Army's "Spiritual Fitness" Test

[bks]

simulist wrote:
• The soldiers who come to realize that "what they've gotten themselves into" is wrong should then do what, exactly? Should they:

• (1) Make the choice to "STFU and get out alive" — and quite possibly continue to risk their lives by following orders to kill, even though they now know that this is wrong?

• (2) Make the choice to risk their lives by following their newly-informed consciences to stop cooperating with a war effort they now know to be wrong?

The first seems to me to be a thoroughly murderous, cowardly, and contemptible position. What's possibly even worse is that those who enable this deplorable behavior by making excuses for such soldiers are not only possibly enabling murder, they are also potentially consigning those soldiers to a lifetime of emotional pain, since some of these soldiers will no doubt have to live with the fact that they knew that what they were doing was shamefully wrong — and they nevertheless did it anyway!

I think soldiers who newly discover that "what they've gotten themselves into" is wrong deserve better than frail excuses being made for them to continue down the wrong road; they deserve the clarity of a moral choice that is within their grasp to make. (my emphasis of these last five words)

But there's the rub, isn't it? We know from the obedience studies of the 20th century that order-following has a great deal to do with the immediate environmental circumstances people find themselves in. Proximity to order-givers, the behavior of peers, the opportunity for the follower to feel he can shift the responsibility for what he is doing onto that superior or another person, training in conformity and the pleasing of superiors - these sorts of considerations impact behavior more than individual morality does in many cases.

We can tell ourselves it is always within the grasp of the individual to act on the basis of their judgments, but I'm not sure it's true.

[Simulist]

I think it's pretty wise to question the degree of freedom people may or may not actually possess in particular given circumstances and even in the whole of their given lives. As I see it, freedom exists only within the confines of limitation.

But it also seems to me that some freedom almost always does exist, even under the most confining circumstances.

One of the people I take as an inspiration for this idea is Viktor Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor from whom everything was taken, including most of his freedoms — except, finally, the capacity to choose.

"We, who lived in concentration camps, can remember the men who walked through the huts of others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

— Viktor Frankl

Not only do most people — including soldiers — possess at least some capacity to choose, but those soldiers under discussion here are the soldiers who have already determined at a certain point that the war effort they have become involved in is wrong. This suggests to me that the capacity to choose, exemplified by changing their minds based on new evidence, has already been operative.

While the very nature of human freedom is limited — and actually exists only within the confines of limitation — the capacity to choose does appear to exist most often, even under the most oppressive circumstances.

[wintler2]

..
But that ends when you sign the contract, and hand over control of your life to your chain of command. From that point forward, in both officer and enlisted indoctrination programs, soldiers are not trained to differentiate between lawful and unlawful orders, and hold themselves to noble ideals. Soldiers are trained to comply without question, and they are taught to expect unquestioning cooperation. ..

That is, crudely put, unsurprising brainwashing of soldiers to ensure they provide minimum drag on the violent expression of executive will - a bad thing, yes?
It is a commonplace that there is insufficient feedback control of elites - soldiers have zero say in where the next war is or when enough is enough, never mind the Iraqi's, Afghans, Kurds, etc. And what do you know, that systemic power imbalance is being abused, by those giving and those following the orders, with soldiers enabling/participating in evil deeds, themselves escaping feedback/consequences for their deeds. Protection from those consequences is part of the faustian hold the State has on soldiers, which is why Truth & Reconciliation commissions seem a great idea, a way of breaking the States monopoly on information and on justice. We need to reach the soldiers.

[American Dream]

http://www.counterpunch.org/soldz03242011.html

March 24, 2011

Why is the World's Largest Organization of Psychologists So Aggressively Promoting a New, Massive and Untested Military Program?

The Dark Side of "Comprehensive Soldier Fitness"

By ROY EIDELSON, MARC PILISUK and STEPHEN SOLDZ

The January 2011 issue of the American Psychologist, the American Psychological Association’s (APA) flagship journal, is devoted entirely to 13 articles that detail and celebrate the virtues of a new U.S. Army-APA collaboration. Built around positive psychology and with key contributions from former APA president Martin Seligman and his colleagues, Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) is a $125 million resilience training initiative designed to reduce and prevent the adverse psychological consequences of combat for our soldiers and veterans. While these are undoubtedly worthy aspirations, the special issue is nevertheless troubling in several important respects: the authors of the articles, all of whom are involved in the CSF program, offer very little discussion of conceptual and ethical considerations; the special issue does not provide a forum for any independent critical or cautionary voices whatsoever; and through this format, the APA itself has adopted a jingoistic cheerleading stance toward a research project about which many crucial questions should be posed. We discuss these and related concerns below.

At the outset, we want to be clear that we are notquestioning the valuable role that talented and dedicated psychologists play in the military, nor certainly the importance of providing our soldiers and veterans with the best care possible. As long as our country has a military, our soldiers should be prepared to face the hazards and horrors they may experience. Military service is highly stressful, and psychological challenges and difficulties understandably arise frequently. These issues are created or exacerbated by a wide range of features characteristic of military life, such as separation from family, frequent relocations, and especially deployment to combat zones with ongoing threats of injury and death and exposure to acts of unspeakable violence. The stress of repeated tours of duty, including witnessing the loss of lives of comrades and civilians, can produce extensive emotional and behavioral consequences that persist long after soldiers return home. They include heightened risk of suicide, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), substance abuse, and family violence.

Conceptual and Empirical Concerns

Although its advocates prefer to describe Comprehensive Soldier Fitness as a training program, it is indisputably a research project of enormous size and scope, one in which a million soldiers are required to participate. Reivich, Seligman, and McBride write in one of the special issue articles, “We hypothesize that these skills will enhance soldiers’ ability to handle adversity, prevent depression and anxiety, prevent PTSD, and enhance overall well-being and performance” (p. 26, emphasis added). This is the very core of the entire CSF program, yet it is merely a hypothesis – a tentative explanation or prediction that can only be confirmed through further research.

