Decisive Point Podcast – Ep 6-2 – Neil N. Snyder and Charles “Chuck” Allen – The Consequences of Declining Patriotism in the United States

In this episode, Colonel Neil Snyder and Charles “Chuck” Allen discuss declining patriotism in the United States, highlighting generational and veteran–nonveteran gaps revealed in Snyder’s research. They explore how patriotism influences trust in the military, the challenges of building that trust, and the roles of leadership, communication, and shared values in bridging divides. Both emphasize that leaders must make people feel valued, engage authentically across generations, and anchor service and purpose in the Constitution and the American people.

Host (Stephanie Crider)

You are listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

I’m in the studio with Colonel Neil Snyder, and Charles “Chuck” Allen is joining us remotely.

Snyder is the author of “The Consequences of Declining Patriotism in the United States,” which was published in the Autumn 2025 issue of Parameters.

Allen culminated a 30-year Army career as [a] director [in] leader development, and retired as the professor of leadership and cultural studies in the Department of Command, Leadership, and Management at the United States Army War College.

We are exploring today what shifting attitudes toward patriotism mean for trust, service, and leadership and how leaders can respond constructively.

Neil, Chuck, what’s the one insight you hope leaders take away from the podcast today?

Colonel Neil Snyder

Well, first off, I want to thank you for having me on, and for Chuck Allen for doing this. It’s an honor to be with you, sir.

I would just say for me, I’m a social scientist. People fascinate me, and I suspect that for a lot of the listeners, they’re super interested to know what makes other people tick. And, that’s what I’m interested in.

Today, we seem to be living in fairly divisive times. And so, I’m interested to know what are the things that are dividing Americans. And so, my research in this article is about Americans’ values. And candidly, what I was hoping to find were sources of unity—the ties that bind us all together. And in many ways, that’s what I did.

However, I also found that our values may be dividing us in some fundamental ways, the old from the young and the veterans from nonveterans, over a key issue that is truly important to national identity [and] to our national security. And that’s the value [of] patriotism. And so, if there’s one thing that I would hope listeners would take away, [it] is [that] I hope to inspire some curiosity. I hope that we can have conversations in an open, respectful way about values, to find those things that unite us and to find ways to bridge those things that divide us.

Host

Love that.

Charles “Chuck” Allen

I’m glad to be with you, Stephanie and Neil. It’s a great day to talk about this idea of patriotism and also our national values. My primary insight would be the importance of understanding that civil-military relations in the United States includes the connection of our military institution to society and to our nation. The US military, we must remember, exists to protect and serve the American people and its government as a first principle, and that requires trust, a trust which is grounded in the United States Constitution. So, that’s the one takeaway I think we want to focus on—trust in the Constitution and our responsibilities as a protective force for our nation.

Host

Neil, your article shows patriotism is declining among some groups.

What surprised you most about these trends?

Snyder

Yeah. This is a . . . it’s a good question. And like I said, this article is really about curiosity, and the article itself is about values. And so, [we will benefit] if we operationalize or conceptualize values as our beliefs about ideals, but also ideals that can motivate our behavior, how we act. And a key insight is that traditionally, Americans have had two kinds of values that are at tension.

We seem to simultaneously value our individuality and our autonomy, the things that make us unique as people but, we also are fiercely American. We are proud of being American, [so much so] that even going back to the early period of our country before the Constitution, you know, there was this observation that Americans were united as a people—even before we were a country.

And so, it’s this interesting thing that patriotism, or a common love for the country, is something that should unite us, and that value has traditionally been a key source of motivation for military service. Like Chuck talked about, Americans’ trust in the military as a key aspect of the bond between the people and their military servants, and part of the glue that makes that work is patriotism, a common love for country. And so, I was curious about patriotism. And there had been data out of Pew Research [Center] and some other places that suggests that the share of Americans that feel strongly patriotic seems to be in decline, and that that share seems to be in particular decline among young Americans.

It’s this riddle. We’ve always had patriotism as a source of unity. But in fact, it may be a dividing value right now in separating young from old or veterans from nonveterans. And so, in the article, I look specifically at patriotism to see if it correlates [or] if valuing and showing importance for patriotism or love for country, if that correlates with either trusting the military or for young people, for Generation Z—so at the time of the article, [for] 18-to-28-year-old adults—whether patriotism correlates with having considered military service, being open to serving in our military. And my idea was that for Gen Z, low patriotism might be part of an explanation for why there appears to be less service interest among young people, which, for the reasons that Chuck talked about, has some profound implications.

