The Three Phases of Building a Warrior

Today, I’m sharing the process I used to build warriors during my Ranger leadership days. This is important for anyone wanting to build a cohesive and loyal team, but disclaimer, I wasn’t trying to build an effective sales team or a winning sports team. I needed guys who were the best killers they could be. So, take everything I have to say here with that context in mind.

Moving forward, I’ve broken my process down into three phases: Break Down → Rebuild → Initiated Brother. Each phase has a purpose. Skip one and the architecture collapses.

1. Break Down (Test & Strip)

Purpose: find out what someone is made of.

When a new private arrives, you don’t start with trust, you test. You smoke them hard. You push physical limits because the obvious is easy to measure: physical exhaustion. But the real point is to evaluate mental and emotional toughness.

Breaking someone down is not cruelty for cruelty’s sake. It’s a stress test. How does this person respond when they’re tired, humiliated, cold, nervous, and confused? Do they flinch? Do they quit? Do they look to others? This phase is repeated over time, not a single event. Some people break quickly; some take longer. The goal is to strip away fragile habits and entitlement and get down to a stable, dependable foundation you can rebuild on.

There’s a secondary effect here: shared suffering cleaves a group together. When everyone “endures the suck” together, you form bonds that matter on the battlefield.

Key elements in the break phase:

• Consistent, repeated stressors (physical, mental, emotional).
• Attention-to-detail tests — small things become life-or-death in combat.
• Peer accountability: if Joe lets John down, Joe pays. That teaches collective responsibility.

2. Rebuild (Teach & Mentor)

Purpose: take the proven material and craft it into a useful, competent teammate.

Once a person proves character, work ethic, and resilience, you ease off the nonstop punishing. This becomes a learning and mentoring phase. You still hold the standard high, but now your tone includes respect and investment.

This is where you teach:

• Technical skills and tactics.
• How to manage life outside the fight (marriage, reintegration after deployment, finances, etc.).
• How to rest, maintain, and perform in garrison.

Why the holistic approach? Because a soldier doesn’t fight with only a body, they fight with a whole life behind them. Relationship problems, financial stress, or mental health issues degrade unit performance. Good leaders coach the whole person.

In the rebuild phase, fear of the leader transitions into mutual respect. You still expect obedience and standard, but you also show you care. That combination breeds loyalty.

3. Initiated Brother (Trust & Anticipation)

Purpose: form a team that moves like a single organism.

This is the endgame. An “initiated brother” doesn’t wait to be told, they anticipate your commands, they read your intent, and they act without being micromanaged. Room- clearing and complex movements start to feel like choreography: silent, efficient, nearly telepathic.

Here you switch the dynamic:

• No more treating them like privates. To smoke a squad leader the way you smoke a private is a breach of the brotherhood.
• Everyone is cross-trained; everyone trusts everyone.
• When bullets fly, the motivation isn’t GI Bill or patriotism, it’s the guy right beside you.

The love you build in this stage is the force multiplier. If you can get someone to truly feel they would give their life for the guy next to them, you’ve succeeded.

Toughness, Not Cruelty — And Why Both Matter

I don’t deny sensitivity or compassion. I’m a guy of feeling. But there’s a difference between resilience and coddling. A generation softened by political correctness affects the ability to harden troops today. That’s not an argument to become callous; it’s a warning that leadership must intentionally build grit without becoming abusive.

The breaking phase is necessary, but only if it’s followed by rebuilding and inclusion into the brotherhood. Leaders who only haze are insecure and selfish. Good leaders know when to stop and how to transition.

Tiny Things Kill: Attention to Detail

I can’t stress this enough: the minutiae matter. I once fired someone because he went on a mission without a firing pin retaining pin in his M4. I didn’t know about this until he had finished pulling hours of rear security. He lifted his rifle vertically, I heard the clink, and I knew right then.

If the enemy had flanked behind us, his weapon wouldn’t have worked and I may not be writing this today. That small mistake could have ended all of our lives! It was the final straw.

Exercises that teach attention to detail (uniform inspections, fast-change drills, inventory drills) aren’t petty. They’re habit formation for survival. Don’t skip them.

A Short Story That Says It All

One night I took my team out. Later, while I was talking to another NCO in a bar, I noticed my guys had silently gathered around me. I didn’t notice because I was engaged in conversation, but there was something about this other leader’s posture that they just didn’t like.

They moved to defend and protect me without a word. That moment—the look on their faces, the instinct to defend one of their own—told me everything I had successfully initiated them into the brotherhood. The hell I’d put them through had turned into a fierce, mutual loyalty I’d never trade. That’s the culmination of this process.

Final Thoughts: Have an End Goal

A lot of leaders haze because “that’s how it was done to me.” That’s reactionary and inefficient. Have an end goal in sight. Know the kind of team you’re building and plan the phases intentionally.

If you’re mentoring troops, law enforcement, or any high-stakes team:

• Test to reveal character.
• Teach to build competence.
• Trust to forge brotherhood.

Remember, Train Hard, Train Smart, and build people the right way—tough but whole. That’s leadership.