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THREAD: I waited to truly have time before reading this article from @TJGordonIV1 (Colonel Gordon USMC) and I was not disappointed. It is great to see leaders thinking about all of the different forces that combine to achieve combat effectiveness. Talking about concepts such 1/ https://twitter.com/TJGordonIV1/status/1285560547845574656
as spiritual fitness, resilience, and empathy sometimes gets service members a decent roll of the eyes, but that roll of the eyes only comes from sheer ignorance. @TJGordonIV1 writes about how it is easy for Marine leaders to talk about physical and mental development. I agree2/
Our war fighting philosophy MCDP-1 warns us about focusing on the physical and mental without also focusing heavily on the moral forces that make a war fighting organization effective. It can be easy to think the "moral" is specifically about ethics, or the difference between 3/
"good" and "bad", but simplifying "moral" forces to those things would be a mistake. Moral or better written, "morale" is about getting each warfighter to answer the following questions - "why should I die for you or anyone in this unit?" - 4/
"why should I care about sacrificing everything for my country?" - "why should I dedicate my life to the ruthless pursuit of excellence that has characterized the Marine Corps for 244 years?". We know that a warfighter's ability to answer these questions are critical to our 5/
success. @TJGordonIV1 hits one of the ways that we can achieve this unshakeable commitment in our warfighters... EMPATHY. Force Design efforts, new planes, tanks, no tanks, new ships... all these things are a waste of time without ensuring that we as leaders achieve commitment 6/
to service from them. We can PT them (physical) and conduct as many tactical decision games (mental) as we want, but if we are not going out of our way to truly step into their shoes, then we will never receive their discretionary energy. It is discretionary energy that allows 7/
units to achieve excellence. Empathy - let's continue to talk to our warfighters about the obvious. There is enough social context to pull from in order to engage our Marines on the "moral" level endlessly. Think about that female warfighter in your unit... have you asked her 8/
how she has been feeling since the Vanessa Guillen tragedy? If not - do it today. The thing about bias is that each of us are biased towards what will achieve an emotional reaction within us at any given time, but we need to be aware of the variables that emotionally 9/
wear down our specific warfighters. Talk about Vanessa Guillen with your unit, but yes, I'm specifically saying ask the females, as a group, one on one, just do it. Talk about the murder of George Floyd with your whole unit, but yes, definitely have the extra chat with the 10/
new African American warfighter that just checked in and has been unable to focus at work since the video. Yes - "dare" to bring up the topic of the confederate flag with your units, but more specifically to any proud southerners that this may be affecting on a deeper level. 11/
I truly believe that "daring" to step into the shoes of the warfighters that we are lucky enough to lead whether they are privates, sergeants, senior enlisted, junior officer, or senior officer will achieve the amount of commitment that will be needed to win tomorrow's fight. FIN
