What Today’s Leaders can Take from Aristotle’s Cardinal Virtues

Modern military leadership is saturated with buzzwords.

We talk about agility, innovation, resilience, and adaptability—often in PowerPoint decks thick enough to stop small-arms fire. Doctrine changes, terminology shifts, and leadership models rotate through fashion like field uniforms. Yet the core problem remains the same one leaders have always faced: how to act rightly under pressure, with imperfect information, when real people bear the consequences.

Long before command climate surveys and leadership seminars, Aristotle often wrestled with that same problem. His answer wasn’t tactical. It wasn’t procedural. It was ethical.

The Cardinal Virtues—prudence, justice, temperance, and courage—were not abstractions meant for philosophers alone. They were practical tools for people entrusted with authority. Strip away the centuries, and they remain brutally relevant to today’s military leaders.

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Prudence: Judgment Over Intelligence

Prudence is not caution. It is judgment.

In military terms, prudence is the ability to decide when doctrine applies—and when it doesn’t. It is knowing the difference between a checklist and a compass. Prudence is what allows a leader to act decisively without being reckless, and deliberately without being paralyzed.

Modern leaders are drowning in information. ISR feeds, dashboards, briefs, and real-time reporting create the illusion that perfect awareness is possible. Prudence reminds us it isn’t. Decisions must still be made with incomplete data, under time pressure, with consequences that don’t wait for clarity.

A prudent leader doesn’t ask, “Do I have all the information?”
They ask, “Do I have enough to act responsibly?”

That distinction saves lives.

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Justice: Fairness Is a Combat Multiplier

Justice is often misunderstood as punishment.

In reality, justice in leadership is about fairness, consistency, and moral credibility. Soldiers will endure hardship, danger, and uncertainty—but they will not endure leaders they believe are unjust.

Justice means standards apply to everyone, including the leader. It means discipline is corrective, not vindictive. It means recognition is earned, not distributed for convenience or optics.

In combat units especially, justice is trust made visible. When troops believe their leaders are fair, they follow orders even when those orders are costly. When they don’t, discipline collapses quietly long before it collapses openly.

Justice isn’t soft.
It’s structural integrity.

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Temperance: Restraint in a Culture That Rewards Excess

Temperance may be the least discussed virtue in modern military culture—and one of the most needed.

We reward aggression. We praise intensity. We celebrate leaders who “want it more.” All of that has its place. But without restraint, those traits metastasize into burnout, abuse of authority, and ethical drift.

Temperance is knowing when not to push.
When to listen instead of dominate.
When to step back instead of press harder.

It applies to ego as much as emotion. Leaders without temperance confuse confidence with infallibility and decisiveness with stubbornness. They create climates where dissent is silenced and mistakes are hidden until they become disasters.

Restraint is not weakness.
It is control.

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Courage: More Than Physical Bravery

The military understands physical courage. We train for it, reward it, and memorialize it.

What we struggle with is moral courage.

Moral courage is telling a superior that the plan is flawed. It is owning a failure publicly. It is protecting subordinates when doing so costs political capital. It is choosing the harder right over the easier wrong—especially when no one is watching.

Aristotle understood that courage without wisdom is recklessness, and courage without justice is cruelty. True courage is disciplined. It is anchored to purpose, not ego.

In today’s environment—where decisions are scrutinized instantly and endlessly—moral courage is often the difference between leaders who endure and leaders who are quietly sidelined.

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Why the Virtues Still Matter

The battlefield has changed. The environment is more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous than ever. But human nature hasn’t changed nearly as much as we like to pretend.

People still want leaders who are fair.
Who exercise judgment.
Who show restraint.
Who act with courage when it matters.

Aristotle’s virtues endure because they address leadership at its core—not as a role, but as a moral responsibility. Rank grants authority. Virtue earns legitimacy.

No doctrine can replace that.

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Final Thoughts

We don’t need to abandon modern leadership models to learn from ancient ones. We need to remember that beneath the technology, the theory, and the terminology, leadership is still about character expressed through action.

Prudence. Justice. Temperance. Courage.

Not slogans.
Not values statements.
Virtues—earned daily, tested under pressure, and revealed when it counts.

That was true in Aristotle’s time.

It’s still true now.

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Charles served over 27 years in the US Army, which included seven combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with various Special Operations Forces units and two stints as an instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He also completed operational tours in Egypt, the Philippines, and the Republic of Korea and earned a Doctor of Business Administration from Temple University as well as a Master of Arts in International Relations from Yale University. He is the owner of The Havok Journal, and the views expressed herein are his own and do not reflect those of the US Government or any other person or entity.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.