Critical Thinking in the Field of Military - Essay Example

Military leadership involves influencing others into the accomplishment of a mission. This can occur through the provision of direction, purpose, and motivation. While in military leadership, one exercises command by his assignment, position, and rank. Although this occurs through a chain of command, independent thinking is crucial for maintaining discipline in the military. In this regard, the most fundamental technique required in military leadership is critical and imaginative thinking, decision-making, and problem resolution techniques.

Critical thinking is the capacity to scrutinize the elements that one uses to reason deliberately. It also involves the evaluation of reasoning against the universal intellectual standards of exactitude, intelligibility, relevance, truthfulness, logic, intensity, and breadth. For effective leadership of the military, critical thinking as a discipline is very important. The main objective of critical thinking in the military is to enhance the management, leadership, and decision-making skills of military personnel.

The whole idea of critical thinking in the field of the military may sound strange to some people. This is because people do not seem to decipher the differences in thinking. Critical thinking should be different from ordinary thinking because it helps to evaluate the quality of thinking within the military. The fact that human beings are always thinking does not automatically qualify them to be critical thinkers. The environment in which the military operates has changed tremendously over time.

For instance, there have been massive shifts and demolitions of the old paradigms that worked well during the military’s responses to the Former Soviet Union’s fearsome stability in the United States. This has highlighted the need to adopt a new mode of thinking to counter the widespread and immediate requirements of reexamining assumptions. At this point, critical thinking in the military is crucial for equipping army officers with skills when evaluating diverse courses of action as persons work through problems.

It also helps the military personnel in considering the situational implications of different actions and consequently looks for first, second, and subsequent order consequences of their actions. These actions require people who can think critically. Indeed, the new leadership of the U.S military has doctrines of critical thinking reflections (Department of the Army, 2012). Critical thinking works correspondingly with creative thinking. For effective critical and creative thinking, the military personnel requires an appropriate environment for learning the skills of thinking in realistic and practical situations.

Some of the elements of creative and critical thinking for the success of military leadership include concepts, assumptions, interpretation and inference, viewpoints, and information. Other includes questions at issue, the purpose of thinking, and concepts. These elements are very imperative because they constitute the elements of reasoning in military leadership (Department of the Army, 2012). The military also requires proper and appropriate decision-making. The leadership is tasked with the responsibility of making tactical and strategic decisions that ensure that they attain victory in all their operations.

However, most decisions are not easy to make. This is partly because they are made under challenging and difficult conditions or situations of uncertainty. Wise decision-making skills are important for an individual to exercise thorough essentials of knowledge commands in military leadership. Such decision-making skills will assist the individual in commanding policies, responsibility chain of command, and authority (Department of the Army, 2012). Logical decision-making in military leadership requires the top-ranking officials within the army personnel to seek and take responsibility for not only their actions but for the mistakes of the whole troop. 

The military personnel should be prepared to guarantee that the policies and plans undergo proper implementation by giving out instructions and continuous task implementation. Secondly, military personnel needs to collect facts and make assumptions about the problem for backup purposes. Then he or she requires the definition of the end states and establishes the criteria for the following actions before the development of possible solutions (Department of the Army, 2012). The next step would involve the analysis and comparison of the possible solutions before selecting and implementing the best possible solution. The success of this model of problem-solving requires frequent analysis of the solutions to ascertain their effectiveness.