The Weight of Our Words

Words have meaning.

That’s a pretty simple statement, right? Obviously words have meaning, or else we wouldn’t use them. But sit with the phrase a little longer, and you may just stumble on to why this statement is drilled into the minds of leaders at every level of our military.

As a Marine officer, you go through a substantial amount of training. Of course there are the topics you’d expect: tactics, communication, weapons systems, etc. But a lion’s share of your time is focused on learning how to lead, how to communicate your intent, and how to shape your subordinates in a way that you can trust they will deliver on your intent in your absence. You spend the most time in the fleet, training your subordinate small unit leaders in the same.

During my time in uniform, the buzz word was “strategic corporals.” Corporals in the Marine Corps are those entrusted with leading the small fireteams that build the basis of any unit. Those teams train together relentlessly to maximize their ability to operate independently. But those units almost exclusively train in the tactical level of warfare. That level of warfare is focused on the immediate firefight, whereas the strategic level of warfare is focused on advancing national agendas.

Think about it like this, at the tactical level, you’re focused on capturing the next hill. Strategic leadership is focused on delivering the blow that will end the need to capture that hill. So why the term “Strategic Corporal”?

Call it a symptom of the times, but I think the lesson about strategic corporals will outlast my generation. For twenty years now we’ve been engaged in asymmetric warfare, where major set piece battles don’t define success. Rather, we’ve been nation building – a strategic goal if there ever was one. Especially in the dispersed, mountain communities of Afghanistan small unit leaders assume an outsized level of command. Suddenly in 2001, we began seeing the need for small unit leaders to make decisions that could shape public sentiment across entire regions of a foreign land.

The need became pretty clear, pretty quickly: we invest in teaching our people how to make difficult decisions, bounded by ethical standards, and then communicate those decisions in a way that supports local buy-in. In effect, we were giving 19-22 year olds a crash course in public advocacy with the highest stakes on the line.

So, we dedicated significant resources – the most precious being time in the training schedule – on how to communicate. We taught them how to lean on interpreters, how to build relationships, how to recognize local customs, and how to respect their environment (both social and physical).

In these environments, semantics mean a great deal. Placing your words, your thoughts, into a proper context and affording them the proper weight could, literally, mean everything in the moment. There’s a lesson in that for our advocates.

As we train our people, we need to invest in helping them to understand the importance, the weight, of their words. This isn’t because we’re being politically correct. Semantics are paramount because you never know when the wrong joke, at the right time, will sink your cause.

Next week, I plan on spending some time writing about engaging with those you think will oppose your cause. I hope in that post, you’ll see the connection to this simple idea. Semantics can make or break you. They can win you friends, or influence others into becoming opponents. Tend to your semantics. We won’t always get it right, but the investment in the principle will always be right.