There seems to be reluctance and inconsistency among the CSF promoters in acknowledging that CSF is “research” and therefore should entail certain protections routinely granted to those who participate in research studies. Seligman explained to the APA’s Monitor on Psychology, “This is the largest study — 1.1 million soldiers — psychology has ever been involved in” (a “study” is a common synonym for “research project”). But when asked during an NPR interview whether CSF would be “the largest-ever experiment,” Brig. Gen. Cornum, who oversees the program, responded, “Well, we're not describing it as an experiment. We're describing it as training.” Despite the fact that CSF is incontrovertibly a research study, standard and important questions about experimental interventions like CSF are neither asked nor answered in the special issue. This neglect is all the more troubling given that the program is so massive and expensive, and the stakes are so high.

It is highly unusual for the effectiveness of such a huge and consequential intervention program not to be convincingly demonstrated first in carefully conducted randomized controlled trials – before being rolled out under less controlled conditions. Such preliminary studies are far from a mere formality. The literature on prevention interventions is full of well-intentioned efforts that either failed to have positive effects or, even worse, had harmful consequences for those receiving them. For instance, in the 1990s the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) substance abuse prevention program was administered in thousands of elementary schools across the U.S., at a cost of many hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet evaluations of DARE rarely found the desired effects in regard to reducing young people’s later substance use (e.g., see this and this summary). In response, DARE was modified in the last decade; however, subsequent evaluation found that the revised program actually increased later alcohol and cigarette use in those who received it compared to controls.

Similarly, criminal justice researcher Joan McCord has demonstrated how well-meaning programs have caused actual harm. She conducted a 30-year follow-up of a classic delinquency prevention program. Those participants randomly selected for intervention, but not matched controls, were provided with extensive enrichment, including mentoring, counseling, and summer camp. Among the matched pairs who differed in outcomes decades later, those who received the intensive assistance were more likely to have been convicted of serious street crimes; were more frequently given a diagnosis of alcoholism, schizophrenia, or manic depression; and on average died five years younger. Other studies of criminal justice interventions have also uncovered unanticipated, deleterious effects. Given this well known record, it is especially concerning when a major intervention is rolled out for thousands – or hundreds of thousands – without careful prior examination, including an investigation of potential negative effects. The special issue of the American Psychologist gives no indication that preliminary studies of CSF were conducted.

Also problematic, the CSF program is adapted primarily from the Penn Resiliency Program (PRP) where interventions were focused on dramatically different, non-military populations. Even with these groups, a 2009 meta-analysis of 17 controlled studies reveals that the PRP program has been only modestly and inconsistently effective. PRP produced small reductions in mild self-reported depressive symptoms, but it did so only in children already identified as at high risk for depression and not for those from the general population. Nor did PRP interventions reduce symptoms more than comparison prevention programs based on other principles, raising questions as to whether PRP’s effects are related to the “resilience” theory undergirding the program. Further, like many experimental programs, PRP had better outcomes when administered by highly trained research staff than when given by staff recruited from the community. This raises doubts as to how effectively the CSF program will be administered by non-commissioned officers who are required to serve as “Master Resilience Trainers.”

Regardless of how one evaluates prior PRP research, PRP’s effects when targeting middle-school students, college students, and adult groups can hardly be considered generalizable to the challenges and experiences that routinely face our soldiers in combat, including those that regularly trigger PTSD. In an inadequate attempt to bridge this gap rhetorically, CSF proponents describe PTSD as “a nasty combination of depressive and anxiety symptoms” (Reivich, Seligman, & McBride, p. 26). In fact, PTSD involves a far more complicated cluster of severe symptoms in response to a specific traumatic event, including flashbacks, partial amnesia, difficulty sleeping, personality changes, outbursts of anger, hypervigilance, avoidance, and emotional numbing.

Ethical Concerns

We also believe that other key aspects of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness should have received explicit discussion in this special issue. It is standard practice for an independent and unbiased ethics review committee (an “institutional review board” or “IRB”) to evaluate the ethical issues arising from a research project prior to its implementation. This review and approval process may in fact have occurred for CSF, but the manner in which the principals blur “research” and “training” leads us to wish for much greater clarity here. This process is even more critical given that the soldiers apparently have no informed consent protections – they are all required to participate in the CSF program. Such research violates the Nuremberg Code developed during the post-World War II trials of Nazi doctors. That code begins by stating:

The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.

Disturbingly, however, this mandatory participation in a research study does not violate Section 8.05 of the APA’s own Ethics Code, which allows for the suspension of informed consent “where otherwise permitted by law or federal or institutional regulations.” Despite the APA’s stance, we should never forget that the velvet glove of authoritarian planning, no matter how well intended, is no substitute for the protected freedoms of individuals to make their own choices, mistakes, and dissenting judgments. Respect for informed consent is more, not less, important in total environments like the military where individual dissent is often severely discouraged and often punished.

More broadly, the 13 articles fail to explore potential ethical concerns related to the uncertain effects of the CSF training itself. In fact, the only question of this sort raised in the special issue – by Tedeschi and McNally in one article and by Lester, McBride, Bliese, and Adler in another – is whether it might be unethical to withhold the CSF training from soldiers. Certainly, there are other ethical quandaries that require serious discussion if the CSF program’s effectiveness is to be appropriately evaluated. For example, might the training actually cause harm? Might soldiers who have been trained to resiliently view combat as a growth opportunity be more likely to ignore or under-estimate real dangers, thereby placing themselves, their comrades, or civilians at heightened risk of harm?

Similarly, by increasing perseverance in the face of adversity, might the CSF training lead soldiers to engage in actions that may later cause regret (e.g., the shooting of civilians at a roadblock in an ambiguous situation), thereby increasing the potential for PTSD or other post-combat psychological difficulties? Or, might the resilience training lead some to overcome, for the time, the disabling effects of traumatic episodes and thereby increase the likelihood of their redeployment to situations with further risk of serious disability? The likelihood of these eventualities, or other negative effects, is unknown. But certainly they are sufficiently plausible – as plausible as McCord’s unexpected findings, noted earlier, of intensive counseling and summer camp leading to increased crime, mental illness diagnosis, and early death among participating youth – that they cannot legitimately be ruled out a priori.These possibilities increase the ethical responsibility of those promoting CSF to conduct pilot studies, carefully monitor them for possible negative effects upon soldiers or others, submit the program to careful ethical review, and seek informed consent.