Low patriotism could also be, in an interesting way, a source of less trust in the military. And my logic kind of goes like this: If most people see the military as a symbol of our country, as a bastion of the country, a key part of our democracy . . . well, if you’re feeling less love for the country overall, that might result in less trust in this thing that people conflate with the country. And so, Americans’ trust could be, in the military, could be somewhat of a victim of generally less identification with the trust, with the country overall.

And so, I wanted to see if that was true. I worried that there would be a veteran’s gap, which is to say that people who feel particularly patriotic may be more likely to join and, also, serving in uniform can cause people to feel more patriotic. And the net result of those two forces, selection and socialization, would result in veterans appearing way more patriotic than their nonveteran fellow citizens. Plus [we must consider] the generational gap between Gen Z and their elders. And so, we fielded this very large national survey to test the ideas, along with some others, and I was really surprised by the degree of unity over values that we saw among the respondents.

And so, you asked what surprised me. And we looked at a really large battery of different kinds of values, and for the most part, Americans agree. It doesn’t matter whether you’re young or old, veteran, nonveteran, minority, white, male, female, political left, political right, there’s strong agreement on all kinds of values. But, patriotism was one that really stood out, and there was really this huge gap. And what we see is that far fewer young people and nonveterans value patriotism than older elders and veterans.

And that really, really surprised me. I mean, I think the data showed something like 76 percent of Gen Z nonveterans think patriotism [is] important, [which] contrasts with 92 percent of older nonveterans and 96 percent of veterans. So, virtually every veteran feels patriotic, but if you ask a young person or a young nonveteran, you’re going to get a very different answer in the percentages.

And, the percentages, you know, in the abstract, don’t mean anything, but when you extrapolate those percentages across 260 million adult Americans, those are huge social divides about a value, a fundamental idea about what is ideal and which should motivate people’s behavior. And so, those gaps were surprising. The size of the gaps were surprising to me.

Host

What happens when the younger generation, less than 50 percent, has patriotism? Is there a tipping point?

Snyder

It’s a great question, and we should be thinking about two things. What are the consequences of declining patriotism? Does it mean that fewer young people will serve? While the data seem to bear that out. It could be a threat to the viability of the all-volunteer force if we can’t bring enough young people in [to the military] out of the spirit of volunteerism.

The other thing is, and I really would like to hear Chuck Allen’s wisdom on this, is what do we do about it? We have leadership intuitions about how to build trust in small organizations, but I don’t know how we scale that up across the country. I don’t know what kind of policy interventions can lead to higher levels of patriotism and higher levels of trust.

That’s a really wicked problem that national security leaders should be dealing with.

Host

What are your thoughts, Chuck?

Allen

Well, my first thought is that Neil wrote a great paper, which provides a lot of fodder for discussion and, I think, exploration. When I think about military service, why people come into the military, [I think about my personal experience]. Many years ago, I was a garrison commander over in Germany, and every two weeks or so, I would give the intake briefing to new members of the community. And, I would ask the same question, “Why did you join the military? How did you get here?” And [the answers] ranged from wanting to have a job [to] my folks kicked me out of the house. I believe in the United States. So, the wide collective of the factors that were involved, but they wanted to give us a shot. They believed that something existed for them that they didn’t have otherwise.

And then, my challenge to them, as members of the military when their first term of service was over, is we know why you came in. Why will you stay? And as we have veterans go back into our society, they’ll communicate with the younger generations, “Here’s what I saw going in. Here’s how I felt coming out.”

So, I think this is part of the process. Again, what we can do is make sure our veterans have a good experience within the formations to go back and [say to] the population, to give this a try.

Snyder

I share Chuck’s intuition on this. So, in a very similar way to what he’s describing as a garrison commander, as a brigade commander, I surveyed my troops every week. I was coming out of a PhD program, and I knew how to do surveys. So, it was easy for me to do this. And I had a very short survey of a couple questions that we did every week, and one of those questions is, do you trust your leaders? And the other question is, and this is a combat arms formation, would you want to go to war with this formation? And I was trying to get a sense of whether the people really identified with the organization and felt okay. And over time, the data led me to believe that what seems to work to generate trust is making sure that people feel valued as individuals.

