As an NCO and a leader, you may be a member of a unit or know of a unit that uses pushups or some other exercise as a discipline or leadership tool. There have been debates for years about the value of this leadership tool in the Cadet Program. In late 1998 and again in 2001, the National Cadet Programs office stated simply that pushups and other types of exercise were not available as leadership tools for Cadets. This should have ended the debate, but hasn't.

As easy as they are, there are problems with pushups as a leadership tool. They lead to a laziness on the part of leaders. It is far easier for an NCO to merely order a problem Cadet to: "Drop and give me twenty" than it is to try to understand what the trouble is and to help fix it. This also leads to a false sense of accomplishment: the leader is not actually getting anything done. He's stopping everything to make sure a Cadet is doing the pushups he was assigned.

If a Cadet learns that his punishment for almost anything is only a set of pushups, he'll learn contempt for his leaders and their leadership tools. A healthy Cadet has no fear of twenty or thirty pushups! In this case using pushups is actually hurting the prestige of the leader. His leadership tools are ineffective and so is he.

Or, if a Cadet who is punished with pushups just can't do them, his peers will learn contempt for him because he doesn't have their physical abilities - in spite of what other abilities he may have. Cadets will also learn that their leaders don't care about their self-respect or their standing with their peers. In either case, the leader has lost prestige and the respect of his people.

If an NCO learns to depend on pushups as a leadership tool, he assumes they're fixing things without really addressing the problems his people have. He and his people will be very surprised when pushups stop working and his Cadets are suddenly facing suspensions, demotions or dismissals. Pushups give a false sense of actually solving leadership problems; they don't.