EP | 92 Leaders Making Moral and Ethical Decisions Under Stress

That’s it, that’s the show today. It is a simple concept but one of the most difficult ones to execute consistently. In my personal experience over a more than three-decade military career in peace and war, plus as a utility operations safety and training director leading in natural disasters such as Hurricane Isaac, the situations I found myself in drove thousands of decisions that I had to get right every time or my teams failed. Under the stresses of combat or other life and death situations, the importance of ethical and moral decision-making increases exponentially. That is why we train and grow leaders over time and through various positions to produce a leader that can get this job done, even when faced with enemies trying to kill you. Over the last week we have seen literally dozens of military officers and non-commissioned officers, most of them very senior, even two top enlisted leaders of the Army and Marine Corps, make the poor decision to from their official government social media accounts, verbally attack and attempt to intimidate first a member of the media who dared criticize a military policy and in just the last 24 hours, military personnel in uniform marching on an elected official’s office because they didn’t like what that politician said. These actions were the results of poor decisions by each person involved in these actions, which are prohibited by the law here in the United States. It doesn’t matter what the subject of the criticism or comments was, contrary to what the woke media says. What matters is the American taxpayer has invested millions in these decision-makers and they still made unethical and immoral decisions to take these actions. The effect was a cascading failure all the way from the Secretary of Defense’s office to the lowest enlisted ranks of the basic standard that General George Washington set when he handed his commission voluntarily to the Continental Congress, that in the United States of America, civilians control our military and always will. Today, we’ll talk to our guest about this failure as he has direct experience making ethical and moral decisions successfully under fire when faced with leaders above who could not, or would not, make the right decisions. John ‘Tig’ Tiegen brings over 13 years of high-profile security and force protection expertise within contract and government agencies along with his military experience as a Marine Sergeant, to the table as a security expert and a leader under very difficult circumstances. On September 11, 2011, Islamic militants attacked the American Diplomatic Compound in Benghazi, Libya. Quiet and precise, Tig was the most experienced Annex Security Team member. Defying a stand down order, he along with his team, rushed into burning buildings to defend the Consulate and fought arm-in-arm in defense of the Annex, holding off the radical Islamic terrorist until CIA employees could be safely evacuated. Tig co-authored 13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi, the book and was a technical adviser on the movie later produced. John, welcome to the Rob Maness Show!