CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
USING REWARD AND PUNISHMENT
One of the illusions having greatest currency among our people is that any green member of the fighting establishment is merely an American civilian in a uniform, and that therefore, his spirit is nourished to the extent that accommodations and usages of the service most nearly duplicate what he has known elsewhere.
This belief is especially prevalent during wartime when every mother's son puts on a new suit; it is natural to think that everything in the service will better suit the boy if it smells like home. The corollary of this rather quaint idea is that military organization is therefore most perfect when it operates in the same way as the civil society.
Earlier in this book it has been suggested that these ideas need to be questioned on two broad grounds: Do not both of them run counter to the facts of encharged responsibility, and to human nature itself?
To emphasize it once again, the military officer is not alone an administrator: he is a magistrate. There are special powers given him by the President. It is within these powers that he will sit in judgment on his men and that he may punish them when they have been grievously derelict. This dual role makes his function radically different from anything encountered in civil life—to say nothing of the singleness of purpose which a fighting service is supposed to move forward.
Moreover, the military officer is dealing with men who are submitted to him in a binding relationship which by its nature is not only more compelling but more intimate than anything elsewhere in society. As much as the parent in the home, and far more than the teacher in the school or the executive in business, he is directed to center his effort primarily on the building of good character in other individuals.
One need only compare a few points of advantage and disadvantage to see why a better balanced sense of justice and fair play is required of the military officer than of his brother in civil life, and why the aim would be far too low if the fighting services did not shoot for higher standards of personnel direction than are common in the management of American business. Here are the points:
- If any subordinate in the civilian vineyard feels that he is getting a bad deal from his boss, and has become the object of unfair discrimination, it is his royal American privilege to quit on the spot, be he a policeman, a government factotum or a hod carrier. He can then maintain himself by carrying his skill into a new shop. But an enlisted member of the armed establishment cannot quit summarily, and finally, if his commander is just wrong-headed and arbitrary, it can be made almost impossible for him to transfer out. However bad his fortune, he's stuck with it.
- Nepotism is so general in our business and political life that the people who suffer from its effect accept it more or less as the working of nature; the results are therefore less destructive of efficiency than they might be otherwise. It is common to see the boss's nephew or his son get a good spot in the office and then rise like a rocket, even though he is a third-rater. And it is not less common to see a straw boss in a factory favor the man whom he thinks might grease the wheels for him on the outside. But in the armed establishment, favoritism on any grounds, and particularly on such treacherous grounds as these, will destroy the foundations of work and of control.
- The armed establishment has its own body of law. Therein, too, it differs from any civilian autonomy except the state itself. The code is intended to enable a uniform standard of treatment to all individuals in the regulating of all interior affairs. The code is not rigid; its provisions are not absolute. It specifies the general nature of offenses against society, and special offenses against the good of the service. But, except for the more serious offenses, particularly those which by their nature also violate the civil code, it does not flatly prescribe trial and punishment. Military law, in this respect, has more latitude, and is more congenial, than civil law covering minor offenders. Rarely arbitrary in its workings, it premises the use of corrective good judgment at all times. It regards force as an instrument only to be used for conserving the general good of the establishment. The essential power behind the force is something spiritual—the will and conscience of the great majority, expressing itself through the action of one or several of their number. Its major object is not punishment of the wrong-doer but protection of the interests of the dutiful. This view of military law is four-square with the basic principle of all action within the armed services—that in all cases the best policy is one which depends for its workings on the sense of duty in men toward each other, and thereby strengthens that sense through its operations.
Put in these terms, the attitude of the service toward the problem of correction as a means of promoting the welfare of the general establishment obviously reposes a tremendous burst in the justice and goodwill of the average officer. It would be useless to blink the fact. But there is this to be said unalterably in favor of the military system's way of handling things: If the organization of the whole human family into an orderly unit is ever to be made possible, it will be done only because many men, of all ages and working at many different levels, develop this faculty for passing critical, impartial judgment on the conduct and deserts of those whom they lead, instead of regarding it as a special kind of wisdom, given only to the few anointed. Nor is that all. Not only the knowledge but the sense of duty in men is imperfect. In every society are men who will not obey the law of their own accord. Unless the authority which receives and interprets the law will also impose it, by force if necessary, the reign of law soon ceases. Whether an ordered society is to exist thus depends upon whether there are citizens enough, fixed with a sense of duty, to obey it and to enforce it.