It is also important to note here two controversial aspects of the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program that have already received attention from investigative journalists. First, Mark Benjamin has raised provocative questions, not yet fully answered, about the circumstances surrounding the huge, $31 million no-bid contract awarded to Seligman (“whose work formed the psychological underpinnings of the Bush administration's torture program”) by the Department of Defense for his team’s CSF involvement. Benjamin notes that the government allows sole-source contracts only under very limited conditions. The Army contract documents note that “there is only one responsible source due to a unique capability provided, and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements.” But as we have detailed above, public claims about the effectiveness of the Penn Resiliency Program and its superiority to alternative prevention programs are significantly overstated, casting doubt upon the rationale for awarding the sole-source contract.

Second, Jason Leopold and others have raised serious questions about the “spiritual fitness” component of the CSF program, which appears to inappropriately promote a religious worldview as an important path to greater resilience and purpose. The special issue article by Pargament and Sweeney confirms the legitimacy of this concern. It includes a range of theologically oriented terms and references, and it specifically identifies the Army’s chaplain corps as a resource “to assist individuals in their quests to develop their spirits” (p. 61).

The Limits of Positive Psychology

Comprehensive Soldier Fitness draws heavily on “positive psychology” in aiming to reduce the incidence of psychological harm resulting from combat and post-combat stress. The field of positive psychology has grown dramatically over the past decade and has many exuberant supporters and evangelists. Rather than focusing on distress and pathology, they emphasize human strengths and virtues, happiness, and the potential to derive positive meaning from stressful circumstances. Few would dispute the benefits of broadening psychology’s purview in this way. But writers such as Barbara Held, Barbara Ehrenreich, Eugene Taylor and James Coyne have offered compelling critiques of positive psychology, including its failure to sufficiently recognize the valuable functions played by “negative” emotions like anger, sorrow, and fear; its slick marketing and disregard for harsh and unforgiving societal realities like poverty; its failure to examine the depth and richness of human experience; and its growing tendency to promote claims without sufficient scientific support (e.g., the relationship between positive psychological states and health outcomes, or the mechanisms underlying “posttraumatic growth”).

These and related concerns are directly relevant to Comprehensive Soldier Fitness. As described by Cornum, Matthews, and Seligman in the special issue, the CSF program aspires “to increase the number of soldiers who derive meaning and personal growth from their combat experience” (p. 6). But in many ways the technocratic language of military training programs and the positive psychology strategies that characterize the CSF program appear inadequate for the task. Activities such as the “three blessings exercise” in which the individual reflects on what went well that day and why seem ill-suited for encouraging and supporting the deep questioning and open exploration of existential issues that often arise for soldiers facing extreme circumstances. By all indications, the program’s positive psychology orientation also fails to scrutinize those very institutions that subject recruits to potential trauma in order to create people sufficiently hardy to engage in death-defying and death-inflicting experiences.

In this regard, it is worth noting how special issue authors Peterson, Park, and Castro briefly discuss the lower trust scores of female soldiers on the CSF program’s Global Assessment Tool (GAT), which measures psychological fitness in four domains (social, emotional, spiritual, and family). They interpret these results as suggesting “Female soldiers do not feel as fully at ease in the Army as do male soldiers,” and they recommend further research to “understand the needs and challenges of female soldiers and to help them attain the same morale as male soldiers, which perhaps would reduce attrition among them” (p. 15-16). What goes unmentioned is that the extremely high rates of sexual assault on women soldiers, condoned or covered up by others higher in rank, is clearly a source of distrust and trauma – and it calls less for building a positive, resilient outlook among the victims than for recognition of how the commonplace victimization of women in war should be vociferously prevented.

In important ways, key lessons of humanistic psychology are also regrettably overlooked in the CSF program. For many soldiers, combat awakens questions regarding the meaning of life and of its worth, which can become more persistent after returning home. Too often, our veterans face anomie, lack of community, and the replacement of caring ties with the competitive values of marketability when their military service is over. Humanistic and related perspectives more directly and fully attend to this void, the emptiness of contemporary society that increases the difficulties in recovery from trauma, than does positive psychology. Because of the limitations of quantitative psychology to date, the data for phenomena of this type are more frequently found in stories than in self-report inventories such as the GAT. Limited data encourage a limited view of the phenomenon of PTSD and of any resilience that is based upon denial. In contrast, it is through revelations such as the Winter Soldier testimonies of U.S. veterans and active duty soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq, through studies of the phenomenology of returning soldiers by Daryl Paulson and Stanley Krippner, or accounts of soldier participants in U.S. torture as relayed by journalists Joshua Phillips and Justine Sharrock, that we are able to see how much distress comes from abuses soldiers commit either as a result of commands from superiors or due to the morally disorienting effects of ambiguous combat situations.

Indeed, among the most traumatic psychological scars that soldiers sustain are those resulting from what they have done to others. Some of the particularly intense characteristics of PTSD are found among perpetrators. As Col. Dave Grossman and others have described, human beings have an inherent resistance to killing other human beings. As a result, waging war almost always relies upon propaganda and training designed to dehumanize the enemy and elevate one’s own cause. Psychology and psychologists have contributed to training programs aimed at increasing soldiers’ willingness to kill. Now this newest positive psychology program for resilience promises to shield soldiers from some of the debilitating consequences of their actions and, as Reivich, Seligman and McBride note, it aims to better enable soldiers to “live the Warrior Ethos – ‘I will always place the mission first. I will never accept defeat. I will never quit. I will never leave a fallen comrade’” (p. 27).

