A few years ago, a young U.S. military officer asked me a pointed question: “Do you think we’re getting too soft?” I paused, not because I didn’t have an answer, but because I knew the weight behind his words. My answer was yes. The U.S. military has overcorrected. Across talent management systems, performance evaluations, and even professional military education, it has embraced a well-intentioned shift toward empathetic leadership and psychological safety — seen in trends like inflated evaluations, universal academic passing standards, structured self-examination, and 360-degree feedback models that prioritize harmony over critique. Professional military education, in particular, has long wrestled with these challenges, often criticized for valuing credentialing over intellectual rigor. The recent cultural shift didn’t cause this problem, but it may have hardened it — removing friction from the learning environment and replacing it with comfort. In the process, the military has sidelined one of its most essential developmental forces: the crucible.
What’s missing today is what many now recognize as a resilience gap: the absence of deliberate, sustained formative experiences that challenge officers morally, cognitively, and emotionally across time and career stages. The U.S. military should rethink how it develops leaders — not by returning to toxic attrition models, but by embedding sustained crucibles across professional military education. These crucibles are not one-time ordeals or symbolic tests. They are continuous exposures to ethical ambiguity, intellectual discomfort, and identity-defining reflection deliberately built into professional military education from accession to command. This isn’t about toughness for its own sake. It’s about developing leaders who can make principled decisions amid uncertainty, absorb failure without folding, and grow stronger because of adversity — not despite it.
There’s a story from Biosphere 2 that sticks with me. Inside that sealed ecological experiment, scientists tried to replicate Earth’s ecosystems. Trees grew quickly but fell over just as fast. The problem? No wind. Without stress, the trees failed to develop strong root systems. What looked like perfect conditions produced brittle life. The metaphor for today’s military leadership culture is hard to miss.
To be clear, the shift toward compassion, emotional intelligence, and holistic leadership was needed. The U.S. military made critical progress in rooting out toxic environments and improving the mental well-being of servicemembers, as reflected in initiatives like the Integrated Resilience Directorate, the inclusion of emotional intelligence in leadership curricula, and expanded access to embedded behavioral health professionals. But somewhere along the way, the military began to mistake comfort for care.
Policies and practices designed to support mental wellness — such as flattened hierarchies, universal academic passing standards, and performance systems hesitant to deliver hard feedback — have, in some cases, dulled the military’s edge. The result is a growing resilience gap: a disconnect between the psychological formation of emerging leaders and the chaotic, morally ambiguous environments they will face in modern conflict.
Today’s junior officers are increasingly well versed in psychological terminology, mental health support systems, and inclusive leadership practices. These are all good things. Many have overcome real hardship — personal, economic, and familial — and bring deep emotional insight to their service. But despite these experiences, some arrive at leadership roles without having faced the kind of sustained professional adversity that military life uniquely demands. They may not have encountered prolonged moral ambiguity, high stakes decisions under uncertainty, or the identity-fracturing pressure of command in a combat zone. These stressors require more than technical skill — they demand intentional formation.
There are signs of this gap in many places: risk aversion in decision-making, emotional fragility in feedback environments, paralysis in the face of moral complexity. Removing friction from developmental pipelines may avoid short-term harm but fails to prepare leaders for long-term endurance.
So what is the crucible, and why does it need to be recovered?
A crucible is not suffering for its own sake. It is structured hardship with a purpose — formative, identity-shaping, and enduring. It’s knob year at The Citadel. It’s SERE school. It’s the first combat crisis where the mission and morality pull in opposite directions. Yes, the military already subjects new recruits to crucibles: basic training, deployments, elite courses like Ranger School. But these are primarily physical or procedural trials, tightly controlled and temporally bounded. What’s increasingly absent are the professional and ethical crucibles that challenge emerging leaders over time — those that forge judgment, humility, and the moral courage to lead in ambiguity. The problem isn’t that crucibles don’t exist. It’s that they’re too often front-loaded and siloed, treated as discrete events rather than a developmental thread. Crucibles test, break, and reform — but only when they evolve alongside the leader.
They are the wind.
They build root systems deep enough to withstand the winds of war. And perhaps most importantly, they reveal that suffering is not merely an obstacle, but a teacher. When adversity strikes, it can be hard to find meaning in it — but it is often the very path through which maturity, depth, and resilience are formed. The process of becoming stronger almost always involves pain, reflection, and reorientation. Without purposeful suffering, growth is shallow, and leadership remains fragile.
