Building Intercultural Leaders in Bani Military Contexts: The Evolution of Elt Beyond Linguistic Accuracy

As organizations transition from the once dominant VUCA paradigm to the more volatile BANI framework – characterized by brittleness, anxiety, nonlinearity, and incomprehensibility – the communicative demands on linguistic functionality in intercultural contexts have shifted dramatically. Traditional English Language Teaching (ELT), with its emphasis on linguistic accuracy and native like proficiency, no longer equips future officers to navigate the fragile systems and ambiguous interactions that define the dynamics of contemporary military organizations. This article argues that in the academic military context, ELT must evolve into a form of intercultural leadership training that prioritizes meaning making, psychological safety, and adaptive collaboration. Drawing on the BANI model and Byram’s Intercultural Communicative Competence framework, the study looks at 5 military English manuals in use at “Nicolae Bălcescu” Land Forces Academy (NBLFA), as course support materials for the semesters focused on military ELT. The main objective of the content-driven quantitative and qualitative analysis is to investigate how (and if) language teaching promotes and encourages the development of intercultural resilience. Based on the findings, the conclusions emphasize the imperative requirement that ELT should function as the connective tissue of resilient BANI military organizations, by proposing a theoretical training model that positions ELT as a “leadership‑development ecosystem” that cultivates intercultural competence, adaptive communication, and cognitive agility, and calling on ELT practitioners to embrace their emerging role as trainers who prepare cadets for international professional experiences where communication is increasingly nonlinear, unstable, and difficult to interpret.