Fault Lines of the American Military Profession

• Author: Meredith Kleykamp,Thomas Crosbie
• Published date: 01 July 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X17715437
• Date: 01 July 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Fault Lines of the

American Military

Profession

Thomas Crosbie

1

and Meredith Kleykamp

1

Abstract

Over the past decade, the American armed services have witnessed a near-constant

stream of so-called ethical lapses. Spanning rank, specialty, and service, these

“lapses” have given rise to a flood of criticism by journalists and piercing calls for

reform from politicians. In response, American military leaders have pointed to the

paired concepts of profession and professionalism as the solution. In this article, we use

classical conceptualizations of the military profession to resituate the problem of

ethical lapses as instead one of the three fault lines of the contemporary American

military profession, unfolding alongside crises in military expertise and identity. The

three fault lines reveal at once the large scale of the challenges facing the American

armed services and our very limited social scientific understanding of those prob-

lems. We end by emphasizing the need for future research to establish an updated

empirical baseline for theories of the military profession in America.

Keywords

military profession, civil–military relations, expertise, military ethic, domestic politics

Over the past decade, the American armed services have witnessed a near-constant

stream of so-called ethical lapses from the abuse of detainees by enlistees to cheating

on nuclear power training exams by junior officers to drunken and disorderly beha-

vior by general and flag staff officers. Spanning rank, specialty, and service, these

1

Center for Research on Military Organization, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

Corresponding Author:

Thomas Crosbie, Center for Res earch on Military Organizati on, University of Maryland, 2112 Art-

Sociology, College Park, MD 20742, USA.

Email: tcrosbie@umd.edu

Armed Forces & Society

2018, Vol. 44(3) 521-543

ªThe Author(s) 2017

Reprints and permission:

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0095327X17715437

journals.sagepub.com/home/afs

“lapses” have given rise to a flood of criticism by journalists and piercing calls for

reform from politicians. In response, American military leaders have pointed to the

paired concepts of profession and professionalism as the solution.

Military professionalism has long been a standard topic of research by social

scientists interested in war and military affairs (Boene, 2000; Kestnbaum, 2009;

Moskos, 1977; Segal, 1993). As the key concept in Janowitz’s (1960) landmark

study The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait, professionalism had

particular influence over the development of the field of military sociology (Burk,

1993). It is also one of the field’s most successful exports, featuring widely in

internal military conversations both domestically and abroad. And yet, it is a concept

based on outdated empirical research with deep chasms in how it is understood and

implemented by military organizations.

In this article, we use the classical conceptualizations of the military profession

developed by Samuel P. Huntington and Morris Janowitz to resituate the problem of

ethical lapses as instead one of the three fault lines in the contemporary American

military profession, unfolding alongside crises in military expertise and identity. The

three fault lines reveal at once the large scale of the challenges facing the American

armed services and our very limited social scientific understanding of those prob-

lems. We end by emphasizing the need for future research to establish an updated

empirical baseline for theories of the military profession in America.

Professionalism Problems

Any public agency in a hypermediated democracy has good reason to take the

danger of scandals and public opprobrium seriously (Adut, 2005). Unwanted

publicity can have lasting consequences on everything from talent management to

the bottom line. For militaries, negative publicity can also generate problems in the

strategic domain, since enemies may use such incidences to fuel propaganda and

otherwise undermine the legitimacy of a state’s foreign affairs. For the past decade

or so, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has served as an extreme case for

understanding the effects of near-constant scandal on a state agency (Crosbie, 2014;

Crosbie and Sass, 2016). For the purposes of this article, we focus exclusively on

what these scandals can teach us about the changing nature of the American military

profession. What is perhaps most obvious from even a cursory glance at the list of

recent scandals is the overwhelming concern by critics inside and outside the mil-

itary with ethical lapses.

The Department of the Army, the largest of the three branches, has had a difficult

decade, facing major scandals from Abu Ghraib in 2004 to Walter Reed in 2010, in

addition to the downfall of its two most prominent generals, David Petraeus and

Stanley A. McChrystal, and a charge of atrocity against one of its most celebrated

units in the Iraqi town of Al-Mahmudiyah (Frederick, 2010). Army intellectuals

have noted the failure to maintain standards in the professional military education

(PME) program (C. D. Allen, 2010; Johnson-Freese, 2013). Army officers have

522 Armed Forces & Society 44(3)