Confrontation and Command: Military Leadership and Conflict Averted

Studying military leadership across 150 years, this exploration of five historical confrontations sheds a light on how courageous commanders and calm judgment have averted major conflicts in moments of global crisis.

From a confrontation between the United States and British Canada on the border in the far west in the age of Empire, through the Cuban Missile Crisis to peacemaking duties in the Balkans at the end of the twentieth century, each of the five cases investigated exemplify how military, naval, and air defense commanders have made moral and sound decisions that proved to be instrumental in averting war. These historical episodes reveal how calm judgement and moral courage on the part of a small number of commanders were able to defuse tensions threatening to tip over into conflict, actions which in the most extreme of cases were seen as insubordination.

In a world now more unstable than at any time since the end of the cold war and with a dizzying advance of military technology including drones, robotics and cyber-attacks, the lessons of these case studies throw into high relief the value of fundamental human values of good judgement and moral courage on the part of the commander in circumstances where war might be close but not yet a reality.