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How much is too much transparency? What a question! In the military we have so much that is not transparent for a variety of reasons, and yet transparency in some areas where it is allowed can be a gray area for sure. I read in my research for this that, "Transparency means that citizens have an inherent right to know the truth about public issues and the government ensures that this right is met", (Accountability and Transparency in Public Administration, 2019)and I agree with this statement for general public issues, but what happens when you are in an environment where transparency could harm the mission or the people?

In the military when I was just starting out, I used to be so angry that my upper chain of command would hold information from us and not tell us about potential plan changes. It seemed that occasionally at the last second, we would find out that we had a new mission or that something was changing, it happened rarely, but when it did it had a big impact. I am now currently at a command where I am much higher up the food chain and get to see the other side of that curtain. The potential plan seems to change hour by hour and minute by minute, I honestly long for the days when I didn't know what was going on until I was presented the final polished plan by my superiors. If we were to have full transparency and tell our crew daily that the plan is potentially changing and plan for this and that and this, when it rarely changes in such big ways, we would be introducing a massive amount of stress onto the crew, the stress that we feel ourselves being on the planning side! I think that were transparency becomes a serious and vital thing is when you know that for example the plan has changed and say you are getting extended on deployment or something. At that point I believe that being transparent is the best option to give people the ability to plan for the future. Ethically, we owe our people the best service and product, and I believe that we really need to assess to what level the transparency could help or hurt them.

One of the panels for the week mentioned that, "One person on your team might think this risk is something that we need to address first and someone else might think there's another one. So, you have to be able to kind of ethically come together and discuss those risks in a professional way in order to accomplish your goal", (Zendell & Schmidt, n.d.) in regard to planning, and I believe that the same can also apply to the military when deciding how transparent to be on mission specific items. Luckily for us we have a ship's captain that makes the final decisions. When I was serving on a submarine during my first tour, we did quite a few things that I was not sure why we were doing and that were very risky, but my CO made those decisions based on his priority of risk assessment vs mission reward. In summary, I believe that lack of transparency can in fact be a good thing when the plan is not set, or when the mission must come first, but that once the plan is made full transparency needs to happen. Even if it is only to say that we are going to do it, you may not know why specifically, it's going to be dangerous, but that's how we are going to succeed.