Ironhanded

Nationalist upheaval consumed Yugoslavia after the death of Tito, the ironhanded unifier.

He was an “ironhanded father-figure” (C. Reid, 1998, p. 216). This ironhanded aspect sometimes went too far, like when he forced Erich Lehmann to resign his editorship of Annals of Mathematical Statistics.

In this traditional context, it's easy to assume that anything short of an ironhanded, authoritarian attitude toward discipline is flat-out permissive, although this common belief is not remotely true.