A Soldier's Morality, Religion, and Our Professional Ethic Does the Army's Culture Facilitate Integration, Character Development, and Trust in the Profession?

The context for this book lies in the trust relationships that American military professions must retain with the society they serve if they are to remain professions. Of course, the alternative without such trust is for the Services simply to revert to the character and behavior of a government occupation, a big bureaucracy like the Internal Revenue Service or the Department of Agriculture. But to remain professions, one of the constant challenges the Stewards of the Professions must address is "how different and how separate" they are to be from the society they serve. Stated differently, as the values and mores of American society change, the ethics of its military professions must also evolve, but never so much that such evolution diminishes their military effectiveness-their raison-d'etre and the source of the trust relationship in the first place. As noted in the Foreword, as the values of American society have changed in the past, in most cases, e.g., racial integration, abortion, smoking as a health issue, the service of gays in the military, gender roles, etc., those changes have eventually had a strong influence on the culture of the military professions and, in particular, on the core of those cultures-the Services' Ethics.