In the military environment, questions are often asked about the characteristics that must be the primary baggage of every good commander, the sector literature and history in this regard provide hints of considerable depth that can undoubtedly be taken as a reference.
The amplitude of the subject, however, requires a trace from which to draw eventual extensions and variations adapted to the specific cases.
The NATO doctrine well summarizes the characteristics of the "good leader" taking into account the fact that the operational developments of the last decades have led to the need for a qualitative leap in the definition of what is the role and the figure of the commander. If in the past the command stick was the exclusive prerogative of the officers, today the multidimensionality and the polymorphism of the operational scenarios, connected with a threat of hybrid origin and asymmetrically structured mean that military personnel of every order and degree, on the basis of what it is the intent of the commander of the upper level that they must be able to take decisions with sometimes decisive reflexes on the conduct of an entire military campaign, to do this it is clear that the "spirit" of the commander must be a common heritage for all categories of soldiers " healthy carriers ”of the key factors on which to build a commander regardless of the grade. In fact, with these concepts the Atlantic Alliance defines the DNA of the leader who must be: capable of making decisions, capable of driving, in a position to exercise control. The short list may appear to be an obvious conceptual exercise, expression of competences that can be placed in the common baggage of any hierarchical organization that manifests the need to have a correctly formed ruling class, in reality the three expressions, set in the military reality, contain a quid more than has its roots in the European military tradition forged in years of battles and nowadays. The ability to make decisions is a value, more than a tool as it only decides who is in a position to understand and therefore to manage the cognitive and moral domain before that physical, thus responding to a complex external stimulus. All this is strictly connected to reliability and responsibility, values too, which must be developed during the period in which the commanding soldier is trained. Leadership, an Anglo-Saxon term that expresses the ability to take the lead, is certainly a concept borrowed from the classical tradition where the leader was the one who led, who traced the path to follow before, during and after the battle building with capacity and strengthens its own authority from which authority would descend. In this concept the plastic of the commander understood as an individual in a position to drive by combining his own skills and understanding of the general situation can be said to be condensed.
The exercise of control is the most complex that an individual invested with the burden of commanding can be required, as his control is called into question in his control, the goodness of his choices is personally verified, in essence he is the other side of the coin of the command, that dark face that tells us immediately if the planned or conducted is correct. The nature of verification, intrinsic to the control, makes this exercise little practiced since it unequivocally reveals and before the facts or the superior can make the limits and shortcomings of a leader it is therefore necessary to make an ongoing effort to learn this useful and precious art of "military things". The synthesis of the three aspects in which the command is gathered has shown how each of these combines a basic need based on the intrinsic qualities of the individual. If NATO, through its own doctrinal corpus, has highlighted the aspects of decision, leadership and control as building blocks of command, comparable to a DNA, this same DNA needs its fundamental components ascribable to the concepts of: professional knowledge, intellectual abilities, creativity and initiative, judgment, self-confidence, courage and determination, communication skills. Wanting to use a widely abused phrase, one would say nothing new under the sun, already Cesare in his commentaries and Clausewitz in his "della Guerra" expressed the concepts set out above, the first with a strong individualism typical of the dux of the late Republican era and the second with a more philosophical slant, affirming that the art of command was a combination of mind and body in adherence to the idealistic world in which he had forged his ideas.
If the scenarios change and the technology evolves, our analysis, also linked to what is defined by the doctrine of NATO, shows us how immutable the man commanding him with his own intrinsic abilities, connected to an adequate formation and to the knowledge of the scenarios can at every order level and covering any degree being a leader and resolver element of entire military operations.
Andrea Pastore
