West Point Leadership Quotes

CHARACTER COMMUNICATES CONSISTENCY Leaders without inner strength can’t be counted on day after day because their ability to perform changes constantly. NBA great Jerry West commented, “You can’t get too much done in life if you only work on the days when you feel good.” If your people don’t know what to expect from you as a leader, at some point they won’t look to you for leadership.

there is no other civilization that can serve as support; we have to face our problems alone. The only prospect offered us as a counterpart of the cyclical laws, and that only hypothetical, is that the process of decline of the Dark Age has first reached its terminal phases with us in the West. Therefore it is not impossible that we would also be the first to pass the zero point, in a period in which the other civilizations, entering later into the same current, would find themselves more or less in our current state, having abandoned—"superseded"—what they still offer today in the way of superior values and traditional forms of existence that attract us. The consequence would be a reversal of roles. The West, having reached the point beyond the negative limit, would be qualified to assume a new function of guidance or command, very different from the material, techno-industrial leadership that it wielded in the past, which, once it collapsed, resulted only in a general leveling. This rapid overview of general prospects and problems may have been useful to some readers, but I shall not dwell further on these matters. As I have said, what interests us here is the field of personal life; and from that point of view, in defining the attitude to be taken toward certain experiences and processes of today, having consequences different from what they appear to have for practically all our contemporaries, we need to establish autonomous positions,

In contemplating who should command the Army’s multiplying regiments and divisions, Marshall and his training chief, Lesley J. McNair, kept a list in a safe of more than 400 colonels with perfect efficiency reports. Allen, neither a full colonel nor perfect, was not on it. Rather, he was facing court-martial for insubordination in 1940 when word arrived of his double promotion, from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general. He was the first man in his former West Point class to wear a general’s stars. No man better exemplified the American military leadership’s ability to identify, promote, and in some cases forgive those officers best capable of commanding men in battle. Among the encomiums that followed Allen’s promotion was a penciled note: “Us guys in the guardhouse want to congratulate you, too.

ISIS was forced out of all its occupied territory in Syria and Iraq, though thousands of ISIS fighters are still present in both countries. Last April, Assad again used sarin gas, this time in Idlib Province, and Russia again used its veto to protect its client from condemnation and sanction by the U.N. Security Council. President Trump ordered cruise missile strikes on the Syrian airfield where the planes that delivered the sarin were based. It was a minimal attack, but better than nothing. A week before, I had condemned statements by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who had explicitly declined to maintain what had been the official U.S. position that a settlement of the Syrian civil war had to include Assad’s removal from power. “Once again, U.S. policy in Syria is being presented piecemeal in press statements,” I complained, “without any definition of success, let alone a realistic plan to achieve it.” As this book goes to the publisher, there are reports of a clash between U.S. forces in eastern Syria and Russian “volunteers,” in which hundreds of Russians were said to have been killed. If true, it’s a dangerous turn of events, but one caused entirely by Putin’s reckless conduct in the world, allowed if not encouraged by the repeated failures of the U.S. and the West to act with resolve to prevent his assaults against our interests and values. In President Obama’s last year in office, at his invitation, he and I spent a half hour or so alone, discussing very frankly what I considered his policy failures, and he believed had been sound and necessary decisions. Much of that conversation concerned Syria. No minds were changed in the encounter, but I appreciated his candor as I hoped he appreciated mine, and I respected the sincerity of his convictions. Yet I still believe his approach to world leadership, however thoughtful and well intentioned, was negligent, and encouraged our allies to find ways to live without us, and our adversaries to try to fill the vacuums our negligence created. And those trends continue in reaction to the thoughtless America First ideology of his successor. There are senior officials in government who are trying to mitigate those effects. But I worry that we are at a turning point, a hinge of history, and the decisions made in the last ten years and the decisions made tomorrow might be closing the door on the era of the American-led world order. I hope not, and it certainly isn’t too late to reverse that direction. But my time in that fight has concluded. I have nothing but hope left to invest in the work of others to make the future better than the past. As of today, as the Syrian war continues, more than 400,000 people have been killed, many of them civilians. More than five million have fled the country and more than six million have been displaced internally. A hundred years from now, Syria will likely be remembered as one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the twenty-first century, and an example of human savagery at its most extreme. But it will be remembered, too, for the invincibility of human decency and the longing for freedom and justice evident in the courage and selflessness of the White Helmets and the soldiers fighting for their country’s freedom from tyranny and terrorists. In that noblest of human conditions is the eternal promise of the Arab Spring, which was engulfed in flames and drowned in blood, but will, like all springs, come again.

how to lead an organization and people, such as the importance of consistency in command, the free flow of information, keeping an open mind, and treating people with respect.

any long and bitter campaign morale will suffer unless all ranks thoroughly believe that their commanders are concerned first and always with the welfare of the troops who do the fighting.

