Army Officers Lie All the Time, Study Shows

WP

"A new study by Army War College professors found that not only is lying common in the military, the armed forces themselves may be inadvertently encouraging it.

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The new study found that many Army officers have become “ethically numb” in the face of overwhelming demands and the need to put their reputations on the line to verify that all required standards and training requirements have been met.

The issue affects the whole military, but the professors focused their effort on the Army because they are the most familiar with it, they wrote. They interviewed scores of officers, from captains to colonels, at several bases on the East Coast, many of whom bristled initially at the notion they colored the truth, the report said.

“When pressed for specifics on how they managed, officers tended to dodge the issue with statements such as, ‘You gotta make priorities, we met the intent, or we got creative,’ ” the report said. “Eventually words and phrases such as ‘hand waving, fudging, massaging, or checking the box’ would surface to sugarcoat the hard reality that, in order to satisfy compliance with the surfeit of directed requirements from above, officers resort to evasion and deception.”

“In other words, in the routine performance of their duties as leaders and commanders, U.S. Army officers lie,” the paper concludes."