Military Leadership Lessons

The major lessons for the military leaders to achieve the objectives of the National Military Strategy 2015 are a result of the evolution of the ways to fight the war, the relations among the involved actors and the use of the military to get political objectives. To show the importance of these lessons, this essay discussed the relevance of the ingenuity of the commander and the proper assessment to deter, deny and defeat adversary states, the need of adaptation and focused communication to combat violent extremist organizations and the utility of a combination of soft and hard power to strength alliances and partnerships.

Lesson 1 (NMS Objective #1): Theories and technology are tools for the commander, but the ingenuity and skills allows

This lesson evidence the importance of a proper assessment for the military leaders. Retired US Army colonel Hy Rothstein claimed in his book Assessing War that American approach to war confuses winning battles and campaigns with winning wars. The risk of this approach is that it removes the political objectives from the spotlight, and by doing this, the difference between measures of performance and measures of effectiveness becomes fuzzy. It is easy for the commanders to use their own internal standards like the number of sorties flown or the amount of bombs dropped, but without a contrast to the affectation of the desired targets and the end states these numbers become irrelevant. Scholar Fred Ikle in his book Every war must end, claimed that governments tend to lose sight of the ending of wars when military men fail to perceive that is the outcome of the war, not the outcome of the campaigns within it, that determines how well their plans serve the nation’s

Simpson claimed that the information revolution expanded the audience of the conflict beyond the enemy and beyond the state. Consequently, VEOs’ messages can reach the entire world in real time, without any filters, censorship or any contrast with other sources. By doing this, insurgents seek to persuade the audience converting the political message delivered in an end, conversely to the role of information in conventional war that tends to explain the actions. Conversely, military forces are unable to reply immediately due to the need of filter the messages and request for approvals at different levels. A strategic narrative, defined as the explanation of the actions during and after conflict, must be constructed according to each specific audience to connect policy with actions and get popular