As soldiers navigate an increasingly complex environment, the Army needs to reinvent its values for the future fight, according to a new paper published by the Association of the U.S. Army.

“For decades, the U.S. Army has centered its moral and ethical identity on the seven core values [of] loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity and personal courage,” Col. Chaveso Cook writes. But today, “the strategic and societal landscape has changed dramatically,” he writes. “It’s time to ask a hard question: Do the current seven Army values still serve our force—and the nation—as well as they should?”

In “Transforming Our Army Values for the Modern Force,” Cook argues that the Army values that the service grouped together in 1995 are due for an upgrade that reflects the “morally gray zones” that soldiers operate in today.

Cook is a psychological operations officer and a division chief on the Joint Staff’s deputy directorate for global operations. He is a fellow with the LTG (Ret.) James M. Dubik Writing Fellows Program and also was part of the program’s inaugural class. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, Cook has two master’s degrees and a doctorate in human development from Tufts University.

To evolve the Army’s current values, which shorten to form the acronym LDRSHIP, the service should incorporate them into a new framework named LEAD, which highlights loyalty, empathy, adaptability and discipline, Cook writes.

The new framework is “clear, concise and aligned with the mission and moral complexity of our times,” he writes. “It fits naturally with the Army’s core mission: to LEAD in the fight to win our nation’s wars.”

Though the new framework incorporates loyalty from the LDRSHIP framework, it also introduces new values such as empathy, which Cook writes “is essential in leading varied teams and operating in culturally complex environments.”

To ensure that the new framework goes beyond merely rebranding, “the Army must institutionalize it at every touchpoint,” Cook writes. The framework could be adopted by focusing professional military education lessons around LEAD values, integrating LEAD values into evaluations and adjusting command climate surveys, among other methods.

Evolving the Army’s values will empower soldiers “to make both hard and strategic calls,” Cook writes.

“I am not proposing that the Army abandon LDRSHIP to erase tradition. I am arguing that we must evolve it to fulfill its intent,” he writes. “A reexamination of our values and the mindset around them will … directly empowe[r] our formations to make both hard and strategic calls with loyalty, empathy, adaptability and discipline in mind. It is time to meet the modern formation on the modern battlefield with LEAD.”

Read the full paper here.