Soft Skills for Security and Defense

A few month ago, during the 2018 ISMS Annual Conference “Military Sciences and Future Security Challenges”, Kamila Trochowska published for the Military Education Working Group her thesis Soft Skills for Security and Defense: Cross-Cultural Competence and Beyond, in which she presents extended findings based on one decade of research in curriculum building and skills development of cultural competences. Special focus was given to the assessment of military education within a “multi-agency environment” through Serious Gaming, as tested in her project Gaming For Peace (GAP) and funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Framework (European Union, 2018)?.

The use of role-play and virtualization in an ethically challenging context was highly appealing to me, since my own research suggested that gaming is one of the best forms to develop skills related to behaviour, attitudes, and ethics.

The large body of data and the systematic approach of Trochowska promised to offer sufficient insight for a comparison and to provide some inspiration for further development of my own theories.

One of the mayor issues was to see, how she dealt from a bioethical background with the problem that peace was not, or at least not limited to a Weberian "war in suspense", and required that a society had to affirm the Self and the Other, the concrete present world and the ideal of future equally, as I stated in my own book Principles of Liberty.

The most sensitive point for Trochowska was how to deal with otherness within the military unit (gender awareness). Interestingly, this could not be handled without having a minimal conception of the enemy, as Otherness ad absolutum.

In thanks of the extended work Trochowska shared with me, I finally found the time to write a critical review her work, in which I resume the most important points of her findings, adding some questions and suggestions for further studies.

It is a true pleasure for me to see that the questions of inner leadership, soft skills and attitudes in defense find the attention they really require.

Feel free to comment my Working Paper on the topic.