The Navy announced Vice President Joe Biden will deliver the address at the US Naval Academy graduation at the end of May.
Senior leaders generally rotate through the military academies. Biden spoke at the Air Force Academy last year, and Obama at Navy. This year, Obama will address the US Military Academy at West Point.
The US Army is “[rethinking] how it teaches ethics.”
Some of the interest in ethics is tied to the wars: the black eye of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, concerns that stress from unconventional conflict leads to bad decisions, and, for at least one retired general, the sense that the military lost the public’s trust in Iraq.
Officers involved in the effort say that eventually a soldier’s grounding in ethics — strong or weak — will become a factor in promotions.
Two of the primary places that ethics might intentionally be taught in the Army include the US Military Academy at West Point and the Command and General Staff College at Leavenworth. The need for ethical maturity has already been recognized in some sense at the military academies. Each has its own variation of a “character development center.”
Oddly, the director of military ethics at West Point provided a contradictory assessment of ethics in the Army: Read more