An Cosantóir

An Cosantóir November 2018 www.dfmagazine.ie 12 | BY COY SGT DAVID O'REILLY, NCO TRAINING WING, MIL COL, DFTC O ne could argue that today's Irish NCO leader is the best trained and educated since the foundation of the state. While there is an endless library of memoires from retired gener- als, and thousands of journal articles on military leadership from the officer perspective, there is a surprising lack of writing by NCOs on the topic of leadership. Searching An Cosantóir's database the only article written by an NCO on the subject I could find was a piece from September 1945, written by Sgt Gallagher of 1 Division HQ, that focuses on young officers arriving to their first unit and what NCOs expect of them; an interesting read and still relevant today. Since 2012, of the numerous dissertations submitted to IT Carlow by NCOs, only two are on the topic of leadership. One of these fo- cuses on senior NCO leadership, while the other offers a comparative study between sergeant and lieutenant leadership training. So why is it that NCOs, who eat, work and rest with their soldiers, and indeed live with them on deployments, have not written more on this subject? After all, NCOs are leaders who are at the coalface of day-to-day decision making and problem solving, dealing with soldiers 'eyeball to eyeball'. In this article, I offer a senior NCO's views on leadership; focusing on two themes important to the development of NCO leadership skills: the study of leadership as a subject, and the adoption of a mission-command philosophy. Military leadership is different to civilian leadership in that it is imposed by authority of rank and appointment, and decisions made by military leaders may result in serious injury or death. In a study of leadership in the US Army, prominent military historian and author, Nathan Finney, notes that leadership is simultaneously the least expensive and the most expensive resource a military possesses. Its fiscal cost is minuscule in comparison to the procurement budgets for high-end military equipment, but its cost in terms of time is mea- sured in decades and must therefore be prioritised when allocating available training and education resources. The price of failing to effectively resource the development of lead- ers can be enormous. In a small military such as our Defence Forces, leaders are the competitive advantage that technology cannot replace nor substitute. An NCO facilitating mission command. Sgt John Murray providing leadership feedback to students AASC.

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