Keeping David From Bathsheba: The Four-Star General’s Staff as Nathan

ABSTRACT

Readers of reports on ethical failures by four-star general officers must wonder, “Don’t they have staffs to ensure that the general follows ethics rules?” The Department of Defense publishes robust ethics guidance in several documents; however, a staff’s best efforts to implement this guidance may fail to make an impression on a senior leader who is susceptible to the “Bathsheba syndrome,” an allusion to the biblical account where the prophet Nathan rebuked King David for his moral failings. This paper proposes a methodology to enable senior headquarters staffs to play the role of Nathan in supporting ethical behaviors by high-level officers. It examines the mechanisms that embed ethical behavior within members of those staffs in carrying out their three principal roles of advising, scheduling, and transporting the four-star officer. The authors offer a framework based on an ethical infrastructure of organizational climate that focuses the staff’s daily efforts to mitigate risk across seven ethical “danger areas” that threaten ethical failures by senior officers.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• climate
• followership
• general officer
• Bathsheba
• Nathan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Brett D. Weigle is assistant professor of theater and campaign planning in the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations at the US Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA. He holds a BS from the University of Idaho, an MS from the Pennsylvania State University, and a Master of Strategic Studies from the US Army War College. In addition to military ethics, his teaching and research interests are military strategy and planning, energy and national security, and Arctic policy.

Charles D. Allen is associate professor of leadership and cultural studies in the Department of Command, Leadership, and Management at the US Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA. He holds a BS from the US Military Academy, an MS from the Georgia Institute of Technology, an MMAS from the School of Advanced Military Studies, US Army Command and General Staff College, and a Master of Strategic Studies from the US Army War College. In addition to military ethics, his areas of research and publications are strategic leadership, creativity and innovation, and civil–military relations.

ORCID

Brett D. Weigle http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2170-8377

Charles D. Allen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4467-8027

Notes

1 The DoD Office of General Counsel maintains a comprehensive collection of “Ethics Resources on the Web” available at http://ogc.osd.mil/defense_ethics/.

2 Based on personal experience of Weigle during 2007–2009 in the multinational headquarters United Nations Command/Republic of Korea-United States Combined Forces Command/US Forces Korea.

3 The personal and support staffs should not be confused with the command’s coordinating staff that report through a general-officer chief of staff and advise, plan, and coordinate policy and actions within the major command functions such as personnel, intelligence, operations, logistics, etc. These officers are designated by the familiar “G codes” for an Army staff and “J codes” for a Joint staff: G-1/J-1, G-2/J-2, G-3/J-3, G-4/J-4, etc.

4 It is worth noting that general officers often make a special request through the military personnel system for an officer who previously worked for them to be assigned as their SA or XO. This is an understandable effort to build their inner circle around at least one trusted subordinate with familiar bona fides. This selection does not automatically make the hand-picked officer suspect of ethical pliability but an ethical framework such as the one developed in this paper can help guard against this possibility.

5 “A general’s spouse can be an official traveler if he or she plays an active role in the official visit: addressing those assembled at a function; meeting with spouses of community and government leaders, foreign dignitaries or military officers who are officially meeting the general; or attending an event whose audience is mostly military families or that focuses on matters of particular concern to military families” (DoD 2014a, 15).

6 “We found no evidence that MG Fil sought a legal opinion regarding acceptance of the pen set, the briefcase, or the cash gift given to [him by a redacted Korean citizen]” (DoDIG 2012a, 9).

7 See Hummel (2009) footnotes on pages 17 and 18 for details.

8 “Senior leaders should direct [that the Army] … incorporate or develop empirically validated research instruments to assess ethical climates and include them as part of the DoD or separate Army organizational climate survey” (Allen 2015a, 82).

9 This study devotes 49 pages to a discussion of “research on behavioral ethics … primarily concerned with explaining individual behavior that occurs in the context of larger social prescriptions.”

10 Schein (2010, 230–252) posited that primary embedding mechanisms are more powerful to effect organizational change than secondary articulation and reinforcement mechanisms.

11 For reference, the formal systems in the headquarters would have identical components to the informal systems but bear different characteristics; examples might include the aforementioned policy letters (communications), inspector general investigations (surveillance), and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to prosecute ethical malfeasance (sanctions).