TITLE:
Cross-Cultural Competence: A Key Enablement for 21st Century Military Leaders
AUTHORS:
Dan Henk
KEYWORDS:
Cultural Competence, Leadership, Military Education
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Leadership,
Vol.15 No.1,
December
31,
2025
ABSTRACT: Since the mid-20th century, America’s military personnel have repeatedly displayed a troubling lack of cross-cultural skills in their contacts with foreign societies, resulting in fraught human relations and frantic, temporary military initiatives to generate missing skills. The most painful recent iterations occurred during America’s Global War on Terror (GWOT) after 2003, when desperate pleas from the field for greater cross-cultural capability stimulated a decade of promising educational initiatives, most of which were then scaled back or abandoned altogether. This article identifies the continuously missing capability as Cross-Cultural Competence (3C) distinguishing it from language fluency and regional knowledge. It outlines the 3C domain, offering an overview of its components and describing why proficiency in this unique set of skills will remain an essential military requirement for military leaders in the 21st century, certain to be urgently sought by the US again in the future. The article calls attention to the challenging educational and programmatic prerequisites to developing cross-cultural competence within military leadership. Finally, based on recent American experience, the article offers recommendations for the US and other liberal democracies seeking to develop cross-cultural skills within the leadership of their security communities.