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It isn't hard to see why the culture of truth telling eroded in the military. The first time an officer doesn't turn the box on a slide green is when the transformation starts. Maybe he turned it amber, or god forbid... red. That's when he got yelled at. "How come your unit isn't green but everyone else is? What's wrong with you? Why are you worse than these other commanders?" Nobody likes to get yelled at. And most young officers don't want to rock the boat and hurt their career chances, so they play the game. The unit may not really be green, but by god, they are now on the slide. The commander is now happy in the lie. And the subordinates are happy too. But now, since the first lie has been told, now it's a competition over who can tell the BEST lie. This is where the officer transitions into a human LinkedIn post. Adding flowery language to terrible reports to make everything sound amazing. Fast forward even further, and now you're a General. You've learned nothing but how to be a professional at perpetuating this folly. But the entire scheme is built on one load bearing attribute: hope. Hope that the units they are reporting on won't get tested. Hope that America is strong enough to deter any would-be adversaries. And hope that even if our units are bad, that the enemy's are worse. Hope has worked out from time to time. Unless you're a poor soul standing at Abbey Gate on 26 August 2021. Then hope straight up failed. What you're seeing in the military is just a microcosm of the nation at large though. Maybe even western civilization itself. Look at who the majority of people love. The leader who can deliver bad news in the best way. The one who can twist the truth to make a horrible thing feel not so bad. Conversely, look at how society responds to the blunt truth teller. They just want him to stop talking. Because living in a lie is more comfortable than facing the truth. It always is. In order to fix the military, it must be radically transformed at the top. Not with civilians, with uniformed members. All it takes is one senior general infected with radical candor to force the rest of the uniforms in his image. Like a George Marshall. But George Marshall would never ascend the military hierarchy in 2026. He didn't have the right "credentials". And therein lies the main issue. You can skip a SECWAR from O4 to the top in a suit. But you can't take an O7 and turn him into an O10 like Marshall. If we want radical candor back in uniform, the only thing left is to do something radical to achieve it.

It is my professional assessment after decades in uniform that the single greatest threat to military readiness is the U.S. Army officer corps’ inability to tell the truth. For decades, the readiness culture has been built on literal lies, and must be rebuilt from the ground up.

You don’t understand. You think you do, but you don’t. A great majority of U.S. Army officers are incapable of telling the truth. It is a feature of the system, not a bug. The higher up they get, the more lies they’ve been willing to tell. Not all, but most. This has not always been the way of things. This is the GWOT way of things. If you attempt to speak the truth in a system built on lies, you get attacked like an immune system strikes a virus. This isn’t me trying to take cheap shots at them. I’ve tried for years to spell this out in elevated prose where applicable. I can’t best around the bush anymore. Any institution that attacks the truth no longer serves the greater good. It’s merely serving itself.