This need for hardship in growth is not new. Marcus Aurelius wrote, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” Aristotle believed virtue was cultivated through habit and challenge. The Buddha taught that suffering is not only inevitable but can become a path to enlightenment if rightly understood. Even the oft-maligned Niccolò Machiavelli recognized that effective leadership required the ability to endure hardship and adapt through difficulty. The New Testament offers a similar vision: The Epistle of James calls on one to “consider it pure joy… whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.” Across cultures and centuries, wisdom traditions have agreed: the forge is essential.
More recently, Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term “antifragility” to describe systems that don’t merely survive stress but thrive because of it. Jennifer Garvey Berger emphasizes that leadership in complexity requires “vertical development.” This doesn’t only require new skills. It demands new ways of making sense of challenge. Thomas Kolditz has explored how leadership develops under extreme stress — particularly in combat, crisis, and other life-defining moments. He argues that leaders shaped in these environments emerge with stronger identities, clearer missions, and more lasting capabilities. Challenge, in his view, is not incidental to growth; it is essential. Crucially, Kolditz also cautions that this kind of deep transformation cannot simply be engineered in safe, sanitized classroom settings. It must be lived. Leadership in the 21st century demands more than resilience. It demands transformation through dissonance. The goal is not to bounce back but to build forward, stronger. Not just resilient leaders, but antifragile ones — in the truest sense of the word.
Psychological research supports this. Stress inoculation training shows that exposure to manageable, meaningful stressors builds mental toughness and adaptive capacity. In educational theory, Jack Mezirow’s transformative learning model emphasizes that true growth arises from disorienting dilemmas — precisely the kind of formative experience that has been systematically removed in many leadership development environments.
The modern operating environment demands leaders who can act decisively in uncertainty, navigate moral ambiguity, and inspire others under conditions that are often volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.(VUCA) Strategic competition with peer adversaries, the psychological toll of distributed operations, and the high cognitive demands of AI-enabled warfare will place burdens on tomorrow’s officers that no slide deck or sanitized case study can prepare them for. American adversaries are not likely to offer psychological safety, so leaders must be prepared to lead and endure without it. Only lived challenge — faced with structure, purpose, and support — can build that kind of depth.
The pandemic era illustrated this vividly. Junior leaders were tasked with unprecedented problems — logistics, personnel management, health policy, morale maintenance — without a roadmap. Some thrived. Many struggled. And it wasn’t a lack of knowledge. It was a lack of internal formation, a lack of tested frameworks for acting under pressure.
Closing the Gap: Designing for Resilience
To close the resilience gap, the U.S. military does not need to return to toxic attrition models — but it does need to reintroduce structured adversity into leadership development. These experiences should be deliberately designed to cultivate not just tactical acumen but the moral, cognitive, and emotional durability required in contemporary conflict. Over the past decade, scholars and practitioners across professional military education, military leaders, federally funded research and development centers, and operational commands have proposed tools that move beyond traditional training, offering leaders controlled exposure to complexity, ambiguity, and friction.
Much of today’s professional military education embraces a synthesis model of case studies, historical analysis, and scenario-based exercises scaffolded with theory and structured reflection. This model remains essential. But synthesis alone is not enough. True formation demands an experiential model — one that creates conditions for real-time ethical strain, operational ambiguity, and meaningful failure, followed by rigorous reflection. Leaders cannot merely study crucibles. They must live through them.
Wargaming has long been a tool for tactical training, but recent work by Kelsey Atherton and other colleagues demonstrates how it can also serve as a crucible for ethical decision-making. Their analysis shows that when games are designed to include legal, moral, and informational ambiguity, they allow participants to grapple with the kinds of high-stakes dilemmas where law, values, and mission success collide. These scenarios help build what Atherton refers to as “ethical agility” — the ability to make principled choices under stress, a skillset increasingly essential on the future battlefield.
Meanwhile, Olivia Garard emphasizes the importance of structured reflection in leadership education. She argues that discomfort and dissonance are not threats to learning but essential conditions for growth. By incorporating adversarial reflection — through Socratic seminars, red-teaming of personal failure narratives, and dialectical methods — leaders can begin to develop the moral courage and resilience required to make tough calls in the fog of war. Her work points to the value of confronting uncertainty not just intellectually, but communally. Similarly, Celestino Perez Jr. contends that strategy must be treated not as abstract theory but as performance — messy, iterative, and human. In his view, military education often overlooks the experiential, practice-oriented nature of strategy, failing to fully prepare leaders for the friction-filled, morally ambiguous realities they will face. Taken together, these perspectives call for an education that embraces challenge, not avoids it, and sees reflection as an operational necessity — not an academic luxury.
