My point was that with or without charisma, sometimes a lack of effective leadership or cohesive...maybe courage...plain, mean/evil people can dominate a lot of good people for far longer than you would think the good folk would tolerate it, and there are a lot of reasons, beginning with the lack of effective opposing leadership, and going on to the fact that either misguided good folk, or sadistic or power hungry bad ones will flock around the bad leader and protect him or her. Usually it's a combination of all of them.
What makes an officer? Several things, and many of them can't be tested for short of actual combat conditions (and not all officers are or should be combat leaders, IMO, so this is a fuzzy area; I'll stick to talking about combat for now.) so it's a tough call to try & figure it out.
First, yes, personal physical courage; the ability to assess whether the danger is such that a retreat is the best option.
Second, the ability to make that assessment for others, and weigh; 'can we afford to lose some of the fighters to make this win, or is it a waste of lives?'
Third, the ability to get others to accept those orders. It doesn't have to be innate, but that helps...although as pointed out earlier,
Charisma. As in, "I don't think charisma is necessarily a good thing. Hitler had apparently had a lot of charisma."
this is not and should not be the only/main issue.
Fourth comes training, I suspect. Obviously, a lot of people are or become leaders without any, so it really does come low on the list. Any military person (or corporate manager) who got a field promotion, and kept it, proves this, I think. Napoleon supposedly said that every soldier in his armies should metaphorically carry a marshal's baton in his backpack, meaning all of them should be prepared to lead if the chain of command broke down.
Not everyone is built for it; some of us are indians, not chiefs. Which is good, actually, because remember the trouble that can be caused by "Too many chiefs, and not enough Indians".
