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At a military training base in the southern U.S., tensions ran high. A minority enlisted service member returned to his work area only to find that a noose had been left on a chair. When it was discovered who left it, the situation went from bad to worse. It had been the unit commander.

After an investigation by the immediate chain of command, it was determined that the situation was an unfortunate misunderstanding — the noose had apparently been left on the chair by accident. Over the next several months, senior leaders continued to emphasize the importance of “tolerance” through training programs while the officer remained in command.

A lot has changed over the last 50 years, but not as much as we’d like to think. This event occurred in October 2007.

Since World War II, the U.S. military has emerged as an iconic example of diversity and tolerance. In nearly every unit across the branches of service today, you will find men and women from every race, religion and creed serving side by side as one fighting force in the defense of our nation. But the diversity evident in today’s military isn’t the result of a deliberate strategy to create an inclusive organizational culture as much as the result of an emergent strategy where the integration of minority groups has been resisted at every turn. The Defense Department has embraced diversity within its ranks primarily because it has been forced to do so by its civilian masters.

In 1948, President Truman decisively ended racial segregation in the military by executive order. Although racial equality was achieved with the stroke of a pen, the integration of women across the roles of military service proved to be more complicated and continued to lag for several more decades. Despite it being one of the most hotly contested social issues in U.S. military history, Congress eventually took the lead in the mid-1970s by giving women appointments to the military academies. But it would be another 20 years before women received equal opportunity in select combat roles. The lessons born out of the history of integration of the military are becoming clear: Determining the “right” social policy governing military service in the U.S. was one of the most contentious and politically heated topics from the end of World War II to the end of the Cold War, and it promises to dominate the political stage for the foreseeable future. One needs to look no further than the ongoing debates as to the role of religion in the military or the merits of allowing openly gay people to serve as America continues the war on terrorism. The challenges that military leaders face as to how best to deal with the internal effects of these contentious social issues are not trivial. As a result, the military has become a bastion for tolerance — out of necessity.

How to prevent discrimination, and worse, harassment, inside the ranks presents a perpetual concern for senior leadership. Over the past 50 years, the persistent need to overcome internal cultural barriers to the integration of minority groups into the services has led military organizations to put great effort into creating an environment of tolerance. Through many years of dedicated effort, the armed forces successfully integrated across the declared racial and gender barriers and emerged as an exemplar for other organizations.

The secret to its success was really no secret at all:

n Establish clear policy guidance as to the expectations for all service members.

n Provide sufficient training on the policy to ensure the expectations are communicated and understood by everyone.

n Punish those who don’t comply.

As past and present military members can attest, countless hours have been spent in various training sessions devoted to making each individual in uniform more tolerant of those who are different from them in some way. The solution seemed obvious: When faced with the prospect of increasing diversity within the workforce, it is necessary to create an environment for tolerance to minimize the occurrence of discrimination and/or harassment.

Thus, when military organizations recently found themselves amid a resurgence of social crises involving discrimination and harassment in the realm of gender, race and religion, particularly at the service academies, the natural response was to create more briefings and conduct more tolerance training. The prevailing belief held that increased tolerance training would directly translate to decreases in observed discriminatory behavior. However, it is quite possible that what the military needs now is not more tolerance and less discrimination but, rather, just the opposite. It seems that despite its best intentions, the military may have become too tolerant of tolerance.

We advance a holistic view of how military organizations approach the development of desired values, attitudes and beliefs toward diversity, discrimination and tolerance of others. We argue that despite the best efforts and intentions, the secondary effects of current approaches to promoting diversity awareness are at best ineffective and possibly even harmful. In the end, fostering appropriate attitudes of inclusion and respect can be achieved only by re-establishing the purity of how military organizations socialize their newest members in how they view one another. When these socialization mechanisms become tainted by key members in the organization (such as instructors and commanders), junior members are unknowingly led to think in terms of in-groups and out-groups, resulting in increased potential for divisiveness and harassment. It is time for leadership across the branches of service to critically evaluate how they take a heterogeneous sample of Americans and develop the correct attitudes, values and beliefs toward one another in the pursuit of the shared goal of defending our nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

ON TOLERANCE

The word “tolerate,” despite its generally accepted endorsement as a method of dealing with others who are different, does not connote a positive message. “Tolerate,” defined as “to put up with” or “to endure,” has become the standard by which military members are to relate with others who are different. A critical analysis of tolerance reveals two necessary conditions for it to exist in an interpersonal setting. First, there must be a noted difference between two or more individuals, such as race, gender, religion or sexual orientation. Second, there must be an internal choice not to allow the noted difference to affect the relationship with others within the organization.

