Importance of Accountabilty in the Military

Accountability is defined by answering or accounting for one’s actions and results. It is something every leader should aspire to obtain and uphold. Accountability is easily talked about but can be very hard and uncomfortable to apply to one’s self. You will rarely hear someone stating that they should be more accountable for their actions, yet we do hear that from our peers and leaders on how we should take more accountability for our day to day actions and how they could eventually affect our futures.
In the Army it is extremely important to be accountable for one’s self and their soldiers. From the purposes of a squad leader it is always important to know where and what your soldiers are doing. Prime case is if you notice that your soldier is not at accountability formation and they never have missed that formation before it would probably behoove you to try and get in contact with the soldier. Granted their tardiness most likely may be due to something as trivial as oversleeping, forgetting to turn on or wake up to their alarm or being stuck in traffic on slight chances it could be something terribly worse such as hospitalization or death. In my own experience I have seen a stellar soldier who one day did not show up to morning formation and his squad leader failed to recognize his absence and towards the end of the day is when everyone found out that the same soldier had committed suicide the night prior. I am not saying that the squad leader is at fault in any way for the soldier’s choice to take his own life, however his entire chain of command failed to recognize his absence which could have resulted in an earlier reorganization of the tragedy. But I digress from my tangent and shall go on further to discuss the importance of personal accountability ranging from the lowest ranking private to the highest ranking officer. The bottom line is that accountability means letting your actions rise above your excuses. In the midst of everything accountability is