CHAPTER THREE
RESPONSIBILITY AND PRIVILEGE
There is a common saying in the services, and elsewhere, that greater privileges grow out of larger responsibilities, and that the latter justifies the former. This is part truth and part fable.
In military organization, as in industry, business, and political life, the more important a man's position, the more lavish he is likely to be in his office appointments and living arrangements, and the greater the care that is apt to be taken in freeing him of trifling annoyances.
But that is only partly because of the need for him to conserve his time and energy. When men are successful, they like the good things of life. Why deny it? Not one individual in 10,000 would aspire to power and authority if it meant living like a hermit.
There is no way that the military establishment can denature human nature, and change this determining condition. Nor is there any reason why it should wish to do so. Its men, like all others, develop a sense of well-being from those advantages, many of them minor, which attend, and build prestige, both in private and in official life. The incentive system by which our country has prospered has always recognized that privilege is a reward for effort and enterprise. The American people have always accepted that reasonable, harmless privileges should attend merit. It is by enhancing the prestige of leaders and by making their positions attractive that the Armed Forces get better officers and men.
One of the keenest-minded Americans of our time has said: "Responsibilities are what devolve upon a person, and privileges are what he ought not to have, but takes." In a perfect universe, that would be a perfect truth. But men being as they are, prideful and desirous of any mark of recognition, privileges are the natural accompaniment of rank and station, and when not wilfully misused, may contribute to the general welfare. At all levels, men will aspire more, and their ambition will be firmer, if getting ahead will mean for them an increase in the visible tokens of deference from the majority, rather than simply a boost in the paycheck. To complain about this quality in human nature is as futile as regretting that the sun goes down.
However, since it is out of the abuse of privilege that much of the friction between authority and the rank-and-file arises, the subject can't be dropped at that point. What puts most of the grit into the machinery isn't that privileges exist, but that they are exercised too often by persons who are not motivated by a passionate sense of duty. For it is an almost inviolable rule of human behavior that the man who is concerned most of all with his responsibilities will be fretted least about the matter of his privileges, and that his exercise of any rightful privilege will not be resented by his subordinates, because they are conscious of his merit.
We can take two officers. Lieutenant "A" enters the service with one main question in mind: "Where does my duty lie?" So long as he remains on that beam, he will never injure the morale of the service by using such privileges as are rightfully his as an officer. But in the mind of Lieutenant "B" the other idea is uppermost: "What kudos do I get out of my position?" Unless that man changes his ways, he will be a troublemaker while he remains in the service, a headache to his fellow officers and a despoiler of those who are under him.
In recent years, we have learned a lot about American manpower. We have seen enough of the raw material under testing conditions to know that, with the exception of the occasional malcontent who was irreparably spoiled before he left home, American young men when brought into military organization do not resent rank, and are amenable to authority. Indeed, they expect that higher authority will have certain advantages not common to the rank-and-file, because that is normal in our society in all of its workday relationships.