Art, Craft, or Science: How We Think about Military Leadership
Therese Heltberg | December 29, 2016
Art, Craft, or Science: How We Think about Military Leadership
Just one final stronghold stands in the way of Roman victory and the promise of peace throughout the empire.
These words appear on-screen in the opening scene of the movie Gladiator. Soldiers are lining up for battle against the barbarian tribes in Germania. Russell Crowe’s character, Roman Gen. Maximus Decimus Meridius, walks along the ranks of the army. The soldiers rise as he approaches, looking at him with respect and admiration. Maximus seems calm and determined as he commands, “At my signal, unleash hell.”
At this critical moment, in this pivotal battle, Maximus moves on to lead the dangerous and decisive part of the tactical maneuver behind enemy lines. In the forest where the cavalry await him, he inspires courage in his men by validating the enduring legacy of their actions that day, linking past, present, and future. “Brothers, what we do in life echoes in eternity.”
The military leader, the commander, is a central figure in our common narratives about war. Gladiator is just one of a large number of popular movies and books that center on great military leaders. But there is a surprising dearth of contemporary academic emphasis on military leadership theory. Recently, I looked through the abstracts of articles published over the last five years in three international scientific journals on military studies (two of which were ranked in the top twenty military studies publications on Google Scholar). Interestingly, I found very few articles related to theorizing on military leadership—i.e., articles that deal with how to understand, conceptualize, or develop military leadership from a theoretical perspective. While a multiplicity of scientific books and articles are concerned with general leadership and management, it seems from this selection of articles that academic attention towards military leadership is rather more scarce. In this selection of articles, military leadership was most often embedded in other central themes such as combat motivation, military operations, unit cohesion, or soldier values and identities. Apparently, literature on military leadership most often takes the form of personal accounts by military officers, for instance, or historical monographs about great military leaders, battles, and wartime strategies.
http://mwi.usma.edu/art-craft-science-think-military-leadership/