The problem that emerges by promoting tolerance as an accepted method of human relations is that there is no way to ascertain what the individual attitude might be toward the noted difference observed in others. Indeed, all that separates intolerant behavior from tolerant behavior is a conscious effort to suppress an attitude that otherwise might yield an unwillingness to put up with others who differ in some way. And yet, tolerance training remains at the center of our diversity initiatives and social crisis response efforts. Implicitly, the mere use of the word tolerance leads individuals to believe that they don’t have to like the difference observed in another, but they must put up with it.

This observation is not an indictment of diversity training. In fact, it is quite the contrary — diversity training exists out of necessity. Organizations must establish a baseline for people of different backgrounds to come together and work with one another in the pursuit of institutional goals. Without such training, individual attitudes and beliefs toward others might otherwise go unchecked, leading to bigotry and harassment. Properly structured diversity training must pursue the primary objective of identifying and eliminating harmful stereotypes. To demonstrate a need for a change in perspective, it is necessary to start by highlighting a relevant difference. But where most diversity training programs fall short is in their failure to consider the secondary effects that the highlighting of differences might catalyze.

The desired outcome of any diversity training session should be to foster a sense of awareness on the part of the trainee and an expectation that the training will result in an individual’s willingness to accept and embrace the noted differences. But those who design the training also must consider to what extent the training might create a sense of in-groups and out-groups by directing attention to the particular highlighted attribute. Psychological research has repeatedly demonstrated that in-groups tend to develop a sense of superiority toward out-groups, even under the most artificially created laboratory experimental conditions. Out-groups can be tolerated, but they are often tolerated as an inferior group, and the very act of tolerating reinforces the sense of superiority the in-group holds. Such a secondary effect could be quite harmful and counterproductive to the original intent of programs designed to teach tolerance. Leaders simply cannot ignore the proximate effects that tolerance training initiatives can impose on organizational members to “put up with” or “endure” others who are observed to be different is some fashion.

The emphasis of any diversity training must focus on the individual level because only at that level can a true recognition emerge that no two individuals are the same. Few people would question the assertion that all individuals are different. But when judgments are made comparing others with oneself, absent a deep knowledge of the other person, a critical analysis of the noted differences often is stopped short at the highest and most observable level (gender, skin color, accent, etc.). And yet, a focus on these incomplete comparisons is precisely what traditional diversity training desires to eliminate. People are taught not to discriminate on such irrelevant attributes because there is no correlation with job performance. The generic message that discrimination is bad leads most people to believe that it always results in stereotypical judgments that are not merit-based. But perhaps this is where the wrong message is being communicated. The act of discrimination is not only good, it also is absolutely necessary.

In its purest form, discrimination is an essential element in the daily functioning of both organizations and individuals. Organizations routinely discriminate among individuals to identify the best candidates for a particular job. Society wouldn’t tolerate blind pilots, asthmatic firefighters or autistic neurosurgeons. Under U.S. law, it is entirely permissible for organizations to discriminate among competing candidates to select those whom they believe to be the best qualified, provided there exist legitimate criteria by which the discriminatory actions are based. At the individual level, everyone demonstrates discriminating behavior on a daily basis. Without active and healthy discrimination, we would have a hard time getting through the day. We are constantly bombarded with stimuli and information — so much so that we cannot possibly comprehend it all. The same is true in our dealings with others. Given the impossibility of knowing everything there is to know about someone, we initially take many unconscious shortcuts to arrive at initial judgments about them using the attributes and characteristics we can readily observe and define. Yet when such cognitive shortcuts are used, the discriminatory value is often minimal to nonexistent.

This is where discrimination yields negative results — when it is stopped short and incomplete. But if the discrimination process is taken to a point where all salient attributes are evaluated, the result identifies the person as a unique individual — different from any other person. Thus, the only way that a discrimination analysis can produce any meaningful results is to consciously determine what attributes matter to the judgment at hand and invoke sufficient cognitive effort to judge the individual on the merits of the attribute.

Clearly, it is nonsense to suggest that we should not discriminate. What is needed is a concerted effort to refine our discrimination skills to the point where gender, ethnicity and race become far too general and superficial to be of any discriminatory value. At the point where individuals are inclined to make discriminatory judgments about irrelevant attributes, they should be encouraged instead to take the discriminating analysis as far as it can be taken. In doing so, trainees will discover that by taking discriminating judgments to the extreme, everyone differs from one another on just about every attribute imaginable and thus, discriminating judgments are useful only when they are tied to some level of performance. Once this level of discrimination is achieved, highlighting in-group/out-group events such as “Diversity Month” become immediately obsolete.