Morale is born of loyalty…discipline and efficiency, all of which breed confidence in self and in comrades. Most of all morale is promoted by unity—unity in service to the country and in the determination to attain the objective of national security. Morale is at one and the same time the strongest, and the most delicate of growths. It withstands shocks, even disasters of the battlefield, but can be destroyed utterly by favoritism, neglect or injustice.

My ambition in the Army was to make everybody I worked for regretful when I was ordered to other duty.

A human understanding and a natural ability to mingle with all men on a basis of equality are more important than any degree of technical skill,

In 1984, West Point conducted a survey of 23,000 company-and field-grade officers to determine their current perceptions of the organization’s leadership. Nearly 49 percent of the surveyed officers responded that, “the bold, original, creative officer cannot survive in today’s Army.”[106] Gen. Donald Starry, DePuy’s successor at TRADOC, concurred with these leaders and started to rollback DePuy’s mechanical approach to the training and employment of the forces that emphasized firepower over maneuverability.[107]

When Eisenhower arrived in London in his new role, the first thing he did was organize his staff, clearly articulating to them what his expectations were. He told them Allied unity was critical and that problems would be solved through objective rather than nationalistic perspectives. He preferred to do business informally, and his door was always open. If he didn’t understand something, he asked for their indulgence, and that they should make the subject understandable to him, since they were the experts. He wanted them to be honest and candid with him, as he would be with them. If he had an idea that had already been considered and rejected, he wanted to be told, not humored. Eisenhower told them no commander could possibly know everything, which is why he had a staff.

The specification of broad objectives rather than operational details allowed Eisenhower to maintain maximum flexibility to respond to changing events.

he should be allowed to carry out his task with minimum interference from this end.

serving a two-year appointment as the Class of 1951 Chair for the Study of Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point is the fundamental importance of unit leadership. The cellular structure of any truly great organization is the well-led unit, for this is where great things get done. Great leadership at the top doesn’t amount to very much without exceptional leadership at the unit level.

Dwight David Eisenhower never led a single soldier into battle. Before World War II, he had never even heard a shot fired in anger. His only “combat wound” was the bad knee, weakened by a West Point football injury, that he twisted helping push a jeep out of the Normandy mud. Yet it was Ike Eisenhower who, as supreme Allied commander in Europe, was responsible for leading the greatest military enterprise in history.

the Israelis and Palestinians were at a demographic tipping point, with more-or-less parity in the number of Jews and Arabs living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The century-long struggle over the land was only becoming more intractable. The Israeli Zionist left had long warned that the dream was at stake and that Israel could not have it both ways: Without partition into two separate homelands for Jews and Palestinians, Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish democracy, however compromised those terms were, could not be sustained and Israel would inevitably become a binational country. If all the Palestinians were given equal rights and the vote in Israel, it would not have a Jewish majority. Without partition and without allowing Palestinians to vote for the government that controlled fundamental aspects of their lives, Israel’s claim to be a democracy would eventually implode. The temporary occupation had gone on so long that many critics were already describing the separate statuses of Israel and the occupied territories as a fiction meant to obscure what was already a binational, one-state reality. Instead of a light unto the nations, Israel was being cast by its harshest liberal-left critics and human rights groups such as B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International as a single-state entity and territory that had already veered into a system of varying degrees of “Jewish supremacy” or racial “domination” over the Palestinians in different geographical areas that, they asserted, fit international definitions of apartheid and crimes against humanity. With a weak Palestinian leadership split between the increasingly autocratic Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas-run Gaza, and after years without any semblance of a peace process, Israel, more than seventy years after its founding, was more divided over its endgame than it was on the eve of its independence. Esh Kodesh and a rash of other settlement outposts had stepped into the void to try to determine the outcome and doom Israel to victory, or at least to deepen the entanglement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Africa had free markets and a thriving entrepreneurial culture and tradition centuries before these became the animating ideas of the United States or Western Europe. Timbuktu, the legendary city in northern Mali, was a famous trading post and marketplace as far back as the twelfth century, as vital to the commerce of North and West Africa as ports on the Mediterranean were to Europe and the Levant. In Africa Unchained, George Ayittey offers myriad examples of industrial activity in precolonial Africa, from the indigo-dye cloth trade of fourteenth-century Kano, Nigeria, to the flourishing glass industry of precolonial Benin to the palm oil businesses of southern Nigeria to the Kente cotton trade of the Asante of Ghana in the 1800s: “Profit was never an alien concept to Africa. Throughout its history there have been numerous entrepreneurs. The aim of traders and numerous brokers or middlemen was profit and wealth.”2 The tragedy is what happened next. These skills and traditions were destroyed, damaged, eroded or forced underground, first during centuries of slave wars and colonialism and, later, through decades of corrupt postindependence rule, usually in service to foreign ideologies of socialism or communism. No postcolonial leader in Africa who fought for independence has ever adequately explained why liberation from colonial rule necessarily meant following the ideas and philosophies of Karl Marx, a gray-bearded nineteenth-century German academic who worked out of the British Library and never set foot in Africa. At the same time, neither should we have ever allowed ourselves to become beholden to paternalistic aid organizations that were sending their representatives to build our wells and plant our food for us. Nor, for that matter, should we have relied on the bureaucrats of the Western world telling us how to be proper capitalists or—as is happening now—to Party officials in Beijing telling us what they want in exchange for this or that project. It was this outside influence—starting with colonialism but later from our own terrible and corrupt policies and leaderships—that the stereotype of the lazy, helpless, unimaginative and dependent African developed. The point is that we Africans have to take charge of our own destiny, and to do this we can call on our own unique culture and traditions of innovation, free enterprise and free trade. We are a continent of entrepreneurs.

