Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Academic Exchange Quarterly

Early ethics education at USNA.

Article Excerpt
The United States has long held to a tradition of following a strict code of conduct when fighting wars. The means of inculcating that code have ranged from implicit mentoring aboard ships or the battlefield, to explicit classes in moral philosophy at the service academies. Consensus, however, has never been achieved on the appropriate means or methods for the moral education of war fighters. Even today, the debate rages over whether the military is being held to a higher moral standard than the civilian society, [1] or whether the means of fighting new global threats should include practices that were formerly forbidden. As each military branch struggles with crafting an appropriate code of conduct for their professions in the twenty-first century, the lessons of history serve as a template for the drafting of that code of conduct

The formative years of the newly established nation gave rise to a struggle concerning the function of a military. On one hand, Thomas Jefferson readily acknowledged the necessity of a military-trained engineering force to build the nation, but the sentiment against a standing military ran strong throughout the colonies. An army, it was argued, could fulfill the needs of an emerging nation but a standing navy was rejected as "being against the democratic principle of the new republic. [2] Jefferson's opponent on the establishment of a naval force, John Adams, wrote to his friend John Paul Jones in 1782, that:

nothing gives me so much surprise, or so much regret, as the inattention of countrymen to their navy; it is a bulwark as essential as it is to Great Britain. It is less costly than armies; and more easily removed from one end of the United States to the other. [3]

Adams' plea fell on deaf ears and only episodic national defense crises kept the rudimentary naval militia in existence after the Revolution, but they lacked the equipment and training to be considered a viable force for purposes beyond a coastal defense. The nation's inability to agree to a standing navy would not be resolved until the latter part of the nineteenth century; prior to that shift in vision the officers who dedicated their lives to the calling of the navy were an isolated group who sought refuge in their insularity. The resulting shipboard ethos was formed by a unique educational process that served the organization and the nation...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!