Wings of Hope

On Monday my husband and I attended a talk at Columbia given by General Raymond E. Johns, U.S. Air Force. His topic was “Ethical Leadership in the 21^st Century,” and while he really focused more generally about the military’s balance between fighting and humanitarian missions, I found the speech just as interesting.

A caveat is probably required here that I come from a military background; my father served in the Marines/Coast Guard/National Reserve, my aunt as an Army nurse in Vietnam, my other aunt is currently a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Air Force, and my husband is a Navy veteran. So I came in pre-disposed to be interested, but General Johns still impressed me with his well-spoken and heartfelt talk about balancing the myriad demands faced by our armed forces.

 

The Air Force sees itself as having two main missions – “machines of war” and “wings of hope.” That is, missions that support military action, and those that are humanitarian-driven. But behind these missions are millions of smaller decisions; how to allocate budget money, where to prioritize troops, what supplies to drop where across the globe. During the Q&A portion of the evening, we had the chance to ask General Johns about some of his toughest decisions, and one audience member asked about the ethics in deciding whether to resign if a service member doesn’t believe in an order. 

My guess is the questioner meant grossly unethical orders; perhaps driven from stories of Vietnam’s My Lai or the like, where soldiers commit atrocities and later claim to be acting only under orders. General Johns’ response was an interesting one. While he sidestepped a bit the minefield of discussing truly heinous orders, he shed light on situations that are grayer, and challenged us in a similar situation to first consider whether or not we wanted to remain as an affecting agent in the situation’s outcome. His point is that once you bow out of a difficult situation, meaning in this example resigning from the military, you lose the opportunity to continue to shape the situation.

This seems to me a bit of a slippery slope – is it ethical to voluntarily remain in an unethical situation? – but I take his point that simply leaving the scenario may be taking the easy way out. If you were an employee at Enron, you could have seen the fraud and quit the firm, but would that be ethical? Do you have a duty to remain in an unethical situation and do everything you can to turn the scenario around? Or by staying in an unethical situation, are you giving tacit approval to what happens?

What do you think?