Integrity Matters

It’s 1700, you’re a seasoned lieutenant and have had a great day running a M4 qualification range. As the range closes, your platoon sergeant approaches you with five soldiers who failed to qualify on their assigned weapon. You’re faced with an integrity decision. You know that these Soldiers completed the required pre-marksmanship instruction, so their failure reflects poorly on your training program. The soldiers, for their part, are blaming the targets themselves and poor quality of the range. Your leadership needs your platoon to be fully qualified today because the quarterly training meeting is next week and this is the last range before the brief to the brigade commander. You know that the top performing lieutenant in the battalion will get the next school slot and you really want it. So, do you mark the soldiers as qualified and sign your name on the card? 

Integrity decisions like this occur on an almost daily basis and cover anything from the minutia of a leave form that isn’t processed correctly to fairly and impartially applying the Uniform Code of Military Justice. As leaders increase in rank, the impacts of their decisions have greater and greater effects across larger and larger organizations. Cultivating the character traits of leadership is a continuous process that demands attention, introspection, and development. This is why it is essential to reinforce integrity as the fundamental character trait of leadership. 

Integrity is derived from the Latin word integer- a complete entity, or indivisible. This definition is useful as we apply it to a leader’s character. A leader with integrity is complete, in full control of their decisions, and grounded. Alternatively, a leader who lacks integrity is brittle and when placed under pressure will snap. One of the great attributes of the U.S. military is the all-volunteer force structure. Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines volunteer to leave their homes to serve their country. They do this because of the values of the profession of arms. Mothers and fathers trust that their sons and daughters will be led by leaders of character who possess integrity. This is a sacred obligation between not only service member and their leaders but between the citizenry of the nation and the armed forces. One of the challenges of the all-volunteer force is inculcating the values of service to every member who joins. The first step in this process is instilling the value of integrity as a core character trait. Without integrity, the profession of arms would simply be a rabble in arms. 

A systematic lack of integrity results in failures like Russia’s action in Ukraine. Russia’s poor tactical performance and the reprehensible personal conduct of its “soldiers” are a direct manifestation of a culture that lacks integrity. Unit commanders lied about the maintenance of their equipment and the training proficiency of their soldiers. This directly resulted in operational failures and, more significantly, the deaths of their men. This culture is driven from the top down by leaders who punish subordinates for speaking truth to power. There is no such thing as a zero-defect organization and the pursuit of this goal over time leads to the promotion of sycophants who only say what the boss wants to hear, not the ground truth. 

Sometimes it may feel like having integrity and following the Army values are vague constructs that don’t apply to day to day life. This could not be further from the truth. Every day leaders are faced with decisions that test their character, and you are charged to be the leader that takes those five soldiers back to the range and train them to standard.

Brian Mathews is an active duty Logistics Officer serving as an Army Staff Intern at the Pentagon.

* The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not represent those of the Army, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.