If people feel safe in the organization, in the community, in their state, county, [and] country, and they feel valued as people, they’re going to trust the institutions that shape their perception of individual agency and being and membership. And so, the kinds of questions that Chuck was getting after as a garrison commander, and that he led people to as a faculty member here, are the same kinds of things. That’s my intuition that we need to be able to scale up.

And it’s this process of engagement to make sure people feel safe and valued as people, that can breed trust. And so, the scaling problem is the hard part. How do we go from an individual interaction that leads to promotion of individual identity and group identity to something that works at the national level? And that’s the frontier that we must struggle with.

Allen

So, what we have now is a link back to this term of leadership. And I think it goes back to how we look at ourselves, how we think about ourselves, and what we decide to do. So, I’ll go back to an old definition of leadership from an Army field manual that says, I think, leadership is a process of providing purpose, direction, and motivation to achieve the mission and improve the organization.

I think we can all agree with that. The purpose provides for what we’re trying to achieve. I’m looking at the direction that gives us the where and how we plan to get there, and then the motivation that comes with why that drives us. And, most important for us, is that trust is the enabler and also an outcome of leadership.

So, if we talk about again looking at identity and purpose, you have to have those three things tied into the leadership and trust.

I contend that leaders have the responsibility to communicate and ensure members see the alignment of their values for the principles or the purpose of the organization. The reality is that societal values may shift in relative importance because our environment is inherently dynamic, but the values remain as part of that collective that Neil has already talked about. It gives us an identity and makes up and defines [the] institution.

And through it all, we want the military to be trusted and be trustworthy, based upon three major components. The first one, going back to this idea of ability and competence to accomplish the tasks and missions that are assigned to it; benevolence of motive; looking at the common and shared interests between us, we subordinate our own interests for the larger interests of the institution and the nation. And [there is] this idea of integrity. We’re reliable, we’re transparent, and we’re true to our word. It goes back to Neil’s position as a brigade commander, as an academic. But as a leader, it’s hard to, you know, give people a sense of purpose, direction, and drive to move forward.

Host

Does your data suggest culture-building could influence attitudes toward service?

Snyder

Well, I think so. And not to oversimplify it, but the data suggest that veterans may value certain service-associated values—service, duty, patriotism—significantly more than nonveterans. And so, let’s pause for a second to unpack what that means. If, like, many people think, or may think that values are static, that we form our values early in life and they don’t change too much with the sequence of experiences that we go through during life. Well, the data seems to show that it’s not actually true that the powerful experience of military service among veterans and just selecting into service can shape values and change. And, that change of experience can lead to important consequences like trust in the military and other things. And so, what I’m trying to unpack here is what are the antecedents of Americans’ values? What’s shaping them?

Certainly, military service is a causal factor in that I’m identifying with the research. And, you know, this maps to existing social science research on the topic. And, you know, I have a new research paper that was just published on this issue of the role of values in going into military service or not. And it’s an issue that’s been debated for 50 years by civ-mil scholars.

Certainly, values can lead to selection into service, but service can also socialize or condition service members into adopting certain values, for the reasons that I’ve been describing. Now, I don’t personally study the kinds of policy interventions or scaled leadership approaches to build culture and values. That’s the domain of expertise of other scholars that I would defer to, but my intuition is that it can work, that important experiences and quality leadership can affect values change. And, while my data can’t speak directly to your question, I do share the intuition that collective experiences contribute to value formation.

And to the extent that leaders can engage, to cultivate values, then we might expect scaled efforts to build unity and that it could be work. Now, I don’t want to speculate too much, but just like I have curiosity about what’s making Americans tick and what their values are, I think that leaders ought to try to be comfortable talking about values.

And in recent years, we seem to not be willing to do that. But they’re important. They shape people’s behaviors and, if we’re not engaging in that space, we’re ceding the values debate to other forces.

Host

You found a link between valuing patriotism and trust in the military. What does that mean for leader messaging?

Snyder

Oh, complicated question there. My data suggest that value in patriotism correlates with trust in the military. And what I argued, to some degree, is that what we’re seeing is kind of a symbolic or unreflective form of patriotism. People likely associate the military with a nation, so they feel close to the country, and if they do, and they identify with the nation, then, because the military is a national symbol, then they’re going to trust the military.

And that that raises really important questions about the durability or the true importance of Americans’ trust in the military. What does it mean for Americans to trust the military? Does it mean that Americans think that the military will do good or live up to Americans’ expectations of our values and our character in uniform? Or, does it mean that the public expects us to do the right thing—so, instrumental application of values? Or does it mean something else?

