The cynicism of the apostate

Sometimes, trust is violated so profoundly that it changes one’s entire worldview

*** NOTE: The Declaration of Military Accountability came out while I was writing this article. I support the sentiment behind it, but I am not sure that I’m ready to endorse it fully. Most particularly, it’s not clear to me that all the listed individuals broke the law, per se. They may have twisted it, and they make have snuck through loopholes, but I don’t know that a crime was committed. While it might be very satisfying to take out our frustration on the listed individuals, we must not turn into a mob.

Also, I personally know one of the Generals listed in the Declaration. He is the most kind, decent, and humane man I’ve ever met.

For these two reasons, I am hesitant to say that we should snatch all those people out of their homes and drag them to the town square for a public execution. The organization has clearly failed. Each individual should be given the opportunity to present his or her case.

There is no one quite as zealous as a convert.

Conventional wisdom holds that those who convert to a belief tend to be more devoted, more outspoken, and more sure of their new affiliation than those who grew up in it. This is often called “the Zeal of the Convert”. It’s backed up by science, to an extent.

Trust is built in drops and lost in buckets.

A more humorous version of the above is the “you fuck one goat…” story. Either way, the message is that it doesn’t matter if you spend your entire life filling up a bucket one drop at a time; all it takes is one good kick to spill the whole thing—and that will be the defining feature of your life.

The syllogism built from combining these two statements would be: “there is no one quite as disillusioned as one who’s been betrayed”. Taking the antonyms of “zeal” and “convert”, we might call this “the cynicism of the apostate”—though it doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as nicely.

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The military wants its officers to lie. Don’t take my word for it, read for yourself.

If you don’t feel like following the link, here’s the Cliffs Notes version: unit-level military leaders (junior and mid-level officers) are given an impossibly long list of tasks that must be accomplished. This many days on the range practicing small arms marksmanship; this many hours of computer-based training on DEI and Law of War and Cyber Awareness; this many days in field exercises; suicide prevention, human trafficking prevention, sexual assault prevention, etc. It turns out that when you add it all up, the total amount of time required is literally (yes, literally) greater than the amount of time in between combat rotations. So the officer has a choice: certify that all tasks were properly performed—in other words, knowingly lie—or else report that the unit is not fully trained—and therefore, unable to deploy. Spoiler alert: officers whose units are not ready on schedule don’t tend to have long and successful careers in the military.¹

So what do you do? You lie, of course. You lie and you execute the fucking mission. And when you’re done and take a moment to think about it, you realize that you’re not the only one, or the first one. You realize that lying—knowingly, intentionally—is what everyone does. Because they have to.

What I learned from DoD Cyber Awareness: if a guy you don’t know contacts you through your digital devices, says he’s from the future, and tells you to do various computer-related tasks at the office and in your home—you should TOTALLY do it!

When “integrity” is one of your core values, and you know you and everyone around you must lie in order to perform the mission, this generates a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. “I have to be honest and trustworthy, but I must lie or else I fail at my job, but I can’t compromise my integrity, but I have to or else I fail and my unit fails its mission…”

This cognitive dissonance builds up over time, but it also fades into the background; you get used to it. It’s just a part of the life, a cost of doing business. You stack up rationalizations to keep the dissonance at bay as you slowly drift away from your personal ethical baseline.

Not even our most prestigious units and our most elite warriors are immune. US Special Operations Command, after a string of embarrassing—and deadly—incidents, conducted a Comprehensive Review of its culture and ethics. It found that preoccupation with mission accomplishment had led to a culture of corner-cutting and impunity. Leaders turned a blind eye toward minor infractions, which opened the Overton window more and more, leading to ever-greater violations.

But sometimes, the contradiction is so deep—the contrast with reality so vivid—that it’s just not possible to reconcile it. This brings the Jenga tower of rationalizations tumbling down, and forces you confront the vast gulf that has gradually—so gradually that you didn’t even notice—opened up between your own personal core values and the expectations of the organization.

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The military is a machine; a great lumbering juggernaut. It’s a collection of cogs, wheels, pulleys, and gears (and yes, quite a few shafts). Any two components might be closely linked; however, the farther apart any two offices, agencies, or departments are, the looser the coupling between them.

So it’s not surprising—disappointing, but not surprising—when one part of this machine takes action that makes no apparent sense, or is even harmful. The fact is, some decisionmaking entities are far removed from the effects they generate. This leads to decisions that, while made for ostensibly good reasons, are still bad decisions. It is incumbent on all of us, but especially on the mid-level managers and leaders, to identify when this happens and to help the machine correct course. We all do our part and the world keeps on spinning.

In a previous assignment, let’s say to Unit A, I witnessed such a correction. An office within the Pentagon, seeking to save money, reduced a special pay bonus that’s paid to personnel who perform a certain vital and highly stressful job—let’s call it Job X. Understandably, this damaged morale and sent the absolute wrong message at a time when the people doing Job X were especially needed. Our mid-level leaders, and—to his great credit, our 2-star General—made a big stink about it, and the pay bonus was restored.

Like I said: disappointing, but not surprising. Most importantly, not irreversible. Someone made a bad decision, we provided feedback, the decision was reversed, everyone was more or less happy again. This sort of thing happens. The leaders did what they’re supposed to do: they took care of the people. The basic order of things was restored.

And crucially, this maintained our trust in the basic deal between us and the military machine: that decisions are made in good faith, that the system responds to feedback, and that mistakes—which will inevitably happen—get corrected.

