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= Military Leadership = Military Leadership is a tool used by members of military institutions to navigate a team through stressful and/or highly dangerous situations. It encompasses guiding, helping, and leading a team to complete its objective efficiently. It is developed in military education and training and contains both cognitive and physical abilities. It can be considered a specific type of leadership that is characterised by its use in life-threatening situations such as war. Furthermore, military personals’ leadership is guided by the leading principles of their institution or faction. Different leadership models are used by these factions rather than one definition and the effectiveness of these models are constantly evaluated.

History
In the late 1990’s, scientific studies believed that the paradigm of military leadership promoted authoritative values that may have hampered the development of inter-personal skills. But, with the decreasing amount of global conflicts and some countries having not experienced a war for decades, military Leadership is now regarded differently. The Department of the U.S. Army defines it as, “The process of influencing others by providing purpose, motivation, and direction to accomplish missions and improve the organization”. Rather than being emotionless leaders that are trained to solely hold pragmatic values, there is an emphasis on emotional support and development. Within many institutes there was a transition in the identification of good leaders. Focus shifted away from identifying leaders by only their objective knowledge, skill, or ability to identifying leaders by their competency in implementing strategy and the military body’s goals. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, modelling on competency allows military institutions to align their leaders with guiding principles while modelling on objective skill allows the completion of highly technical tasks.

Traits
Military leaders are identified by their characteristics and personality traits that are ideal for leadership under immense stress. Research has concluded that military leaders operating in high-intensity extended combat are likely to display certain traits. Self-knowledge/development is required of all leaders and encompasses the lead by example philosophy. Military leaders must be able to command knowledge of strategic and tactical importance. They strive for professionalism and take responsibility for their own life and failures. This will set an example for those that follow to replicate for their development. Being observational is crucial in a dangerous environment and those military leaders who are alert tend to be more successful in combat situations. The ability to detect changes in the environment allows proactive innovation of tactics to adapt to such changes, and the constant intake of information by scanning one’s surroundings can give an advantage over an adversary. Encouraging assessment and suggestions helps tackle complex challenges through active participation by followers in problem identification and analysis. Well-rounded feedback from supervisors or subordinates can help find viable solutions especially when the team is competent. The sharing of information and decision-making by the leader can encourage a democratic environment that allows the input of many perspectives. Competence building in followers is a long-term process by the leader who inculcates followers with desire and motivation to seek professional knowledge. The end goal is to create a team that is competent and able to support each other and operate independently. Resilience is defined as, “the ability to persist in the face of challenges and to bounce back from adversity”, and must be instilled within all military leaders. It is an essential trait amongst leaders to instil followers with resilience to traverse the rigours of combat warfare.

Identifying Leaders
Finding great leaders within a military context is often associated with the promotion of one’s rank and done early in training or recruitment. This is due to early signs of their ability, as leadership is derived from fundamental qualities built in one’s character. However, these characteristics can emerge when placed in stressful situations but often do not develop without already being present. Leadership can be measured using predictive or criterion measures to evaluate one’s ability to lead. Predictive measures examine the general dimensions of soldiers’ military performance including general ability, biographical data and personality. Existing measures such as the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery are able to calculate the general aptitude of soldiers to accurately predict performance in the military. Other predictive measures focus on non-cognitive constructs such as the Army Vocational Interest Career Examination, Assessment of Individual Motivation, Tailored Adaptive Personality Assessment Screen, that are used over general intelligence measures such as IQ testss. So, predictive measures aim to measure the variance of general intelligence measures. On the other hand, criterion measures focus on performance and while many military leaders generate success there are no direct measures of leadership, as a leaders’ followers will garner the same success as the team and the leader leaving no differentiation by success. In addition to the difficulties of measuring leadership there may be a resistance to soldier comparison due to the zero-defect mentality. Because of these difficulties measuring leadership performance and criterion measures are in early stages of implementation, such as in non-commissioned officer evaluations that are intended for personal management and leadership development. Recently, measures are being developed that specifically look at military leadership involving validating a measure of experience and situational judgment tests and is conducted by the Center for Army Leadership. To measure experience, it assesses one’s history in terms of the experiences lived. The situation judgment test assesses a leader’s reaction to various situations common in the military. The subject is given a scenario and selects a course of action to take from possible options. The impact and potential usefulness of these measures are yet to be seen. In the future, personnel development may prove a more accepted tool to base accurate and reliable measures of leadership around.