Effect of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder on Military Leadership: An Historical Perspective

摘要

This monograph examines the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) on military leadership. For over twenty years, the United States Army has used the Be, Know, Do leadership model to describe what Army leadership is and does. The BKD leadership model addresses the personal values, competence, and actions of a leader that influence others to achieve successful mission accomplishment. Ongoing operations demonstrated shortcomings in current doctrine, which are clarified using recent leadership theories and historical experience. World War I, World War II, and Vietnam provide historical experiences that illustrate how American military leadership encountered PTSD, or one of its predecessors, on a large scale. The American experience in World War I began with a baseline understanding of war neurosis by observing and working with the British military. As the United States entered World War II, military leaders were determined to reduce psychiatric losses of the scale suffered in the previous World War. The military relied on personnel screening as a discriminator for service and believed that soldier selection would serve as the solution to mental health problems. The Vietnam experience showcased the effects of combat stress on a military organization. A new epidemic of delayed stress response surfaced in the military, and leaders were once again left with an emerging problem during operations. Transformational, leader-member, and situational leadership theories can best augment the leadership model's shortfalls and address multi-leader collaboration towards PTSD, the relationship between the leader and follower with PTSD, and practice of leading social change within an organization comprised of PTSD diagnosed members.