[May 22, 2017] On the battlefield and in the heat of extreme competition, courage and integrity are not enough to succeed. One must also be imaginative and flexible; traits that every leader must possess if they are to be a winner and achieve something of importance.
Those who have participated in professional sports, combat, or the world of national politics are keenly aware that the competition to win is as difficult as it is fraught with obstacles, misdirection, dread, and frustration. Rising to the top can mean many things but without imagination to “see” the future and how to get there, as well as being flexible enough to quickly introduce new methods and processes, leadership will inevitably fail.
My personal experience in combat introduced me to this with a hard lesson that my teammates and I never forget. Military engineers early in the Iraq War were generally left alone to complete their tasks and rarely attacked. What we constructed was to the benefit of the Coalition, Iraqi citizens, but also unexpectedly beneficial to the enemy. However, that changed later as the early combatants were replaced by Iran-supported insurgents; Engineer and civilians became specifically targeted.
Engineers who failed to understand the change in enemy tactics and never adapted were often killed or wounded or got civilians killed. Most of these casualties were inflected upon the IED hunter teams1 that engineers employed early in the war. We were significantly reducing the effectiveness of this ambush tactic and for much of the war we were back and forth on who would hold the technical and tactical upper hand.
Once we were coordinating our new tactics and integrated improved, along with our ever evolving technology, we were able to improve our reduction in IED kills on our troops. Complacency was at the root of our initial inflexibility and failure to imagine what the enemy was capable of doing after seeing us in action. Only after we coordinated directly with combat elements (primarily infantry-armor teams) were the effort to eliminate the threat improved.
For those of us who survived combat, the experience was a great teacher. You learned to have trust and confidence in your teammates as well in all Coalition forces. You also learned to control your fear and stay focused on the mission. We did this through brutally honest critics of our engineer effort. It is counterintuitive to accept criticism of your mission but we did it and it ultimately allowed us to adapt quicker than the enemy.
Because we were more imaginative by a long shot and flexible enough to change when necessary, we were always on the winning side of the tactical and technological fight. Courage and integrity, while necessary, were simply not enough.
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1. Initially the IED (Improvised Explosive Device) hunters were Cooks from Engineer units. Later they were replaced by qualified engineers who were trained specifically for the dangerous job of locating and exploding roadside hazards.