Missing, it would seem, is any meaningful CSF component devoted to helping soldiers grapple with the profound ethical dilemmas involved in their duties, including killing others in furtherance of state policy. Brett Litz and his colleagues have used the term “moral injury” to describe the exceedingly difficult challenges and consequences that soldiers face in response to “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations” (p. 700). These are especially troubling omissions from the CSF program when we also consider the regrettable reality that many recruits, often drawn to the military by economic necessity and deceptive marketing strategies, are never told about the types of injuries to which they will be exposed or the level of slaughter in which some of them will take part.

The U.S. Military and American Psychology

In the closing article of the special issue, Seligman and Fowler (former CEO of the APA) attempt to counter the objections they anticipate from readers who have concerns about how closely the American Psychological Association and the profession of psychology should align themselves with the agenda of the U.S. military. Certainly, such reader concerns are not entirely unfounded, especially given the tragic repercussions of the APA’s decisions post-9/11 to shape its ethics code, policies, and pronouncements to meet the perceived needs of an administration that viewed torture and other detainee abuse as legitimate components of national security practice. Unfortunately, however, Seligman and Fowler’s arguments serve only to instill greater concern about the foundations of the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program and the role of institutional psychology in advancing it, as we explain below by responding to three statements from their article.

“It is not the military that sets the nation’s policies on war and peace. The military carries out the policies that emerge from our democratic form of government. Withholding professional and scientific support for the people who provide the nation’s defense is, we believe, simply wrong” (p. 85)

No one recommends withholding services from anyone in need. Indeed, health professionals deserve to be commended for providing such support to our soldiers and veterans. But when acting ethically, health professionals address the needs of their clients before the wishes of the institutions that hire them. Therefore, if those institutions constrain the options available for the well-being of the practitioners’ clients, these professionals have an obligation to consider remedies beyond the narrow institutionally defined interests. For example, the CSF program does not include a component whereby participants are invited to listen to fellow soldiers and veterans who have enhanced their own safety, well-being, and sense of purpose by refusing to comply with illicit orders, or by deciding, as have so many other American citizens, that the war they are fighting is unjust and immoral.

In addition, whether the U.S. military plays a role in establishing policies is not a matter to be determined by recitation of formal rules. Scholarship involves an obligation to look at the actual evidence. Generals routinely make political statements in which they advocate for the latest war. Major military contractors work closely with military officials to sell both weapons of war and war itself. Retired military officers are then often hired as lobbyists for these same corporations, and some appear as military “experts” in the media without revealing their conflicts of interest. The exorbitant budget for “perception management” services paid to professional propaganda organizations is also used by the military to spin news and promote war to government officials and the public alike. And, as recently reported by Rolling Stone, psychological operations (“psyops”) techniques were used by the military on visiting U.S. Senators to strengthen their support of the increasingly unpopular Afghan war effort.

“The balance of good done by building the physical and mental fitness of our soldiers far outweighs any harm that might be done” (p. 86).

It is disappointing that researchers who have emphasized the purported empirical underpinnings of the CSF program would here abandon all semblance of scholarly rigor. The authors offer their cost-benefit claim as transparently true (i.e., the good outweighing the harm). But they offer no evidence in support of this crucial claim. For example, in their calculation how much weight do they give to the tragic numbers of civilian casualties in Iraq (minimally estimated in the hundreds of thousands) and Afghanistan – the dead, the injured, and the displaced? Does this harm matter at all to those promoting CSF? Have we reached the point where “do no harm,” the fundamental principle underlying the psychology profession’s ethics, has become “do no harm to Americans, unless it serves the interests of the state”? These issues deserve careful consideration, not evasion.

We should also keep in mind that every effort to support military operations is billed as “support for our troops.” Whether it is the use of drones that kill from a continent away or tapping into a soldier's capacity to kill without a serious hangover, all are justified as for the brave troops. But the decisions to use military force are not made with the well-being of military personnel in mind, nor are they made by soldiers or even influenced by their desires. Master resilience trainers in the Army will not be urging soldiers to report violations of the rules of engagement by their superiors. They will not encourage soldiers to empathize with the humanity of the adults and children whom they may have killed as collateral damage, nor to use forms of restorative justice for apology and reconciliation that have a potential for deeper healing. And they will not encourage troops to build supportive ties with those critical of the wars they are fighting or the tactics required of them.

“We are proud to aid our military in defending and protecting our nation right now, and we will be proud to help our soldiers and their families into the peace that will follow” (p. 86).

The blind embrace of overly simple notions of “patriotism” is inappropriate for professional psychologists dedicated to the promotion of universal human health and well-being. Ideological convictions based upon mythologies of American exceptionalism are no substitute for an examination of their verity. If it is not true that the U.S. is defending its democratic foundations against ruthless adversaries, then the balance shifts dramatically toward averting the alleged harm of making healthier killers. By tying the CSF program to claims of the rightness of American military goals and actions, Seligman and Fowler are, unrecognized by them, requiring that an ethical evaluation include a comprehensive empirical evaluation of the justification for those policies.

Such an evaluation likely will find that the view of U.S. military history as being primarily "defensive” in nature, rather than one of imperial control, is false. Rather, the U.S. has a long history of intervening in other countries and overthrowing their governments when they act in ways considered to be against U.S. national interests. Where does the “defending and protecting” reality lie in regard to the war in Iraq, or the invasion of Guyana, or the support for the Venezuelan coup, or the bombing of Serbia, or military aid to dictators around the world? Sadly, history (and scholars such as retired U.S. Col. Andrew Bacevich, among many others) has shown how remarkably war-prone the United States has been in the non-defensive pursuit of its foreign policy and “national interest.” The U.S. is, in fact, at best only inconsistently a defender of democracy. Our empire-building behavior has caused great harm to our own safety and well-being – and to the principles our country purports to value. Meanwhile, the promise of peace following military victories has surely not materialized, while the case for the extent of U.S. engagement in wars that were unneeded is extensive and compelling. It is not professionally responsible to ignore these facts.

Conclusion

In addition to our deep concerns about Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, the American Psychological Association’s unrestrained enthusiasm for the program is especially worrisome for what it says about the APA, the largest organization of psychologists in the country, indeed the world. As we have demonstrated, there are many complex issues regarding the CSF program’s empirical foundations, its promotion as a massive research project absent informed consent, and the basis on which its psychologist developers justify the program. We would therefore expect a special issue of the American Psychologist, a journal edited by the APA’s CEO Norman Anderson, to encourage an extended discussion of these matters.

