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

Abstract

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.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 19, 2011
Accession Number
ADA545103

Entities

People

  • Karen A. Baker

Organizations

  • United States Army Command and General Staff College

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Anxiety Disorders
  • Brain Injuries
  • Civil War
  • Health Services
  • Medical Personnel
  • Mental Disorders
  • Military Organizations
  • Organizational Structure
  • Physicians
  • Psychiatry
  • Psychology
  • Teamwork
  • Therapy
  • Traumatic Stress Disorder
  • Vietnam War
  • War Colleges
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Mental Health of Military Veterans with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): Risk Factors, Prevalence, Symptoms, and Treatment.
  • Military History / Militaries and War Studies
  • Organizational Psychology.