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You may have heard that we are about to have a change in leadership, a different person in a very consequential role, a new sheriff in town, so to speak. I have been through quite a few of these at different levels during my military career, and most of them have been uneventful. Most of them have not significantly impacted unit morale or effectiveness. There were a couple of exceptions.
The first exception took place aboard a Navy ship during one of my Naval Academy midshipman summer cruises. The captain for the first three weeks after I joined the crew was, like me, a prior enlisted sailor. He knew his ship and its systems and the logistics of the deployment and all the requirements for training, transit, and port calls. Technically and operationally, he was a pro. The crew couldn’t wait for him to go.
The problem was in the condescending and often angry way he addressed his department heads and other officers on the ship. I witnessed this in my first few days aboard the vessel, and that was also a problem. I was not yet old enough to drink in the United States, but I knew that a midshipman shouldn’t witness a commanding officer berating a department head. So even though the captain treated the enlisted men magnanimously and the officers conscientiously kept trouble from rolling downhill, unit morale was abysmal.
That changed almost overnight when the ship got a new captain. The new captain wasn’t more salty (experienced) than the old one, he was just more friendly, constructive, diplomatic. If something broke or went wrong, he didn’t immediately assign blame and berate an unlucky officer in front of bystanders. He didn’t berate anyone at all, as far as I know, and the entire crew breathed easier.
The exact opposite happened when a Marine Corps unit I was in returned from a successful six-month deployment. (This was long before the Global War on Terror.) With a change of command, we went from a strong, cohesive unit to one that Marines wanted to escape, even if that meant engaging in conduct that would get them separated from the Marine Corps. Changing the commanding officer changed everything, and it was once again about how the CO interacted with his closest subordinates. I was one of those closest subordinates, and I felt fortunate to be out of there a few months later. That commanding officer was replaced sooner than expected.
Military technology has changed significantly since those days. It has even changed since I retired, and some tactics, techniques and procedures have changed in response. But what the Marine Corps expects from its leaders has remained constant. The fourteen traits and eleven principles of leadership I learned as a young lieutenant haven’t changed for as long as I can remember, and I learned them at a time when only one guy named George had ever been President of the United States.
One of those eleven leadership principles is, “Be technically and tactically proficient.” The commanding officers of that Navy ship and my Marine Corps unit met that standard. They knew their equipment and other resources and how to employ them in battle. What they lacked was one of the fourteen leadership traits: tact.
You are probably aware that tact is related to politeness, diplomacy, and even sensitivity. These are not things the movie-viewing public associates with the Marine Corps. Polite and sensitive doesn’t describe Colonel Bull Meechum (Robert Duvall) in The Great Santini or Gunnery Sgt. Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) in Full Metal Jacket. Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Nathan Jessup in A Few Good Men didn’t give a rip about anyone’s feelings for cripe’s sake, and Lt. General Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller—a real-life Marine Corps legend—was famous, in part, for coining the phrase, “Pain is weakness leaving your body.” This sounds like the opposite of sensitivity.
Note: Not all pain—or even all pain associated with exercise—is weakness leaving your body. Sometimes you’re just injured.
Funny thing about that legendary warrior, Chesty Puller: In many of his photos, he looks as if he is trying not to break into a grin or even laughter over some self-deprecating inside joke. You wouldn’t want to be opposite him in a gunfight, but I’m sure he had boatloads of tact. That whole name-calling, screw-your-feelings, tough-guy act in the movies is just a caricature of the real thing. (Some of it in The Great Santini was just plain abuse.)
And before we move beyond military leadership, here is the Marines Corps definition [ [link removed] ] of tact: “The ability to deal with others in a manner that will maintain good relations and avoid offense. More simply stated, tact is the ability to say and do the right thing at the right time.”
So tact is really the social skill of saying the right thing in the right way at the right place and time. It’s a sign of maturity and self-control, and the Marine Corps expects [ [link removed] ] it from leaders “under all conditions and regardless of true feelings.”
“Regardless of true feelings?!” But I just gotta be me!
Then you probably shouldn’t lead.
You are probably right now thinking of some schmuck who is completely without tact. Or maybe you are thinking of more than one such schmuck, since they are ubiquitous these days. There is some possibility you are thinking of someone who is or was the very essence of tact, a model for us all to follow. In that case, I am glad you are here with your lemonade and your smiley-face t-shirt because you balance out these other folks with their whiskey and their Outlaw Josey Wales ponchos.
You can see, I hope, that tact is a desirable trait in both military and civilian leaders. It describes a way of acting against which we can measure ourselves, our bosses, and our elected or appointed leaders in government. Do they deal with others in a way that maintains good relations and avoids offense? Do they have the self-control to do so regardless of their true feelings? If so, they may be fit for leadership.
What about technical and tactical proficiency? Does that apply to our elected or appointed leaders in government? Sure. We don’t expect elected or appointed officials to know all the ins and outs of their new offices on Day One—unless they are named Pete Buttigieg—but we do expect them to become technically and operationally proficient broadly and to understand some things in a detailed way, and we expect them to get ramped up quickly. This is why we have experts—bureaucrats, some say, in a pejorative tone—to provide assistance and information and keep their boss from doing something embarrassing or illegal.
So, along with tact, we have this technical and tactical (how to best employ one’s assets) proficiency as standards against which to measure our leaders at whatever level.
In a perfect world, voters would have criteria such as these in mind when they cast their ballots. Our elected and appointed leaders would know their jobs and treat everybody with respect, and we could all breathe easier.
We are not quite there yet.

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