A deep understanding of the power of discrimination reveals the most critical aspect of fostering a positive organizational climate: Celebrating individual differences (not in-group differences) is at the root of organizational effectiveness. Regardless of skin color, religious affiliation, gender or sexual orientation, each individual within the organization brings a portfolio of perspectives, ideas, experiences and capabilities to contribute to the institutional goals. Creating a sense of acceptance of individual differences among organization members is merely a first step along a continuum in creating an inclusive and cohesive environment. If the ultimate goal is to develop a sense of perceived equity between individuals in an organization that transcends individual differences, perhaps if we taught members to be more discriminating, we would have less of a need for tolerance training.

The possibility for the military to advance along the continuum beyond tolerance and on to a desired end-state of inclusion hinges on its ability to create an environment in which the appropriate discrimination skills can be taught and learned. It is unlikely that such skills could be achieved under the current methods involving the standard training, such as tasking a trainer to develop and deliver a boilerplate block of training each year. Briefing the importance of going beyond distinctions among race, gender and ethnicity to find relevant levels of discrimination that support organizational effectiveness is likely insufficient and counterproductive. Although training is certainly important, it is never enough to transform an organization’s culture. Given the “culture of tolerance” that has developed over the past 60 years of social integration of the U.S. armed forces, what is needed now is not more training but, rather, the implementation of a robust socialization process. Fortunately, the socialization of new organizational members is an area in which the modern military has earned a well-deserved reputation for superior results. However, as with any socialization process, such a tool should not be taken for granted, as its misuse or abuse could have far-reaching consequences well beyond those which are intended.

ON SOCIALIZATION

In every society, risks sometimes must be endured to achieve some greater good and, thus, societies may give license to certain professions to wield powerful and potentially dangerous tools. Surgeons are allowed to cut into the human body with razor-sharp scalpels. Police officers are permitted to use deadly force against citizens who place others at peril. Pharmacists are permitted to mix and dispense powerful concoctions to prevent illness and pain. But when it comes to the military, society yields a tool that can be more dangerous than any scalpel, weapon or drug. It is the tool of socialization.

Socialization is the way our military takes immensely diverse and heterogeneous people from our population and recasts them as a single and homogeneous type. Socialization of citizens into uniformed members of the armed services is essential to the discipline and subservience that society requires of a capable military force. It is a deliberate set of indoctrination tactics that results in changing how individuals view themselves and their role in society. Individuals are transformed from citizens to combatants. They become the obedient servants of the nation and are prepared to do its bidding wherever, however and whenever it is asked of them.

Socialization can be an immensely effective tool, having the dual capacity to do both great good and great harm. Thus, it is essential that it be entrusted to those who use it with extensive knowledge and discipline. Just as surgeons are expected to be impeccable in the sterility of the operating room, it is no less important for society to insist that military leadership exercise the highest levels of prudence when entrusted to use socialization tools. Purity of use is the minimum standard.

Socialization is the process by which people, beginning in infancy, learn to become effective participants in social relationships. Psychologists have long studied the processes of socialization and its outcomes. One of the earliest essays on the subject, written in 1919 by Edward A. Ross, defined socialization as the “development of the ‘we’ feeling in associates and their growth in capacity and will to act together.” This observation that individuals sharing a master experience were likely to bond with one another foretold of the prevailing mind-set that would dominate the U.S. military’s approach to the socialization of new recruits into the 21st century.

As early as 1955, researchers studying socialization processes at the Coast Guard Academy discovered that from the moment individuals enter an organization, they are both formally and informally socialized into the organization’s culture. It also revealed that a person’s earliest experiences in an organization are the most formative in their development within the organization. Prospective members going through a socialization process are more receptive to organizational cues during this period than they ever will be again, and what is learned during the initial stage becomes the core of the individual’s organizational identity.

Once an individual decides join an organization such as the military, a considerably strong desire develops to become an integral part of it. Because of this desire, there exists a considerable motivation to conform. With such a high need for conformance and a desire to become an integral part of the organization, new members are exceptionally vulnerable to role-modeling. Thus, it is incumbent on the organization to take great effort to select those ideal organizational citizens that will become the exemplars in terms of organizationally sanctioned attitudes, behaviors and values that will profoundly influence new recruits. In the military, these exemplars who wield the most influence early on in the socialization process are the training instructors and commanders.

Newcomers to the military are particularly vulnerable because of their near-absolute dependence on the organization for almost everything. Having been virtually stripped of their former identity early in the socialization process, they are placed in a situation in which they must establish a new identity to survive, one that is in the desired mold of the military caste. In this state, they are particularly dependent on role models as sources of information. They also are dependent on the system to show them what new behaviors are desired. At this stage, their dependence is nearly complete. They are dependent on the organization for their basic needs for sustenance, they are dependent on the system for their social needs, and they are dependent on the organization for their personal growth and development needs. This high level of dependency presents an omnipotent source of power for the organization and those who represent the organization. It is hard to overstate the potential influence role models have on individuals during these highly dependent and vulnerable states. But this is precisely what makes socialization so effective in transforming individuals into the desired organizational citizens.

