"I Refuse" — Disobeying Orders Implies Leadership Failure

Copyright © 2004 by Don Blohowiak
Don@LeadWell.com www.LeadWell.com

Fighting a war with a huge component of "citizen soldiers" -- reservists and National Guard troops -- means that a civilian mentality is brought into the military under fire in a war zone.

This reality came into stark relief a week ago today. Eighteen members of a U.S. Army Reserve unit, the 343rd Quartermaster Company, tried to talk their superiors out of sending them on what they believed was a suicide mission.

When their attempts at persuasion failed, these part-time soldiers refused a direct order to drive a fuel convoy to supply fellow comrades-in-arms. (And, in another implication-ladened twist of waging war in our high-tech era, these frontline troops proceeded to call and email the folks back home to tell them about the incident.)

Serving in the military is different than toiling in the civilian workplace. Military leaders must be prepared to send their troops to their death. And soldiers must be prepared to go there willingly. That's the deal. And every soldier, each a volunteer, knows it.

If there is an overriding ethos in today's military, it is this: The Mission must be accomplished. Refusing a lawful order, even one that reasonably implies harm or death, challenges the traditions, the discipline, and the order that are specifically designed to protect warriors on the life-threatening battlefront. Disobeying orders carries the seeds of destroying from within the very institution of the military itself.

Making Sense of This Troubling Story

Does this unusual, dramatic, and apparently exceptional incident present the rest of us, observing and contemplating these events at a safe distance of thousands of miles from the war zone, with a clear case of right and wrong?

Hardly.

Those 18 defiant soldiers went willingly and bravely to the war zone. By all accounts, before not following their orders they raised legitimate concerns: About the safety of their trucks, the integrity of their payload, and the lack of protection for their excursion through notoriously dangerous territory.

Did their refusing direct orders amount to treasonous mutiny? Apparently not. The refuseniks are still on duty in Iraq. (A sign of how thinly stretched the U.S. military ranks are?)

Ultimately, this incident speaks to a failure of leadership -- at many levels. As the New York Times concluded in an editorial yesterday:

An Army where discipline breaks down can neither accomplish its mission nor protect its own troops. Once the facts have been established, the men and women who refused the mission can expect to be held accountable. It seems far less likely that Mr. Rumsfeld and his civilian associates will ever have to answer for their egregious failures of planning, imagination and leadership.

[Originally posted 20 October 2004]

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