‘Groupthink’ among today’s military leaders reaches epidemic levels

“A lot of senior military leaders today clearly have resolved themselves to be order-following automatons, denying and/or impinging upon constitutionally guaranteed rights of the individual service member simply because that is what gets them promoted.”

This shocking assessment of the degree to which groupthink has taken hold of many current leaders in the U.S. military comes from retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Ryan Sweazey, founder of Walk the Talk Foundation, an organization that advocates for and protects whistleblowers. The former F-16 fighter pilot, who once served as inspector general in the Air Force, spoke to WorldNetDaily in an exclusive interview.

At the extreme, Sweazey said, the thought process of too many of today’s U.S. military leaders forces one to recall what happened in Nazi Germany. “I’m not making parallels between today’s military leadership and Nazis outside of the incredible amount of groupthink psychology that’s going on,” he told WND.

Groupthink, according to Psychology Today, can be defined as “a phenomenon that occurs when a group of well-intentioned people makes irrational or non-optimal decisions spurred by the urge to conform or the belief that dissent is impossible.”

From Sweazey’s perspective, as well as from his foundation’s clients’ perspectives, the continued abuses, denial of due process and lack of real justice systems in the military are highlights of this epidemic and are coming at a significant detriment to the force.

“A carrot was dangled in front of many, [providing] a path to become a senior officer and continue to progress their careers,” Sweazey said. “It came in the form of something like implementing the controversial shot mandate or carrying out questionable implementations of divisive Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies that many might not have wanted to accept, but they did it anyway to advance their careers.”

“Others already assimilated into the groupthink circles of military leadership now infer or explicitly convey that the one thing that will result in you being culled from that leadership ‘herd’ is to go against the grain, to speak out of line, to not toe the party line,” Sweazey told WND. “For these leaders, there’s incredible pressure to maintain the groupthink mentality even if it goes against what you once believed in, or still believe in.”

“The infiltration of questionable and/or illegal acts and policies into the ranks has become a more permanent fixture because no one is willing to speak out against it,” Sweazey explained. “To speak out of turn, or speak out against a general officer or flag officer, is career suicide,” he said. “As a result, nearly everyone is forced to toe the line, whether they believe what’s happening around them is moral and just or not.”

Unfortunately, adds Sweazey, there’s a steep price to pay for this kind of unprincipled conformity to avoid trouble or for the sake of personal advancement.

“When no one resists, it tells me that the general officers and flag officers of today lack the moral courage to do anything else but remain in lockstep with everyone else,” he argues. “This kind of groupthink is incredibly dangerous to the future of the military, and that’s the parallel between our military and that of the German military of the 1930s and 1940s that cannot be ignored.”

To save the nation’s military and return it to a powerful fighting force, Sweazey argued, “Service members will need to be bold and be willing, at times, to accept uncomfortable risks to do what is right over what is clearly wrong.”