During a socialization process, recruits can easily be taught to discriminate between attitudes and behaviors that are consistent with the institutional values and those that are not. For instance, there is a reason why military units don’t conduct tolerance training for eye color, music preference and one’s favorite reading genre. The reason is obvious — these are irrelevant attributes. During basic training, recruits are instead socialized into believing that the only permissible form of discrimination in the military is the ability to do a job. To the extent that the socialization process is not contaminated, this approach would be complete in preventing undesired discrimination. It would be unlikely that a future need would occur for any form of tolerance training because the only differences recruits would be socialized to see would be those that limit others’ abilities to do their job.

Unfortunately, a string of reports documenting senior officers injecting their personal beliefs into the developmental programs at military academies and training units over the past few years indicates that the socialization processes of the U.S. military aren’t as pure as they need to be. The danger from a socialization perspective emerges when an organizational exemplar (be it a drill sergeant, instructor, commander or general officer) elects to infuse his or her idiosyncratic perspective into the process. As a result of the power these exemplars have in terms of their organizational status, their perspective easily can infect the organizationally sanctioned message while remaining indistinguishable to the lower-level members. Such covert modifications to the process result in an in-group mentality based on the socialization contaminants.

A significant part of the problem emerges from the structure that permits exemplars to infuse their own attitudes, values and beliefs into the socialization process as proxies for those that are organizationally sanctioned. Senior officers often are given free license to inject their own perspective into training processes, in the belief that they know best. But then the senior officer changes assignments two years later and turns over everything to someone else, who will change the training program to fit his own worldview. This structural instability fosters variations in the expectations of the desired behaviors, which inevitably derails the socialization processes on a path to nowhere good. The short-term result: more tolerance training at some future date. The long-term result: explaining to the public why a scandal emerged.

The most prominent and recent examples of military leadership injecting personal perspectives into socialization processes (as noted in these pages in “A Question of Faith,” January) dealing with religious preference are profound. As newcomers pursuing entry into the military become immersed in the institutional socialization processes, they are often unable to disassociate the contaminated aspects from the pure aspects. The result is that they are socialized to recognize the merit that some religious beliefs have over others in the course of military service. Thus, it should come as no surprise that religious harassment emerges from the system, and also that the institutional response will be to conduct tolerance training to “fix” the problem. The lesson that cannot be forgotten is that every system is perfectly designed to yield the behaviors observed. To the extent that impermissible discrimination emerges, it is quite likely because it was designed into the socialization process.

ON INCLUSION

Although the domains of race and gender seem to be settled when it comes to the roles they play in military service, it seems equally clear that the domains of religion and sexual orientation will dominate social policy discussions for the foreseeable future. If history is our guide, we can gauge that the diversity within the U.S. military is destined to become more diverse, not less. And thus, the military has an opportunity to unilaterally reflect and critically re-evaluate how it can best mitigate the effects of impermissible discrimination in the future. The military social structure has progressed beyond the point where tolerance training can provide any future value. To achieve a level of inclusion and respect among all military members, basic training (socialization) programs should refine their focus on teaching all recruits the necessity of becoming highly discriminatory in the identification and evaluation of attributes that will profoundly affect the military’s ability to wage and win wars in the future. Service members must be socialized to refrain from incomplete discriminatory comparisons that deal with irrelevant attributes and instead learn to fully discriminate across the domains of values (such as loyalty and integrity) and required behaviors for successful soldiers (such as conformity and creativity). As a first step, the word “tolerate” should be stricken from the military lexicon. Men and women in uniform should not be encouraged “to put up” with each other. Instead, they should be socialized to look beyond classifications such as race, religion, sexual orientation and gender and instead focus on attributes that directly relate to a person’s ability to do the job assigned.

Unfortunately, despite the military’s unparalleled success as an organizational leader in developing and implementing socialization mechanisms, it is likely that these mechanisms will continue to be ineffective toward the socially contested views of the roles that religion and sexual orientation have on military service. Socialization can work only if the process is pure — free from contaminants. Until leaders are held accountable for sanctioning inappropriate behaviors (such as proselytizing and overt homophobia), the socialization processes relied upon by the military will continue to reinforce an in-group mentality and a mantra that everyone should be tolerant of everyone else.

Given this landscape, it should come as no surprise that the next social crisis is likely just around the corner. After all, every system is perfectly designed to yield the behaviors observed. For socialization to be maximally effective, it is imperative that congruence exists among the various messages that are sent to everyone in uniform. But until the actions and behaviors of military leaders match the intellectual and emotional understanding of fostering an inclusive environment based on mutual respect, we must continue tolerating tolerance. Words aren’t enough.