The identification of officers’ leadership competencies in the face of current threats – an educational aspect

This paper describes the results of a study on identifying and shaping the leadership competencies of cadets, taking into account current military challenges and crises that measurably affect how commanding officer cadres operate and how their subordinates perceive them. The authors highlight the need to shift the focus of cadet education in higher military education from activities oriented towards shaping the competencies of the platoon-company commander towards proposals that take into account the latest trends and lessons learned from the current armed conflict in Ukraine. This approach mainly addresses the challenges of “new generation warfare”, where the boundaries between war and peace are difficult to identify. The evolution of warfare we are seeing includes and will continue to include non-military activities extensively supported by sensors and reconnaissance systems, with the apparent dominance of information, but also the sowing of confusion and fear and the building of narratives focused on undermining the opponent’s morale. The requirements of modern warfare necessitate faster diagnosis of candidates’ leadership aptitude, even before recruitment to military universities, and then intensive improvement of their competencies, especially at the initial (adaptive) stage of training. This should result in improved matching of cadres to the real challenges of “new generation warfare”. In this article, the authors present multifaceted exploratory research on diagnosing and shaping leadership competencies in one of Poland’s military universities.