In contrast, guest editors Seligman and Matthews have assembled 13 articles that include no independent evaluation of the empirical claims underlying CSF. They contain no unbiased discussion of ethical issues raised by the program. They do nothing to enlighten psychologists about ethical challenges posed by consulting and research work with the military. And they most certainly offer no encouragement for questioning the foreign policy context in which our soldiers are sent into combat, to face physical and moral hazards for which even the best program can never adequately prepare them. Unfortunately, the APA’s uncritical promotion of the CSF program reveals much about the current moral challenges facing the psychology profession itself.

Psychology should maintain an ethical and critical stance distinct from and resistant to the lure of patriotic calls, which are part of each and every military undertaking – by all nations – regardless of the legitimacy of the cause. As psychologists we should tread carefully when our efforts are solely directed toward sending soldiers back into combat rather than counseling them away from participating in misguided wars. In a similar way, assessing soldiers for their potential to withstand such horrors of war and building their resilience through teaching mental toughness skills are not necessarily healthy alternatives compared to affirming and assisting them in their expressions of doubt and dissent.

Ultimately, there is a paradox that should be foremost in the minds of professional psychologists. Helping people who have already been harmed by trauma is essential. But should we be involved in helping an institution prepare to place more people in harm’s way without careful and ongoing questioning and review of the rationale for doing so? Whatever the needs for a military for national defense, or the benefits of team building, loyalty, camaraderie, and a positive outlook, militaries are, among other things, authoritarian institutions that kill, maim, deceive, and actively reduce an individual’s sense of independent agency.

The enormous toll that armed conflict exacts on soldiers, veterans, families, and communities is a key reason why we should send young men and women to war only as an absolute last resort – and we should bring them home as quickly as possible, rather than sending them back again and again. If the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program is truly about enhancing well-being, then we should also question whether these soldiers might be helped more effectively by finding non-military ways to resolve the conflicts and concerns for which they carry such heavy burdens.





Roy Eidelson is a clinical psychologist and the president of Eidelson Consulting, where he studies, writes about, and consults on the role of psychological issues in political, organizational, and group conflict settings. He is past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, associate director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College, and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. Roy can be reached at reidelson@eidelsonconsulting.com.

Marc Pilisuk is Professor Emeritus, the University of California, and Professor, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center. He is the author (with Jennifer Achord Rountree) of Who Benefits from Global Violence and War: Uncovering a Destructive System (Greenwood/Praeger, 2008), and the co-editor (with Michael Nagler) of Peace Movements Worldwide (Praeger/ABC-CLIO, 2011). Marc can be reached at mpilisuk@saybrook.edu.

Stephen Soldz is a psychoanalyst, psychologist, public health researcher, faculty member at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, and president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility. He has conducted extensive research on psychosocial prevention and treatment interventions. He edits the Psyche, Science, and Society blog and is a founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, one of the organizations working to change American Psychological Association policy on participation in abusive interrogations. Stephen can be reached at ssoldz@bgsp.edu

[Allegro]

.
Top Air Force Official Issues Religious Neutrality Policy in Wake of Truthout's "Jesus Loves Nukes" Exposé
— Truthout | Wednesday 14 September 2011
— links here and highlights are mine

A top US Air Force official, in an attempt to ensure the Air Force adheres to the Constitution as well as its own regulations and policies, issued guidelines that calls on "leaders at all levels" to take immediate steps to maintain "government neutrality regarding religion."

In his policy memorandum dated September 1, but sent Tuesday to all major commands, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton A. Schwartz said, "Leaders ... must balance Constitutional protections for an individual's free exercise of religion or other personal beliefs and its prohibition against governmental establishment of religion."

The First Amendment establishes a wall of separation between church and state and Clause 3, Article 6 of the Constitution specifically prohibits a "religious test."

The memo was issued a month after Truthout published an exclusive report revealing how, for two decades, the Air Force used numerous Bible passages and religious imagery to teach nuclear missile officers about the morals and ethics of launching nuclear weapons, a decision that one senior Air Force officer told Truthout last month should have "instantly" resulted in the firing of the commanders who allowed it to take place.

The Air Force suspended the mandatory Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare training immediately following the publication of Truthout's report. David Smith, a spokesman for the Air Education and Training Command told Truthout last month the ethics training "has been taken out of the curriculum and is being reviewed."

"The commander reviewed it and decided we needed to have a good hard look at it and make sure it reflected views of modern society," Smith said.

The decison angered Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) who fired off an angry letter to Secretary of the Air Force Michael B. Donley criticizing the move and demanding Donley provide him with a report detailing "actions taken" by the Air Force that led to the suspension of the ethics training.

But the Air Force went further, pulling all of its training materials "that address morals, ethics, core values and related character development issues" pending a "comprehensive review," Smith told the Air Force Times.

That decision was made after a Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) instructor, who read Truthout's report, sent the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a civil rights organization, copies of ROTC leadership training materials, which also contained Christian-themed citations from the Bible. The PowerPoint slides in that presentation the unnamed instructor sent MRFF are used in all colleges and universities that have an ROTC program.

While Schwartz does not state whether any particular incident prompted him to issue the memorandum, it would appear the media attention surrounding the revelations about the ROTC leadership training and the "Jesus loves nukes" ethics course, which is how one former nuclear missile officer referred to it during an interview with Truthout, played a significant part.

UPDATE: Lt. Col. Sam Highley, a spokesman for Schwartz, told the Air Force Times Friday, "we have seen instances where well-meaning commanders and senior noncommissioned officers appeared to advance a particular religious view among their subordinates, calling into question their impartiality and objectivity. We can learn from these instances."

Schwartz said commanders and supervisors, "must avoid the actual or apparent use of their position to promote their personal religious beliefs to their subordinates or to extend preferential treatment for any religion."

