SOF Truth I: Humans Are More Important Than Hardware

SOF Truths Series | Dave Lozano | Leadership Development

This is the first in a series exploring the U.S. Special Operations Command's five foundational principles, the SOF Truths, and their application to leadership and business.

The U.S. Special Operations Command maintains five foundational principles known as the SOF Truths. They've guided the most elite military units in the world for decades. The first is deceptively simple:

"Humans are more important than hardware. People, not equipment, make the critical difference. The right people, highly trained and working as a team, will accomplish the mission with the equipment available. On the other hand, the best equipment in the world cannot compensate for a lack of the right people."

When I served, I accepted this as an absolute. I believed it in my bones. No amount of technology, no drone, no satellite, no weapons system, could replace the trained operator making judgment calls under pressure in an environment changing by the second. We had satellite radios and phones that could reach other parts of the world. Lasers invisible to the naked eye that could paint targets so that helicopters or planes thousands of feet overhead moving hundreds of miles per hour could drop smart munitions on them. Goggles that allowed us to see through the darkness of night while maintaining depth perception. Nevertheless, the hardware supported the human. Full stop.

But this is 2026, not 2006. And the hardware has gotten scarily, undeniably good.

The Conversation Everyone Is Having

AI is currently the rage, and for good reason. It will fundamentally change how we live and work. Which makes it the perfect stress test for SOF Truth I: does it still hold, and if it does, how do we apply it in business when the hardware is this good?

(And before someone reminds me that AI is technically software, not hardware: in this context, "hardware" meant the tools - everything that isn't human. AI is the tool. And when I say AI here, I mean the generative AI tools most of us are encountering daily - ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot - not the machine learning systems embedded in weapons platforms or industrial automation. Different conversation.)

And I will be transparent: I use AI every day. It helps me write. It helps me research. It helps me think through problems faster. I am not a Luddite standing on the hill shaking my fist and yelling at "the AI" to get off my lawn!!! The hardware is genuinely impressive, and anyone who dismisses it isn't paying attention.

But I've also had some very deep conversations with AI. Not with the intent of a synthetic relationship. Probing it. Testing it. Assessing its capabilities. Proving use cases where it excels and where it fails. Trying to find the edges of what it is and what it is not.

And here's what I found.

Ask AI how it feels. It will give you a very sophisticated and insightful answer . . . explaining that it can't. Ask it what it's like to take the winning shot at the buzzer. It will describe the adrenaline, the crowd, the moment of release, the slowing of time, poetry. But it's never felt the weight of the responsibility, the elation of the swish, the euphoria of the victory. Ask it what it's like to lay off 50 people in a single day. It will walk you through the emotional weight, the guilt, the responsibility, but it's never wondered how those employees are going to get their kids through college. Ask it how it grieved when it lost its father last April . . .

It will give you words. It will give you the right words. But it doesn't know. It has never known, and it is incapable of knowing. It has never ugly cried so hard that it basically sobered itself up from crying inebriation because it just hurt too much to cry anymore.

You'd Quote Me a Sonnet

There's a scene in Good Will Hunting that I think about all the time. Robin Williams (Sean) is sitting on a park bench across from Matt Damon (Will). He goes through this litany: you could tell me everything about art, about Michelangelo, but you've never stood in the Sistine Chapel and looked up at that ceiling. You'd throw Shakespeare at me if I asked about war, but you've never held your best friend's head in your lap and watched him die. And then he gets to love, and he says something I'll never forget. I've been paraphrasing up to this point, but I want to quote this part verbatim:

"I'd ask you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn't know what it's like to be her angel, to have that love for her, be there forever, through anything, through cancer. And you wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in the hospital room for two months, holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes, that the terms 'visiting hours' don't apply to you. You don't know about real loss, 'cause it only occurs when you've loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much."

Sean is talking about what it means to have actually lived. Will Hunting, the genius kid, has all the information in the world but none of the experience.

That's AI. It will quote you a sonnet every single time. And the sonnet will be beautiful. But it's the Walmart version of the hand-carved chair that your carpenter grandfather made with his own two hands. You can sit in it. It looks right. But something about it isn't real, and on some level, everyone can feel it.

This is not a small distinction. This is the whole game.

Because leadership, real leadership, is not solely an information game. It's an experience game. The leader who has actually laid off 50 people doesn't need AI to tell her what that feels like. She carries it. That scar tissue is what makes her next decision different, deeper, more human. The leader who has sat in a room where everything is falling apart and made a call that affected hundreds of people... that judgment wasn't built by data. It was built by years of being the person in the chair when it mattered.