In the realm of anticipatory leadership, Sean McFate and his contemporaries such as August Cole and P.W. Singer advocate for embedding futures literacy into professional military education. They argue that preparing leaders for disorientation is not a luxury but a necessity. The late Maj. Gen. (ret.) Robert Scales argued that by exposing officers early to horizon scanning, scenario planning, and red-team exercises, educators could instill habits of anticipatory thinking that help leaders navigate the volatility of modern conflict environments.
Finally, Gen. (ret.) Charles Krulak’s enduring contributions to leadership theory — including his “Three Block War” construct — underscore the need for trials that go beyond physical endurance. Krulak and those who have built on his ideas call for developmental crucibles that reflect the emotional, intellectual, and moral complexity of contemporary warfare. When these experiences are intentionally designed with embedded meaning-making and guided reflection, they forge not only capability but character, producing leaders who are cohesive, grounded, and authentically strong.
These are not nostalgic throwbacks — they are strategic necessities. But fully reclaiming the crucible requires a sharper distinction between training and education environments. Military training programs — such as basic training, SERE, or Ranger School — are crucibles in the traditional sense: intense, high-stress environments that test physical limits and psychological endurance. However, they are also bounded, tightly scripted, and focused on compliance and technical mastery. Education crucibles, by contrast, should provoke moral uncertainty, intellectual conflict, and identity tension. They must be revisited not once, but continuously — as a thread running through professional military education, staff rides, leadership seminars, and command development courses. This is not simply about toughness; it’s about meaning-making under ambiguity.
Such transformation must also be modeled at senior levels. If junior officers never see their superiors acknowledge failure, name formative struggles, or reflect openly on their own disorienting dilemmas, they will learn that suffering is weakness, not instruction. Reclaiming the crucible requires leaders at all levels to value what it produces — and to create environments where adversity is not avoided, but metabolized.
Such transformation should be systemic, not symbolic. Imagine a military where crucibles are embedded across the institution itself: officers earning “warfighting scores” as part of their evaluations, assessed through rigorous wargames and operational exams (an idea once floated by Adm. Mike Mullen); general officers facing off in force-on-force campaign simulations (joint task force versus joint task force), where the stakes aren’t merely theoretical; professional military education courses where students could actually fail — not for misconduct, but for failing to demonstrate growth, judgment, or command readiness. These reforms aren’t about gatekeeping. They’re about building an institutional culture that values challenge as preparation, not punishment.
Now extend that vision across an individual career. Picture the crucible not as a single event, but as a throughline — a fire returned to again and again. It begins in pre-commissioning with scenario labs that test moral courage before tactical skill. It deepens at Squadron Officer School, not through rote lectures, but through red-team peer critiques and crisis simulations where failure is embraced as feedback. At intermediate and senior-level professional military education, the crucible sharpens: officers must lead teams through future scenarios and ethical wargames, with failure not just possible, but necessary. Staff rides become reflective pilgrimages; command courses culminate in narrative reckonings with personal and institutional failure. At the general officer level, leaders confront one another in operational design contests — public, scored, and hard. Throughout the journey, senior leaders model vulnerability, not polish, showing that struggle is not a blemish, but the source of real strength.
The military is in a moment of inflection. The demands of great power competition, strategic ambiguity, and cognitive warfare are already redefining what it means to lead. If the American military does not recover the crucible, it risks fielding leaders who are compassionate but unformed, intelligent but brittle, inclusive but untested.
Perfect conditions don’t build character. The tree without wind may look healthy — until the storm comes. To lead in that storm, leaders must be formed in challenge, not protected from it.
America needs the wind back.
J. William “BILL” DeMarco, D.Prof is the director of innovation and analysis at Air University where he is also an assistant professor. He is a retired U.S. Air Force colonel with five command tours spanning mobility, refueling, and joint operations. A former Hoover fellow at Stanford and research fellow at Cambridge University, he focuses on operational design, intrapreneurship, and leadership innovation in complex military systems. The views in this article are those of the author and not those of Air University, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.
Image: Midjourney
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