"Commanders or supervisors who engage in such behavior may cause members to doubt their impartiality and objectify," Schwartz added. "The potential result is a degradation of the unit's morale, good order and discipline."

Furthermore, he advised Air Force leadership who may have concerns "involving the preservation of government neutrality regarding religious beliefs" to speak with a chaplain and staff judge advocate "before you act."

Mikey Weinstein, MRFF's president and founder, referred to Schwartz's memorandum as a "damn good line drive single to potentially start a rally of Constitutional religious freedom compliance, which has been scandalously lacking in the entire Defense Department for decades." [Full disclosure: Weinstein is a member of Truthout's Board of Advisers.]

Weinstein had provided Truthout with copies of the PowerPoint presentation used during the nuclear ethics training course taught by chaplains at Vandenberg Air Force base in California. MRFF obtained the materials from an Air Force officer who received the documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Weinsten said Schwartz is the "most senior Pentagon official to date to ever send this strong a mandate of Constitutional religious compliance to our United States armed forces members."

"While MRFF wishes that such a letter had been sent by the Chief of Staff of the Air Force a very long time ago, the old adage 'better late than never' most certainly applies," Weinstein said in an email. "Gen. Schwartz has the Air Force at least now 'talking the talk.' Whether the Air Force can 'walk the walk' will depend upon many factors, not the least of which is whether ANYONE in the Air Force is EVER punished for violating its clear mandates of Constitutional recognition for BOTH the No Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the Bill of Rights' First Amendment." (Weinstein's emphasis.)

Systemic Issues

That Schwartz, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was forced to issue such an edict underscores how widespread the issues pertaining to commanders who appear to endorse religion, particularly fundamentalist Christianity, have become within the Air Force.

Indeed, some examples over the past few years include an email circulated in 2009 by military command and staff officers to all personnel stationed at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada inviting them to attend a Bible study class in which the topic of discussion referred to Jews as "whiners."

Air Force Capt. Melissa Danley, the military personnel chief at Creech, sent the initial announcement from her official government email account at the request of a chaplain. The 432nd Wing Commander's Office sent out another announcement soon after.

In December 2008, Chris Rodda, MRFF's director of research, reported that a presentation titled "Purpose Driven Airmen," which incorporated the teachings of megachurch leader Rick Warren and creationism as a means of suicide prevention, was sent by commanders from an official government email account to 5,000 servicemen and women stationed at RAF Lakenheath, the largest US Air Force base in England.

In January 2009, senior command officers again used a government email account to send an announcement, at the request of a chaplain, to base personnel asking them to attend a screening of the Christian movie "Fireproof."

When commanders use their official government email accounts to send out such announcements, it implies that the events are officially endorsed by the United States Air Force.

No one was held accountable in either of those cases and Schwartz doesn't say whether Air Force commanders and supervisors who violate the policy would be punished or held accountable.

Schwartz does, however, state that while commanders are responsible for certain Chaplain Corps programs, "including activities such as religious studies, faith sharing and prayer meetings ... they must refrain from appearing to officially endorse religion generally or any particular religion."

"Therefore, I expect chaplains, not commanders, to notify Airmen of Chaplain Corps programs," he wrote.

Chaplain's Column Scrubbed

But, like the nuclear ethics training course taught by chaplains, there are other instances in which chaplains appear to be speaking on behalf of the Air Force, even unintentionally. For example, last month, some Air Force officers complained to Truthout and MRFF about a column they read written by a chaplain, Lt. Col. Curtiss Wagner of the 179 Airlift Wing, that was posted on the command's official web site.

The August 16 column, "The Dignified Transfer," centered around Wagner's six-month deployment to the Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations at Dover Air Force Base. A portion of Wagner's column discussed the pain he saw in the eyes of family members who went to Dover to witness the return of their loved ones' remains. Wagner wrote that during his "deployment to mortuary affairs he was reminded ... just how important faith and a spiritual foundation is."

"It was very apparent who had a strong faith and who didn't." Wagner wrote. "Of course those who had a strong spiritual foundation still grieved at their loss, but they had hope and strength through that difficult time because of their relationship to God. I am reminded what the Apostle Paul stated in 1 Thess. 4:13 when he said that those who are Christ followers do not 'grieve like the rest of men,' who have no hope."

Several Air Force officers who contacted Truthout said they were deeply offended by the Biblical passage, "those who are Christ followers do not 'grieve like the rest of men,'" because it suggests family members of other faiths who do not worship Christ, as well as nonbelievers, "have no hope" and unless you accept Christ you grieve differently. Moreover, because it was published on an official government web site, it led them to believe that the Air Force endorsed Wagner's position.

Truthout contacted Holli Snyder, a spokeswoman for the Air Force's 179th Airlift Wing based out of Fort Campbell Kentucky, about whether Wagner's use of the Biblical passage in a column published on a government web site amounted to a policy violation. Snyder responded a week later and said Wagner column was "removed" from the170th Airlift Wing's web site "upon realization that his comments could be perceived as offensive and hurtful."

A link to the column, now goes to a page not found. Wagner's column was also removed from Google's cache and can no longer be found on the web.

"Our most sincere apologies go out to any of those individuals who were offended by this commentary and will [sic] ensure in the future that statements published on our website could not be perceived as such," Snyder said. "With that being said, one must take into consideration that Lt. Col. Wagner was writing a commentary, a personal narrative, meaning it was his own thoughts and beliefs, on his tour of duty at Dover Air Force Base. Wagner was not expressing the thoughts and beliefs of the 179th Airlift Wing, the U.S. Air Force, or the Department of Defense, but I can see how that could have been misconstrued by being posted on the official base website for the 179th AW. There should have been a statement attached with his commentary that stated the following:


The views expressed in this commentary are the views of the individual and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the U.S. Government, the Department of Defense, the Air Force, the 179th Airlift Wing or Airmen assigned to the 179th AW.

Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff, goes on to say in his memo that chaplains are "trained to provide leadership on matters related to the free exercise of religion and to help commanders care for all of their people, regardless of their beliefs."