Taylor spent a week at Point Isabel building the earthworks he should have finished a month before, then, on May 7, started back to relieve the fort. His West Pointers begged him not to take the massive train, which could be brought up later in complete safety, but he had no patience with textbook soldiers.… Well, what did he have? A sound principle: attack. A less valuable one which was to serve him just as well in this war: never retreat. Total ignorance of the art of war. And an instinct, if not for command, at least for leadership. He had been hardened in years of petty frontier duty, he had no nerves and nothing recognizable as intelligence, he was afraid of nothing, and he was too unimaginative to know when he was being licked, which was fortunate since he did not know how to maneuver troops. Add to this a dislike of military forms and procedures and a taste for old clothes and you have a predestinate candidate for the Presidency. The army and even some of the West Pointers worshiped him.

Perhaps the magnetic pull of West Point ultimately wasn’t rational but emotional. The history-laden rhythm of a military parade reverberated like the incense-scented rituals of Catholic mass. Walking around West Point, I was swept up in its call to “Duty, Honor, Country.” Self-sacrifice, integrity, and leadership echoed between the larger-than-life statues of Eisenhower and MacArthur. Cadets discussed courage and duty without a note of irony. They spoke without slouching, oozing confidence, projecting their chins, eyes fixed straight ahead. Around them my own spine stiffened with resolve. Whatever they had, I wanted. West Point offered more than an academic education. It offered an almost religious quest for perfection. I wanted to graduate a better man.

Note. Adapted from “A Model for Information Assurance: An Integrated Approach,” by W. V. Maconachy, C. D. Schou, D. Ragsdale, and D. Welch, 2001, June. Paper presented at the 2001 IEEE Workshop on Information Assurance and Security, United States Military Academy, West Point, New York: New York..

the threat today is not western religions, but psychology and consumerism. is the Dharma becoming another psychotherapy, another commodity to be bought and sold? will western Buddhism become all too compatible with our individualistic consumption patterns, with expensive retreats and initiations, catering to overstressed converts, eager to pursue their own enlightenment? let’s hope not, because Buddhism and the west need each other. despite its economic and technologic dynamism, western civilisation and its globalisation are in trouble, which means all of us are in trouble. the most obvious example is our inability to respond to accelerating climate change, as seriously as it requires. if humanity is to survive and thrive over the next few centuries, there is no need to go on at length here about the other social and ecological crisis that confront us now, which are increasingly difficult to ignore [many of those are considered in the following chapters]. it’s also becoming harder to overlook the fact that the political and economic systems we’re so proud of seem unable to address these problems. one must ask, is that because they themselves are the problem? part of the problem is leadership, or the lack of it, but we can’t simply blame our rulers. it’s not only the lack of a moral core of those who rise to the top, or the institutional defamations that massage their rise, economical and political elites, and there’s not much difference between them anymore. like the rest of us, they are in need of a new vision of possibility, what it means to be human, why we tend to get into trouble, and how we can get out go it, those who benefit the most from the present social arrangements may think of themselves as hardheaded realists, but as self-conscious human beings, we remain motivated by some such vision, weather we’re aware of it or not, as why we love war, points out. even secular modernity is based on a spiritual worldview, unfortunately a deficient one, from a Buddhist perspective.

WHO’s performance during the 2014–16 epidemic was severely criticized. International governments, NGOs, and groups of experts pointed the finger at WHO not only for the delay in sounding the alarm but also for its poorly functioning regional and country offices and a lack of leadership and coordination on the ground in West Africa.

I’ve come to a personal belief that a key ingredient in the West Point recipe is the idea that great leadership begins first with character—that leadership is primarily a function of who you are, for this is the foundation for everything you do.

The united men at the bottom of San Juan Heights now represented all of America: “Aristocrats from the east, cowboys from the west, millionaires, paupers, shyster lawyers, quack doctors, farmers, college professors, miners, adventurers, preachers, prospectors, socialists, journalists, clerks, Mormons, musicians, publicists, Jews, politicians, Gentiles, Mexicans, professed Christians, Indians, West Point graduates, wild men, Ivy League athletes, and thinkers.”12 They were from the North and they were from the South. They were from every part of the Union. They had one leader, Theodore Roosevelt.