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But sometimes, this mechanism fails. Bad decisions are made, but the feedback fails to change anything.

While at Unit A, performing Job X, we were issued the DoD COVID vaccine mandate. Most got the shot. Nobody flat-out refused; that’s the sort of thing that got people booted out for disobeying orders. Four members of the unit—let’s call them the Beatles—were strongly opposed to it, and pursued all the lawful exemptions they could: first medical, then religious.

To be perfectly honest, I (the commander of Unit A) didn’t truly believe that the Beatles all had deeply held religious beliefs that prohibited them from getting the shot; I think that they just really, really didn’t want to get the COVID vaccine. Fortunately, I didn’t have to make that determination. We had a military Chaplain meet with each of the four; the Chaplain, being an expert on matters of faith, certified that each of them had properly articulated a sincere belief that prevented them from getting the shot. No matter how I personally felt about the Beatles’ requests for religious exemptions, it was my duty, as their commander, to fight for them and their rights. As long as it didn’t impact the mission, of course (which it didn’t).

Armed with this and secure in the righteousness of my position, I assembled all the paperwork and submitted it through my chain of command all the way up for approval. My basic reasoning was this:

• Forcing the Beatles to get the vaccine would cause them irreparable harm by forcing them to violate their (properly certified) sincere beliefs

• They can do their current assigned jobs without the vaccine

• If there ever comes a time when they can no longer do their jobs without being vaccinated, then and only then we should force them to decide whether to vaccinate or leave the military; but for now, we should approve their Religious Accommodation Requests

The response I got was that all Airmen have to be ready to perform the full range of their mission at all times. Since the Beatles were not vaccinated, they were not ready to perform the full range of missions (even ones that they weren’t assigned at the time). Therefore, all four Religious Accommodation Requests were denied.

So naturally, I did what any good bureaucrat would do: I slow-rolled. I procrastinated, requested extensions, filed appeals, stretched everything out to its absolute deadline and beyond. I did everything I could to make the process go as slowly as possible, hoping that the vaccine mandate would be rescinded—which it was, eventually, though that took too long. In the meantime, the Beatles were running out their clocks on active duty and nearing the magical date when they could apply for retirement.² Two of them eventually gave in and got the shot; I don’t know what more I could have done, but I still feel like I failed them. The other two reached retirement eligibility and punched out; they left the military but kept their well-earned pensions and retirement benefits.

Moral or immoral, legal or illegal, the vaccine mandate was a bad decision from an organizational point of view. Seeing the DoD stick with its bad decision despite being offered a better way—knowing what this decision was doing to morale and mission accomplishment! knowing that we were forcing good Airmen out of the service!—was, for me, what’s known as a “significant emotional event”. It kicked my bucket right the hell over.

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I had heard about the vaccine injuries, the questionable Emergency Use Authorization, the equivocal-to-disastrous study data, and all the other anti-vaccine arguments. I wasn’t sure, one way or the other—who can believe everything they read on the Interwebs?—so I trusted in my chain of command when they told me, told all of us, that the vaccine is necessary, safe, and effective. I got the shot, because I didn’t think it was that big a deal. It was important to the DoD, and there wasn’t any harm in it, so why not?

When this chain of command demonstrated that it had zero interest in logical arguments, when it showed a complete disregard for our rights for no reason at all except to enforce obedience—that’s when I lost that trust.

I still trust my peers, those on my left and right. We depend on each other during our battles—literal and metaphorical—and we couldn’t function any other way. There are some I wouldn’t trust, of course, because they’ve shown themselves to be untrustworthy, but at least I know who they are.

I still trust my immediate superiors, those who are one or two echelons above me. I personally know them to be good and decent Americans; even when they’re occasionally wrong, they are sincere and they fix their mistakes. Again, this doesn’t apply to all of them—some are not worthy of trust—but I know who they are.

I no longer trust our senior leaders at the DoD and above.

And while this change of heart was precipitated by the COVID vaccine mandate, it now extends far beyond that one topic. It’s made me re-examine everything I’ve ever been told by the military and by our government. For two decades of military service, my default assumption in any given situation was that I’m being told the truth and given all the information I need. Now, my default assumption is that I’m being manipulated.

I may be later to this realization than some, but I’m now one of the growing number of Americans who are losing trust in our Nation’s institutions. This mass disillusionment, while both understandable and justified, is dangerous: it’s making us weak and divided as a society, even as we face off against ever-bolder rivals. Our leaders overplayed their hand and piled the lies just a little too high; in the process, they turned our nation’s vitality into just another victim of “death with COVID”.

1. Yes, there also exists Option #3: be a leader, make a command decision, and choose which training that gets done—skipping the rest. Which one will you skip: the field training and shooting practice that ensures your soldiers can fight, or the legally mandated, reportable DEI training that makes some Congresscreature happy? Or will you choose Option #3a: pretend to do the computer-based training and report it as complete (again, knowingly lie)?

2. The traditional military retirement eligibility is at 20 years of active duty service. Once you reach 19 years, you can “hit the button” to apply for retirement 1 year out. There are many complicated rules governing this, but the simple version is that this places you in a protected status: someone with an approved retirement date can’t be involuntarily separated from the military (unless they commit a crime or something). Someone who doesn’t yet have an approved retirement date might be separated involuntarily, meaning that they won’t receive a pension or any other retirement benefits—even if they served 16, 17, or 18 years. Again, this is a simplification, but it’s enough to convey the idea.