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[Allegro]

.
Critic Claims Victory After Religion Memo Goes to Air Force Academy Cadets
— Truthout | Thursday 29 September 2011
— links here and highlights are mine

Colorado Springs, Colo. - Air Force Academy critic Mikey Weinstein claimed victory Wednesday after learning that a memo on religious tolerance was distributed to the school's 4,000 cadets a day after he unveiled a billboard featuring the 200-word treatise from the service's top general.

The academy, though, says Weinstein and his New Mexico-based Military Religious Freedom Foundation had nothing to do with it.

[Full disclosure: Mikey Weinstein is a member of Truthout's Board of Advisers.]

That didn't dampen Weinstein's spirits Wednesday.

"It's a victory for the U.S. Constitution," he said. "Lady Liberty is smiling today."

The two sides had been in a standoff over the Sept. 1 memo to commanders from Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz that cautioned leaders to remain neutral in matters of faith.

Weinstein, an academy graduate, made emailed demands to academy Superintendent Lt. Gen. Mike Gould that the academy distribute it to every cadet, airman and civilian worker at on the campus. But leaders at the school said they would distribute the Schwartz memo as they saw fit.

The academy has been under scrutiny since 2004 over allegations of religious intolerance. Commanders there have tried to fix those issues with an ever-growing "religious respect" training program.

Weinstein on Tuesday unveiled a billboard near the intersection of Woodmen Road and Lexington Drive that displays the memo. He said the sign cost "thousands of dollars" and will stay up for weeks.

Academy spokesman Lt. Col. John Bryan said the memo's distribution occurred in the wake of a Monday meeting between Commandant of Cadets Brig. Gen. Richard Clark and the officers and sergeants who oversee the academy's 40 cadet squadrons.

Clark penned a lengthy Sept. 19 memo to reinforce the one issued by Schwartz that also tells cadets who face unwanted proselytizing how to seek redress.

Clark told the gathering to "be sure this gets out to the cadet wing," Bryan said.

Weinstein said the academy's move is no coincidence.

"This was gigantic victory for the foundation," he said.

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[Hammer of Los]

..

The soldiers have a conscience.

It must be awakened within them.

Try and do it using every label you can imagine.

Use the labels they like.

They can be shown that the "Higher Power" is indeed within them, is indeed their own conscience, which we ALL have, yes these soldiers too. But they have been conditioned to think of "God" as a King, a temporal ruler, who controls all through might, whose wrath is both terrible and self-justifying, whose will is all consuming, who must be obeyed out of fear or lust for personal power. The High Priest and the King. Shall their day never end? It must, I think.

Show people stuff that is self evident, that is indubitable. That's the ticket. Help them to see clearly, remove confusion and error. Be gentle, they may not like it, they may resist, they may fight you.

..

If you hate on the religious, if you hate on the secular, then we are all lost.

We can even unite in the name of Christ, or the name of Liberal Humanism, it matters not, they are labels.

But we must make common cause with all mankind.

..

[Luther Blissett]

Pastor: Atheists Don’t Deserve Rights
February 20, 2012 at 5:10 pm Ed Brayton

The Pasadena Sun had an article about the military’s “spiritual fitness” program that discriminates against atheists and most of the response was positive. But as Justin Griffith, who first raised the issue of that program, points out, one pastor went completely off the deep end and declared that atheists have no rights at all. Here’s a portion of what the pastor said:

If you believe you’re nothing but worm-food at death, you aren’t going to jump on a grenade to save the platoon, or charge a machine-gun nest expecting to meet Jesus. You’re going to be reserved, second-guessing, and probably be a big fat chicken…

Listen, all religions are protected by our laws, but atheists don’t countenance America’s documents that mention God. They don’t actually deserve rights that even bizarre religionists have.

Go read the whole thing on Justin’s blog and be appalled. Then feel free to contact the asshole and tell him what you think of him — with no threats whatsoever, please; don’t give them any excuse at all to dismiss you.

In Theory: Should the military test spirituality?

[Simulist]

Go read the whole thing on Justin’s blog and be appalled.

But I already live in a persistent state of appallment.

[American Dream]

Go read the whole thing on Justin’s blog and be appalled.

But I already live in a persistent state of appallment.

Which given the state of the world is not only appropriate but actually good...

[Allegro]

The following article was originally posted here by seemslikeadream, whom I thank. Please review this upthread post for background info.

As I’m typing this, Liberty University, you know, the Christian fundamentalist school that’s established its own drone in-the-name-and-power-of-Jesus-Christ program, shows up in an ad atop AlterNet’s banner that’s just above Weinstein’s photo and the following blog.
How apropos .

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Posted by Mikey Weinstein at 12:25 pm
AlterNet | August 7, 2013

The Horrific Specter of the “Post-Fleming Amendment” Fundamentalist Christian Military

From its inception, our American republic has been a melting pot among nations. Citizens originating from every region of the world, from every religious background and no religious background, and from every ethnicity have sought to make a living for themselves and their families within our borders. This cultural and ethnic alloy has only been made possible by the foundational protections established within our Constitution, its construing federal and state case law, and the subordinate laws serving to uphold it. Recently, a perversion of the sacrosanct principle of freedom of religion enshrined in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution has found its way to Congress through the evil bigotry of a repugnant Christian fundamentalist carpetbagger and Congressman by the name of John Fleming (R-LA 4th).

The Constitutionally-derelict Rep. Fleming believes that any way to abridge the ability of servicemembers to express their deeply-held religious convictions somehow constitutes a conspiratorial “threat” to their rights of free speech. At first glance, his Religious Liberty Amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2014 would seem innocuous enough. In actual practice, however, the bill would give carte blanche to those who would wreak havoc on the morale, good order, and discipline of U.S. servicemembers who faithfully serve in the United States armed forces. What Fleming’s amendment would do is add any type of “actions and speech” to the protected religious freedoms of servicemembers, thus rendering commanders all but helpless to stop potential problems until such actions or speech reach the point that they “actually harm” (a euphemistic phrase for “irreparably damage”) good order and discipline.

