Growing Strategic Leaders for Future Conflict

Abstract

Global operations since 2001 highlight certain characteristics of the US military's emerging operating environment. Future operations will likely take place amongst the people in a wide range of unpredictable environments. (1) Managing these conflicts will require extensive collaboration between military and civilian agencies representing a range of governments, intergovernmental organizations, and nongovernmental organizations. Likewise, general-purpose forces (GPF) will make larger contributions to tasks previously reserved to special-operations forces (SOF). These two components will experience greater intermixing and burden sharing. (2) In ongoing operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, effective senior leaders are those able to grapple successfully with the dynamic emerging environment and its functional implications. Along the way, leaders have developed important insight regarding the characteristics of successful commanders and the measures required to ensure future leaders possess these characteristics. As the Department of Defense seeks to develop a cadre of senior joint force leaders for operational and strategic command in multi-modal conflicts, these views are worthy of serious consideration. (3) To illuminate and begin to codify attitudes toward strategic-level leadership development, the authors selected a group of SOF and GPF leaders who have commanded at the colonel or Navy captain level and higher in recent irregular and hybrid warfare environments. (4) In extensive interviews, they reflected on the characteristics required for effective senior-level leadership and provided recommendations for leader development. Their responses highlighted the characteristics, educational experiences, and assignments this cohort considered relevant to success in the unpredictable operating environments of today and tomorrow. Characteristics of Strategic Leadership The interviewees' reflections on necessary strategic leader characteristics fall into three broad categories: cognitive, interpersonal, and managerial styles. Each style comprises a cluster of qualities, skills, and cultivable traits that the officers associated with each other. With respect to the first style, interviewees focused on cognitive aiding in problem-solving. Most prominently, interviewees distinguished between and what-to-think approaches, with the former embracing flexibility of mind and diverse intellectual disciplines. How-to-think approaches emphasize the importance of understanding the parts of a problem in relationship to each other, as well as the different perspectives and needs that problem-solving partners contribute. Such approaches entail developing problem-solving methodologies that serve to reconcile competing viewpoints while remaining focused on the goal. A how-to-think framework also accounts for consequences of decisions, over time and across multiple levels and lines of operations, while tolerating iterative problem-solving in the absence of perfect solutions. (5) As one GPF officer said, It's being able to look at a problem, think about the influences associated with the problem, think about potential solutions to the problem, and go deeper into the second- and third-order effects. Officers considered the how-to-think method essential for cultivating other important cognitive qualities, particularly the ability to think analogically from one case to another. Interviewees spoke of stepping outside events and intellectual to observe in real time how they and others proceed and learn. One corps-level commander referred to this method as going up onto the balcony, with one SOF leader similarly emphasizing the ability to turn observations into course corrections in dynamic time. These comments suggest the need for leaders at this level to see inside their own thought processes through meta-cognition, or thinking about thinking. …