Does it mean that they think that we will be effective on the battlefield or to secure their interests? And the data doesn’t speak well to this. The literature on this is particularly unclear. We tend to conflate being confident in the military with trusting it. And I think, for the reasons that we’re describing, that trust is really tied to values. And, we ought to be thinking about whether the public trusts our values and if that is a durable appreciation for the military or if it’s based on something else.

And if so, what should we do about it? I think, to get to your question, I think leaders should be curious about the correlation between patriotism and trust. I think we should ask hard questions. I think we should ask, “Is it good for Americans to trust the military simply because they are patriotic? Is trust elevated by symbolic patriotism that appears to give false support to the military? And what are the consequences of high trust in the military today if that has a shallow basis?” And, in my experience, military leaders at the strategic level, are super, super attentive to public attitudes about the military. We pay attention to the trust numbers. And, if those numbers have a shallow or symbolic basis, then we may be fundamentally misunderstanding what Americans think about their military. And so, we should be curious. If we are misunderstanding our place in society, and if trust is inflated for symbolic reasons, then we may need to relook [at] our [relationship] with the country.

Host

Chuck, what are your thoughts on how leaders can connect authentically with young cohorts?

Allen

I’m going to back up to a point that Neil had just made about this idea of shallow trust. Peter Feaver has a book out that’s called Thanks for Your Service. He talks about trust from different parts of our society of our military and how that trust, while it may be stated that [it is] relatively high compared to other factors or other institutions in our society, that trust can be very brittle.

It may look solid, but if you poke at it, you’ll fall through. And so, it goes back to the idea of trust that society has for us. It has to be based upon a lot of experiences [and] reflection, but also the practice. What do we see consistently? So, I think we’ve talked about the term of culture sometimes. And [regarding] the idea of climate, I think Edgar Schein says, [it is] the basic assumptions and patterns of behavior that are used by organizational members to solve day-to-day problems. And, it’s really so important that we will bring new members that and teach it to them. And as that culture is based upon the assumptions and values that we espouse to be true. And what we’ll find is that the culture of trust that we want to have within the military should also be reflected in the perception of trust by our society.

And as we talk about our leaders and organizations, they come in and out of organizations. They’re going into an organization that already has a set of trust values or assumptions [that] are in place. The expectation is there, but we find that the climate exists around the leader that may shift very quickly based upon the group dynamics, individual personalities, and some other environmental factors.

So, I think leaders, in this aspect, have to understand the organizational or the institutional culture, but they’re responsible for building that culture and a climate within the organization itself. So, if you’re talking about looking at the nation and how we connect between members that are in the military and then the ones that we want to bring in, I think communication becomes a large piece.

I think you’ve asked me before, [and] I’ve also had a conversation before about what are the key elements of communication at that level. There’s four Is that are out there that we teach at the [US Army] War College: inform, influence, involve, and inspire. And again, as a brigade commander, I’m sure Neil had formations and communication sessions from time to time where he’s [the] one trying to inform them [the soldiers] as to what the mission was and why were they going after it. And then what the important components to that might have been.

He was seeking to influence individuals through their understanding of the task at hand and then that their contribution mattered to being successful. And he wanted to involve them, that’s the third I, in the process of one clarifying what the vision might have been and clarifying the factors that might affect the performance of the task but also to get their input so that they own the responsibility of making the plan or the unit successful.

And the last one is this inspiration, this idea that we’re going to connect to the emotional affective side of the house. Why should I believe in you? Who are you? Who am I to you? And that idea that we’re going to use stories, talk about personal experiences—things that are impactful to you or to us and in the organization—that now communicates those values in a very clear and concise fashion.

Now, I think the last part there, too, in terms of inspiration, is that we want to be able to connect our day-to-day activities to something larger than ourselves. It’s more than [the idea that] this is my squad. It’s more than the banner that’s on the guidon or the colors of the battalion. It goes back to that Constitution that says provide for the general welfare, provide for the common defense.

If you can make those links between the individual units and the Army and the military, and those links are clearly visible to the society that we serve, then I think we’ll be better off.

