The issue of toxic leadership throughout the Army is very real and extremely important. LTG Ulmer’s paper addresses regular Army leaders in general, however this problem also exists in Special Operations community and is harder to combat and identify. This is largely due to the fact that Special Forces (SF) leader, specifically SF officer, posses all the traits that LTG Ulmer identifies as possible toxic leader traits and indicators. For example, LTG Ulmer mentions that most of Army’s toxic leaders are energetic, “go getters”, know how to meet their superior’s intent, career driven, and short-term goal oriented. Those qualities describe not just an average, but also a good SF leader. Special Forces officers are energetic, because they love their job, just like every Special …show more content…
They do this, because good performance rewards them with the highly sought opportunity to command SF soldiers at the next level of command. For an SF officer, command is the best time in service, which easily equals to an SF NCO wanting to be on a team for as long as possible. Recently, the high operational tempo allows less time for an SF officer to serve as a Detachment or Company commander, so the SF officer focuses on short-term goals. He keeps the organizations long-term development in mind, but strives to affect the unit now, due to his short tenure in leadership positions. Toxic leadership becomes so much harder to detect and identify in the Special Forces, because LTG Ulmer’s toxic leader indicators so closely match the above-average SF officer traits. Special Operations community faces a greater challenge when it comes to finding the toxic leaders within its ranks. The short command times and quick turn over also favors toxic leader in SF, because it allows him to quickly move on to the next unit or position before anyone can identify his behavior and report it. There is no time to gather all the facts and conduct a thorough investigation. That is only the first