Author Archives: Douglas R. Satterfield
[March 13, 2020] One thing the U.S. Army Infantry School taught me back in 1983 was that you had better be aware of your operational environment. This requirement meant that each of us Second Lieutenants had to understand and deliberately plan for the conditions, circumstances, and influences that will affect our military unit’s mission. In this article, I… Read More »
[March 12, 2020] Rudyard Kipling once said that words are the most powerful drug used by mankind. He was talking about how communication is the peak human achievement, and our use of it is unimaginably powerful. Many decades ago, beginning in the Great Depression, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the new radio medium to connect to millions… Read More »
[March 11, 2020] Back in November last year, U.S. Presidential candidate Joe Biden called a woman in his audience a lying dog-faced pony soldier.1 Darn it; I wish he had called me that name. If he had, I would be the envy among my combat veteran peers. I like the expression, and I thank Joe Biden for saying… Read More »
[March 10, 2020] It has said that leadership is the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work. But some ideas work and some don’t work. There is a long-standing controversy about whether the views of Robert Owen, one of the founders of Socialism, actually work. Robert Owen, a Welsh textile manufacturer and social reformer,… Read More »
[March 9, 2020] Lessons from the past are frequently overlooked or consciously discarded for a variety of valid-sounding reasons. The Spanish Flu of 1918, however, can give us some clues on how to survive the Coronavirus (COVID-19). While I am about to layout those very lessons, one of them stands out above all the others. The first lesson… Read More »
[March 8, 2020] The Company Commander at my first unit in the U.S. Army was a jerk. The story is common; the world revolved around him, he was smarter, more reliable, better looking than the rest of us (at least he thought so), and he was “going places” in the Army. When the boss is a jerk, our… Read More »
[March 7, 2020] As I sit in my comfortable armchair watching cable news, I watch many politicians pointing fingers to who they believe is responsible for the spread of the Coronavirus. At first, they blamed China and their leaders, then it was U.S. President Trump, and now they are accusing local health officials of allowing more outbreaks. “Confusion”… Read More »
[March 6, 2020] With the U.S. Presidential election scheduled for later this year, many of our politicians are doing their best to prepare themselves to get votes. Everything tends be politicized, and so the spread of the Coronavirus has become a topic of volatile political partisanship. World leaders have jumped into the political fray faster than a one-legged… Read More »
[March 5, 2020] Much has been written about the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in the world. Coming on the heels of a concerted effort throughout the world to expand the reach of Communist ideology, some may have thought this fall not possible. Cuba is one country that adopted it when Fidel Castro took… Read More »
[March 4, 2020] To the surprise of my close friends, the current literature on psychological traits, and these traits’ relationship to leaders, the effect of agreeableness is somewhat of a mixed bag. They were hoping for some positive correlation, especially since I believe that a kind, respectful, an empathetic leader can be very successful. I knew better. A… Read More »