Snyder

I could listen to Chuck on this issue all day long. Your wisdom is appreciated. I like your emphasis on communication and the different dimensions of communication. One of the things that I’m thinking about—about Gen Z, about young people—is that if we’re trying to reach them, and we’re trying to cultivate ties across generations and between young, young members of Gen Z, nonveterans, and the older veteran population across age and veteran status, I think communications and intersubjectivity may be key. My data shows that young people may be less patriotic, but I’m also cautious in my claims in the sense that maybe we’re getting the read totally wrong. I mean, I’ve had many, many interactions with folks from Gen Z that were inspiring where I respect their values and their intellect and their drive.

And, it may be that we have the wrong read, that they may communicate or interpret the world with the language and symbology that is just simply different than the way that people like me ask survey questions to gauge their values and attitudes. And maybe, maybe we’re missing the point of Gen Z. If leaders want to be able to bridge the gap and communicate effectively, the way Chuck is describing, then we need to sustain our curiosity about what makes young people tick.

And, it may be even more difficult with Gen Alpha. I don’t know if, Stephanie, you or Chuck have spoken to Gen Alpha folks lately and experienced Gen Alpha slang and had to figure out whether you had the “rizz” and all of these things to deal with the young people. It’s a different way of navigating the world linguistically.

And so, communicating bilaterally and building trust through communication, requires a skill set for leaders that’s certainly far past what my article is talking about, but if we want to tap into young people’s collective identity, we may need to be able to meet them where they are and communicate with them on their terms.

Allen

I think, again, when we talk about those generational differences, Allison Abbe, one of our faculty members at [the US Army] War College, I push back on the concept of generational gaps. I think we go back to the basic human nature that every individual wrestles with. Who am I? What is my purpose while I’m here? Who am I working with and why? And then, why do I matter? Or do I matter at all?

If we can connect those individuals at that level and then build that collective, cohesive vision of identity and purpose, then a motivation will come, irrespective of the generation.

Snyder

Absolutely.

Host

Agree. Agree. This is for both of you.

What’s an actionable step that leaders can take to build trust and purpose?

Snyder

Well, I guess I’ll go first, and, kind of building on the frame that we’ve been on, which is, I think that we all just need to be fully conversant with other people, with different generations, with folks from different cultures and subcultures and societies. We all need to learn some Gen Alpha slang, to gain some insight into how they see the world and how they navigate it.

They are people. To Chuck’s point, they’re individuals, and we ought to meet them there, and at some point, just accept that they are the future of the country. Time stops for no person. And, they will staff the military, hopefully voluntarily, in the future. And so, we sort of need to recognize that they’re going to have a unique outlook, unique values, that they’re not static. And we need to be attentive to those changes and work with them. And we can’t presume that, you know, graying old people like me should be able to impose values. Instead, if we want to lead them, we need to figure out what motivates them and [how] to incentivize their behavior.

Allen

And for me, I think we go back to this idea that we look at the recruiting data for the past number of years, and one of the greatest predictors of someone who is going to join the service is someone who has a family member in the service. Or they’re located in communities that have a military presence. So, [what] we’ll find is that these individuals that we were looking for, they come in [and] have seen role models in their communities and their families. They provide the best example of what to expect within the service. And again, they also reflect the values that we espouse are important in the service. And [what] we’ll find, again, is that we have to have role models [and] guidelines. We have to have structures in place that people can lean into, they can cling on to.

One of the primary responsibilities of leaders is to make sense of a world that is very confusing and ambiguous around them. And I think the other parts are, too, that we have to realize, like Neil has said, we have to trust, extend trust, into the younger generations, [and have faith that] that they can understand the values, that they can hold on to the task at hand, that they can hold together with themselves to move forward.

So, we have to be able to extend trust in order to gain their trust in the process. And from that, being a role model, understanding the values what we espouse are really important. But more important, what you say must be what you do. The audio has to match the video.

Host

Chuck, I really love that, and, I guess my next thought is, how do you track and measure the trust? Or do we even need to?

Snyder

I like this question, and I’m engaged in some research on this very question right now. And it has seized me, absolutely. I think I want to back away from the question, not to dodge it at all, but I think we need to understand what trust means for different people. And, you know, military leaders, communicate it almost sometimes as a commodity that’s given. Whereas, scholars sometimes communicate it as a conditional expectation for behavior. And those are divergent sets of ideas. And in my work, I’m talking about trust in the military on a national scale, and I truly think that we need a dedicated, multi-year effort to get to a really granular understanding of what, why, how, and when Americans trust the military and to delink ideas about values expectations and expectations of our character from their views of our competence or battlefield efficacy and how those two things overlap. And much of what we see seems to indicate that that confidence in the military, which we conflate with trust, is durable but shallow, based on things like symbolic patriotism or, worst case, partisan allegiances, which is what Peter Feaver’s book, as Chuck mentioned, kind of describes. And that may not be healthy. So, I think what we need is this multidimensional assessment of trust because we may not have an accurate picture of Americans trust in the military. And so, if your question is, how do we build trust? I think that we need a much-refined operationalization of what trust means and to work to common measures of that before we try to consider any kind of bold policy interventions to build trust. Why act without understanding? I guess is what I’m saying.