As the Obama White House rightly stated in its objection to the amendment:


“By limiting the discretion of commanders to address potentially problematic speech and actions within their units, this provision would have a significant adverse effect on good order, discipline, morale, and mission accomplishment.”

We at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) know all too well what the true consequences stemming from the signing of this “Christian Talibanistic” amendment would be. It would generate a thoroughly dreadful nightmare of civil rights desecration wrought by a tsunami of unabated fundamentalist Christian supremacy, exceptionalism, and tyranny.

Within the last 72 hours, we received yet another signal, among thousands, of exactly what our military would look like if Fleming’s despicable amendment is signed into law. In a fit of philosophical dissonance that I like to call “G.I. Jesus Tourette’s Syndrome,” Staff Sergeant (SSgt) Zach Frith of the USAF’s 187th Fighter Wing took it upon himself to steer his fellow airmen away from what he believes to be the “wrong religion” through a literally shocking and shameful email addressed to the entirety of the 187th:


Dear friends of the 187th,

Due to the influential power that a chaplain might have over the life of a military member, I’m strongly compelled to inform you of what is True in regard to how one may come before or come to know God. That truth is in the word of God and that truths’ name is Jesus Christ.

(JOHN 14:6) Jesus said to him (Thomas, the doubter), “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father(God) but through Me”.

And I understand that this e-mail might have consequences or ridicule to follow but I’d rather suffer that than have those around me be lied to about something that could have a detrimental impact on their soul.

Sincerely, SSgt Zach Frith

SSgt Frith was prompted to inform his peers, superiors, and subordinates that his personal religion of choice is superior to all others after a military chaplain had merely shared an informative interview that described the traditions surrounding Ramadan. In doing so, this fundamentalist Christian religious predator committed egregious violations of the United States Constitution, DoD directives, regulations, and instructions, as well as the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The mere offering by an armed forces chaplain of even the slightest scintilla of perspective and information about religious traditions that “deviate” from his favorite flavor of fundamentalist Christian tradition was seen as a dastardly threat to SSgt Frith’s beliefs granting him “just cause” to degrade, denigrate, and belittle those who don’t subscribe to his wretchedly parochial conception of his chosen faith. Fleming’s despicable amendment, if signed into law, would revoke any meaningful authority that military commanders have to prevent and punish utterly reprehensible behavior like that of the ignoble SSgt Frith.

To his credit, COL Black, the Air Force’s Commander of the 187th, was quick to notify his Wing of exactly why SSgt Frith’s “actions and speech” in sending his email were wrong:


In light of today’s mass email, I would like to re-emphasize the role of chaplains in our wing....It is no surprise some folks have very strong religious views and are not hesitant to share them; however, using a DoD system to express your personal viewpoint is inappropriate and will be addressed....We may not always agree with others’ viewpoints regardless of the subject matter, but we need to be respectful of everyone’s right to hold their beliefs.

Had the Fleming amendment been in effect, however, COL Black would not have been able to address the self-serving statements of vicious religious bigotry in SSgt Frith’s email. Instead, Frith’s “actions and speech” would have been protected under the guise of Rep. Fleming’s insidious mockery of religious freedom.

In short, Fleming wants to give free reign to every fundamentalist evangelical dominionist Christian in our military to be as hostile, tyrannical, and disrespectful to others as they want. This travesty of Old School fundamentalist Christian triumphalism is the true content of “religious liberty” as cooked up by Fleming and his dominionist ilk. Here we have a Staff Sergeant - a non-commissioned officer - publicly telling his USAF subordinates via unsolicited mass email that if they don’t believe in his version of weaponized Jesus they’re simply wrong and seriously endangering their eternal souls. Arrogance, thy name indeed be Frith.

Meanwhile, a seditious alliance of representatives in Congress is feverishly laboring to make sure that these types of unconstitutional train wrecks happen at an even greater pace with absolutely no repercussions. It takes a twisted and tortured crusader mentality to think that encouraging this vulgar, seditious behavior will do anything but annihilate the good order, morale, and discipline of our valiant war fighters.

There is some remnant of comfort to be derived from the acknowledgement that the command does not approve of the unlawful use of government networks and military rank to hammer into the heads of our servicemembers the order that they have only one religion to choose from. The 15 MRFF client-whistleblowers (14 of whom are Protestant Christians) from the 187th who courageously reported this incident to MRFF are surely grateful. However, the glaring question still stands; what will be done? Will this rapaciously proselytizing, fundamentalist, USAF SSgt Christian bully simply be given a perfunctory tongue lashing and/or wrist slap and be sent happily on his way? Will there be any consequences of ANY significance whatsoever for so willfully, flagrantly, and blatantly violating his oath to the U.S. Constitution as well as DoD and Air Force policy? Or is this simply yet another pathetic example of our military shrinking in the face of the law, rendering it inapplicable and impotent when the name of Jesus is publicly invoked, especially to helpless subordinates?

It is the hope of all of us at MRFF that COL Black will have the intestinal fortitude to appropriately discipline SSgt Frith, however dubious the odds. As St. Augustine said, “Punishment is justice for the unjust.”

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation is up against well-funded extremist religious organizations. Your donations allow us to continue our fight in the courts and in the media to fight for separation of church and state in the U.S. military. Please make a fully tax-deductible donation today at helpbuildthewall.org.

Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein, Esq. is founder and president of the five-time Nobel Peace Prize-nominated Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) and an honor graduate of the Air Force Academy. He served as a White House counsel in the Reagan Administration and as the Committee Management Officer of the “Iran-Contra” Investigation. He is also the former General Counsel to H. Ross Perot and Perot Systems Corporation. Mikey is an honor graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and a former J.A.G. in the U.S. Air Force. His two sons, daughter-in-law, son-in law, and brother-in-law are also graduates of USAFA. In December 2012, Mikey was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in U.S. Defense by Defense News. He is the author of “With God On Our Side” (2006, St. Martin’s Press) and “No Snowflake in an Avalanche” (2012, Vireo).

_________________
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[Allegro]

^ Campus Crusade for Christ Air Force Academy Propaganda

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