Junior Leadership Course

LDR 301 · Leadership and Command · Level 300 (intermediate; aspiring and newly appointed junior non-commissioned officers)

A Royal Army College course on leading a section: the first command, the standard, orders, and the after-action review.

Course length: 10 hours, studied online and asynchronously at the student's own pace, together with any in-person practical instruction and assessment the course requires.

Foreword

There is a particular moment in a soldier's service when everything changes, and it is rarely as dramatic as it feels. It is the moment they are first made responsible for others: when the soldier becomes a junior leader, a section second-in-command or commander, answerable not only for themselves but for the people beside them, often the very people who were their equals the day before. Nothing in a soldier's earlier training quite prepares them for it, and many good soldiers stumble at it, because leading is a different craft from following well.

This course teaches that craft at its first and most important level: the section, the small team that is the building block of the whole Army and the level at which most soldiers will ever lead. It builds directly on Foundations of Military Leadership, which taught what leadership is; this course is about doing it, in the concrete: taking a section, knowing and building it, setting and holding its standard, giving it clear orders, planning a simple task, leading it in the field, learning honestly from what happened, and looking after the people in it.

It teaches the step from soldier to leader; leading a section as a team; setting and holding the standard; communication, briefing, and the brief-back; planning at section level through a simple estimate and a set of orders; leading in the field through command tasks and decisions under pressure; the after-action review; and the welfare, morale, and personal example by which a junior leader holds a team together.

How this course works

This is an intermediate leadership course, and leadership is learned by doing as much as by study. Its knowledge is studied online, lesson by lesson, but its heart is the practical leadership exercises and the after-action reviews, which are conducted and assessed in person under instructors. The course assumes the soldier has completed Foundations of Military Leadership (LDR 201) and is a trained soldier of the Army.

Structure

Where this sits

This is the first course of the leadership pathway above Foundations of Military Leadership (LDR 201), which is its prerequisite. It leads toward the Non-Commissioned Officer Development Course (LDR 310) and, for those who take the officer path, the Officer Candidate Foundation Course (LDR 401). It draws on the discipline and conduct of Military Customs, Discipline, and Conduct (RMT 120), the orders and reporting of Signals and Field Communication (FLD 220), and the section movement of Patrolling and Tactical Movement (FLD 230). It expands the leadership content that the archived Basic Training Manual carried in its modules on discipline and on tactical movement.

A note on sources

This is the College's own course, written fresh in Kaharagian and Commonwealth terms on the British and Commonwealth tradition of junior command and the experiential leadership method, adapting its sources rather than reproducing them. It is written in formal British English and carries Crown Copyright. Its examples are illustrative and use generic settings, since the Principality holds no territory of its own.

Crown Copyright © 2026 | Published by Authority of H.R.H. The Prince of Kaharagia