were left to leaders much closer to the action. Inherent in both positions, as they have evolved, is great strategic risk.
Strategic corporals make tactical decisions that can have far-reaching strategic consequences. On the other hand, high-level leaders, through technology, can directly affect tactical situations without sufficient consideration of the strategic implications of these actions.
At any level, as Army leaders we cannot let our stra- tegic acumen atrophy. Instead, we must become more sophisticated in our decision-making processes, especial- ly when it comes to incorporating strategic-level ethics that directly impact mission success or failure.
Strategic-level ethics-or macro-ethics-takes into account the structure of ethical decision making as a whole. Macro-ethics, like macroeconomics, looks not at the individual agent but at the overall effect of ethical decisions. In other words, macro-ethics looks beyond relatively black-and-white ethics of specific situations or individual decisions and takes into consideration the overall strategic-level ethical climate.
Granted, it is important for individuals to make ethical decisions in their personal situations because little good can come from immoral behavior at any level. However, high-level leaders also need to make morally driven macro-ethical decisions because the American people expect, and our military profession demands, that military professionals make military decisions based on proper moral judgment, taking into consideration the overall end state desired at tactical and strategic levels. As ethicist Don Snider writes,
To be sure, all of our forces use billions of dol- lars of technology, but it is all at the beck and call of a human operator or commander who uses discretionary moral judgments to apply that military power. That is the art of being a military professional, making repetitive discre- tionary judgments often scores of times a day that are both effective militarily and within the moral norms expected by the military's client-the American people.1
In making these discretionary moral judgments, Army leaders must take into consideration complex- ity since understanding and visualizing the complex environment-all...