Military Review English Edition January-February 2015 | Page 85

WINNING TRUST

conclusions from a research project that set out to
answer this question. The research consisted of a
study of interviews in the Combat Studies Institute’s
“Operational Leadership Experiences” (OLE) collection
(all interview excerpts in this article are taken from
OLE collection transcripts).1 I looked for ways soldiers
and members of other services reported they had built
confidence and gained trust over time. From their
experiences, I sought to create a generalized model that
future forces could apply to this difficult mission. My
goal was to ground the model in real-world experience
in Iraq and Afghanistan and to make it easy to understand. Moreover, I wanted to create a starting point for
a deeper discussion on this critical skill set.
My research indicated that in Iraq and Afghanistan,
forces often created and then applied incremental
confidence-building measures to win trust over time,
while taking into account the cultural context. (For
the purposes of this research, confidence building is
conceived as a contributor to gaining trust.) Generally,
I found these confidence-building measures fell into
three categories, which I will call physical measures,
communication measures, and relationship measures.
A model based on my findings could assist in training
soldiers and leaders so they could improve their ability
to build trust in often challenging and ambiguous operational environments.2

The Importance of Establishing
Trust

National-level policy documents, such as Sustaining
U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense,
describe the need for forces to conduct a wide array of
missions.3 Many require the operational flexibility to
build relationships as well as apply military lethal force.
Therefore, soldiers and leaders can expect to take on
roles that require gaining trust to achieve the nation’s
policy goals and to protect its vital interests.
At the tactical level, building trust often becomes
critical to personal survival and mission accomplishment. In Afghanistan today, both combat and noncombat units interact with host-nation military, police, or
local leaders daily to build legitimacy and set the conditions for a secure environment. What makes this even
more of a burden is that in counterinsurgency, discerning whether a person is friend, foe, or fence sitter is not
easy. Ideally, when soldiers gain trust at the tactical
MILITARY REVIEW  January-February 2015

level, they can reassure those on their side and win over
the undecided, and this leads to denying adversaries the
support of the populace.4
When soldiers assume an embedded trainer or
advisor role, they should have the ability to gain trust
so they can train and prepare their partner forces for
combat. When the partner forces begin to execute
real-world missions, they and the advisors must have
already established high levels of mutual trust. If trust
is inadequate, the stresses of combat can further impair
how effective the partners are in fighting together.
Soldiers sometimes serve with interagency partners
to help improve quality-of-life conditions.5 For example, members of reconstruction, development, or agribusiness teams need to gain trust. Without the trust of
the populace, determining which projects to execute
and garnering local support to help complete them will
be difficult. In fact, the projects these teams execute are
a vehicle to winning trust and building legitimacy.
At the operational and strategic levels, commanders continually conduct key leader engagements with
civilian stakeholders and military counterparts to set
the conditions for mission accomplishment. When
building partner capacity, fostering military-to-military relationships, enabling civil authorities, or conducting counterinsurgency, strategic- and operational-level leaders must earn trust from a wide array of
stakeholders to accomplish their missions and further
national objectives.6 Without establishing mutual trust,
even though senior leaders will talk, they may not truly
communicate.
Moreover, because complex coalition operations
are the norm and will be into the future, partners need
glue that can hold a coalition together—trust is that
glue. In long-standing coalition relationships, such as
between the United States and the United Kingdom,
Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, trust already
is established. This trust provides the foundation for
successful interoperability during crises. However, for
trust to endure, the parties must engage with each other and continually work on understanding each other’s
perspectives.7
For new or nontraditional coalitions, replacing
uncertainty with trust becomes even more critical. In
many roles, and at many levels, soldiers and leaders
must succeed in winning trust before they can accomplish missions.
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