Allen

A few years ago, I wrote a paper with William Trey Brown, one of our colleagues, called “Trust: Implications for the Armed Professions.” We wrestle with the exact same things that Neil is talking about. One was our assessment mechanism. So, our bureaucratic answer is to put out very formal surveys. We’ve got organizational culture surveys [and] command climate surveys. We’ll do these things, again, to try to come up with a quantitative data of what the trust looks like within the organization and then try to extend that to public confidence and trust.

Places like Harvard, the Gallup Poll, and the Pew Research [Center] have done studies like that on [trying to] quantify this conversation of trust. But, for me, I think the indicators we ought to focus on more [are] within the military, within the organization itself. What are the focus groups we can grab hold of to have a conversation with and see what themes are emerging over time, rather than rely on what we’ve used before in the past.

We have command and information sessions for leaders with members of their organizations so that we can now engage with them. Engagement is a key point to invite them for the conversation and to see what themes are popping up that we hadn’t talked about before. And then the idea within organizations, how do you have these kind of team and group huddles as a matter of course? Not as episodic, but as a matter of course. Or when we engage with each other, what do we talk about that will give us indicators of the trust level, of the engagement levels, of the trends that we think are might be influential in helping us decide what we need to do. I think all of these are things that help us go back and look at those core values and principles that we espouse and see how close we are to them.

I generally show a diagram where we’ll have a set of clouds in the sky on my PowerPoint slide, and I say, “These are the aspirations of our values and the things that we come up with for our basic assumptions.” And then I’ll show a little brick wall down below that. Here’s the day-to-day place where we live—the decisions that we have and our behaviors. And we will find in most circumstances [that] there’s a distance between the clouds and the brick, the brick wall. There’s inherently a gap between what we aspire to and then what we are actually doing on a day-to-day basis. And a responsibility of leaders is [to] one acknowledge that the gap exists and then to determine if the gap is getting too large, and then how do you bring it back in to make it closer?

It probably won’t match exactly to what we’re doing in practice, but at least there’s an aspiration that’s in place. And so, for me, that goes back to our society. There’s a number of things that will happen that folks will ask us, what do we believe in? What are our values? What does our culture tell us that we’re going to do?

And then we read the news reports. We’ll get certain examples of either bad behavior or questionable behavior. And then there’s a gap. And we have to ask ourselves, what are we going to do about that? I think our responsibility goes back to our Congress and our Executive Branch. What do we owe the American people? To be true to our values, to have a strong culture, and to meet the mission and task that we espouse to and complete. And from that, be trustworthy and earn the trust of the American people.

Host

I would love for each of you to share one timeless leadership principle or civic value.

Snyder

Well, I will return to kind of what I thought, which is that in difficult times, the most important thing a leader can do is make the people around them feel safe and valued. And if you can do that, you can find ways to have common ground and trust, even if you have different, you know, perspectives on the world. And, you know, that may not scale up and doesn’t necessarily apply to my research, but that’s something that rings true for me. And the organizations that I’ve been most proud to be in had leaders that made people feel safe and valued.

Host

You have the last word, Chuck.

Allen

Not quite the last word, but I have a, probably, unsourced quote that says, “The purpose of an organization does not reside within itself.” And for me, that comes back to say our purpose has to be anchored in service. Leaders provide others what they need to be successful, and thus leaders exist to serve others, not the other way around.

And I think we have to focus on that again. [The question] within our formations, within our institutions, is how do we serve others? Within our military, we serve the American people. We use a document called the Constitution as our guideline, our guiding principles.

Thank you for this opportunity to have a conversation with you, two. I really appreciate that.

Snyder

Thank you.

Host

Listeners, you can read the genesis article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 55, issue 3. For more Army War College podcasts, check out Conversations on Strategy, SSI Live, CLSC Dialogues, and A Better Peace.