I know this because, like Robin Williams's character, I've lived it.

For a period of time, I was a director of operations at a kidnap for ransom consultancy. I was in Venezuela working a case with one of our consultants. We had been on several calls with the kidnappers and had just finished one that did not go well. Contentious. Aggressive. They hung up the phone mid conversation. The family sat in the kitchen in silence. The kind of silence that fills a room when nobody knows what to say and everyone is terrified.

The consultant, in perfect Spanish, let that silence sit for about a minute. And then, out of nowhere, one word:

"¿Apostamos?"

Meaning: Shall we bet on when Grandpa will be released?

I had no idea how to react. None of us did. For what felt like an eternity, nobody moved. And then he explained the rules. One by one, everyone's eyes lit up. They jumped out of their chairs, went to the whiteboard we had brought into the kitchen, and started drawing out the calendar and placing bets - pulling out Bolívares and buying their square on the calendar signifying when abuelo was coming home, laughing and talking smack to one another.

Tears. Smiles. Joy.

No AI makes that call. No system reads that room, feels the weight of that silence, and decides that what a terrified family needs in that moment isn't more information or a plan update but a moment of humanity in the middle of something grossly inhuman. That was judgment built on years of sitting in rooms like that one. Cultural intuition. Emotional intelligence operating at a level that looks like instinct but is actually deep expertise. And courage, because if that joke lands wrong, he's the monster who made light of a kidnapping.

I didn't make that call. He did. But what I did do, as the leader in the room, was trust that he knew what he was doing and back his play to see where it went. That's inherent to this truth. The leader's job isn't to make every call. It's to put the right human in the right room and then get out of the way.

I've carried that lesson into hundreds of hours sitting across the table from senior leaders, hearing them at their most uncertain, most afraid, most stuck, and helping them find their way through. The work is always the same: trust the human. Back their play.

No algorithm does that.

So What Does This Mean for Your Business?

If the argument stopped at "AI can't feel things," this would be a philosophy piece, not an essay on leadership. So let me take it somewhere practical.

Right now, I would loosely say that there are two kinds of leaders navigating AI. The first kind hears "humans are more important than hardware" and rolls their eyes. They see 100 employees, calculate that AI can do the work of 80 of them, and start cutting headcount. Klarna tried this, replacing 700 customer service employees with AI. Their CEO publicly admitted they went too far. They rehired humans.

The second kind hears the same truth and asks a completely different question: if AI can handle the routine, what can my people do now that they couldn't do before?

IKEA is the example that stopped me in my tracks. They built an AI bot that handled 47% of routine customer inquiries. Instead of laying off the 8,500 customer service reps whose workload just got lighter, they retrained every one of them as interior design advisors. The result? $1.4 billion in additional revenue. Those employees went from being a cost center to a revenue generator, not because the AI was good, but because the humans were finally given the space to do what only humans can do: build relationships, exercise judgment, create value through expertise.

That's SOF Truth I in a business context. The people are the humans. The AI is the hardware. Give your people better equipment and get out of their way.

Where Does This Leave You?

The question I work through with leaders isn't about AI. It's about how they see themselves and their people. Do you see them as costs to be optimized, or as capabilities to be multiplied? The AI conversation just makes the answer harder to hide.

And that question reveals something deeper about how you lead. Because multiplying people requires trust. It requires patience. It requires investing before you see the return. Replacing them is faster and the spreadsheet looks better in Q1. But you can't automate judgment, trust, culture, or leadership. AI will never care. It will replicate a convincing facsimile of caring, but it hasn't the capacity to want to further your business, to stay up thinking about your team, to feel the weight of getting it wrong. The companies learning that the hard way right now are the ones that treated their people like hardware.

Too many leaders are asking, "Where can AI replace my people?" A better question is, "Where can AI multiply them?"

And an even better question: what would your leadership look like if you invested in your people the way Special Operations invests in theirs? Not as headcount. Not as a line item. As the mission-critical capability that no piece of hardware will ever replace.

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If you're a leader wrestling with that question, that's the work I do. I help senior leaders get honest about how they lead, where they're getting in their own way, and what it takes to build the kind of leader and the kind of team that performs when it matters most.

Schedule a Conversation

I'd love to have that conversation with you. You can reach me at dave@davelozano.com or learn more at davelozano.com.

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Next in the series: SOF Truth II, "Quality is better than quantity."