There are so many interesting questions here and the author seems to have a laser-like focus on the material fact that he feels insubordination has occured and that this is a problem, which doesn't really require more than a sentence or so of explanation.
For example, in training, why is it that the soldiers agree to polish their boots, iron their uniforms etcetera - e.g. generally perform a ton of ancillary tasks to the actual job?
I don't think it's solely because someone said so. There's a level of respect for the ritual that comes from somewhere. Like, they might think that today they can't be arsed with polishing the boots, but that it's a point of pride to do it. Or there's a competitive aspect with the others.
Maybe it actually is just because the commander will bark at them otherwise - but that just cycles around to the motivation to the commander.
Once you figure that out, does that illustrate that there's something unique about mask wearing?
Like, you have this empirical data that soldiers will literally run into a battlefield and dodge landmines and all the rest of it, you've created a framework in which that's an order they'll obey.
I dunno, it feels like the article is really light on the "whys". The thing your mental model told you should happen is not happening - so try to understand it?
Try to figure out why people don't want to do this thing?
Recruits do what they are told because they have been conditioned to do it - it’s the purpose of boot camp, it’s the purpose of drill Sargents, it’s the purpose of the ritual and culture of the military.
If they lose that conditioning or fail to comply, there are many negative consequences for them. From minor things like being passed over for promotion, to jail.
When you become familiar with, and have experience with people and what combat operations actually entails, it becomes obvious why this is the case, and why it is necessary.
Soldiers who do not follow orders, even sometimes nonsensical ones, die or get others killed. Sometimes everyone.
It is impossible and unwise to explain the needs and situation behind every order in a combat situation. Even if there was no leaks, assuming every grunt will have the capacity and meta awareness of the situation to process it correctly and not get confused just doesn’t work. It also opens up reinterpreting orders in ways that have unexpected consequences and end up breaking larger unit movements that depend on specific side effects and actions.
It also has negative side effects of course - inefficiencies, difficulty adjusting to changing circumstances, opportunities for corruption and abuse.
Blind obedience is a double edged sword, for the same reason our brain generally has mechanisms to shy away from us chopping our own hand off. You don’t want that.
But you need to ensure that orders are followed when it matters, or you don’t have a military, you have a social club with tanks.
Yeah, all of that makes sense. I don't at all disagree with the concept of military discipline.
But then we come to the question of why this one thing is different. Because that's how you're going to solve it right?
And the article just doesn't seem to expound on it. It's observed, and that's just it, there's paragraphs of waffle. There's not even like, an anonymous quote from the guy asking one of the other recruits/OC's/whatever (I'm slightly more au fait with UK military terms as you might be able to tell) why they're not doing it.
There's an implicit extrapolation that slippage on this particular point implies slippage across the board. But that isn't explored either - it's kind of just stated as if it's a physical consequence which doesn't seem clear at all to me.
As an absurd example - if you suddenly turned up, in theatre, with the soldiers' wives, and asked them to shoot them, I'd imagine a lot of them would refuse. But that wouldn't in any way imply that you now have some increased subordination risk in the future. It would imply that your order was absurd. Obviously, in this wholly artificial and constructed case, we know that because we've constructed it to be so, but you get my point.
In the article there appears to be zero thought given to the concept that if a huge group of people, people who, as you well describe, have been drilled and moulded into accepting almost any order without question, are refusing to do what you're asking them to do, that there might be some fundamental issue with what you're asking them to do.
I don't really know what the actual answer is, I mean obviously the act of putting a thing on your face is trivial when described in those terms, but something else is going on here.
It's different because masks and vaccines to prevent Covid have become political. But they author is trying to remain nonpolitical, the way military people are supposed to behave in a democracy, and I think this is why he's waffling a bit.
Yes, a soldier is supposed to push back against an illegal order (say, to slaughter a bunch of civilians). But wearing a mask doesn't meet that standard. Neither does accepting a vaccine when the soldier already accepted many far more risky vaccines (like for anthrax) against much more unlikely risks (no one is attacking American troops or their allies with anthrax, but Covid is actively attacking).
> In the article there appears to be zero thought given to the concept that [...] there might be some fundamental issue with what you're asking them to do. [...] something else is going on here.
The simplest explanation is that there isn't a fundamental issue.
For civilians, you might claim that there is some sort of deep principle of freedom at stake, however ridiculous it might be given that those same people are all happy enough to comply with the laws most places have about covering up their naughty bits. But this is the military. They signed up for a job where many of their freedoms go out the window. This very clearly among them.
If you look at who's wearing masks and who isn't, [1] it's obvious that this is a political. And if you read the news, it has been deeply politicized. Soldiers refusing to wear masks is a political statement: they in practice view allegiance to party (and/or news channel) above allegiance to the chain of command.
The "something else" going on here is the same sort of propaganda-driven undermining of belief in rule of law that has been going on for years, and has resulted in the attempt to sack Congress and a majority of Republicans believing that the last presidential election wasn't legitimate. [2]
This is all pretty much in line with how democracies slide into autocracies. Given that the Trump administration considered using the military to seize voting machines in Dcember 2020, [3] people should be very nervous about signs that the military has become this deeply politicized.
Soldiers are not automatons. In fact, in the US military, its doctrinal to instill some level of leadership and autonomy in all soldiers, so that the death of a leader does not incapacitate the unit.
Not only that, but orders need to align with the morals and ethics of the soldiers that will follow them, and the soldiers must believe the orders were given in good faith. It’s not necessary that the order even makes sense (soldiers don’t have to always understand why) but the action AND the MOTIVATION for the order must comport with the values of the soldier. If you tell me to charge to my death in machine gun fire to win the battle or save my unit, I’m a lot more likely to do so if I trust you than if I believe you just don’t like me and want me gone.
In this case, I think that many soldiers do not believe that their general officers are acting in good faith, and therefore are resistant to blind obedience.
> Soldiers who do not follow orders, even sometimes nonsensical ones, die or get others killed.
While this is true, it's also true that soldiers are not fools, and they know when they are in situations where they need to follow orders blindly or fail in the mission--and when they are not. And leaders who treat every situation as though it were the first kind, even when every soldier can plainly see it is a situation of the second kind, are not doing themselves or their units any favors.
Actually they are. No offense in any way, the IQ for being a soldier is between 84 and 90, it is illegal to enlist someone with a lower IQ and it is normal to send to NCO or officer school someone with higher (it depends how much higher). So yes, most soldiers need to be told what to do most of the time.
I am extremely skeptical. As a judge advocate, I see the personnel files of every accused service member and the majority of witnesses in any given case that comes through my office. While IQ tests are not routinely given, the GT score (a rough proxy derived from the ASVAB/AFQT) is in every personnel file. I have seen an 84 once and below-84 once.
Your post was in response to "soldiers are not fools," so we are talking about the general population, not the legal minimum. Additionally, "NCOs and officers" are soldiers (or sailors, or airmen, or Marines) as well, so you cannot exclude them. Lastly, one cannot generally be an NCO without first being junior enlisted.
You willfully misunderstand the parent. If you are more interested in scoring points than contributing to the topic, you might consider whether your time is spent more productively outside of internet forums.
That's still quite high enough to perceive simple things like what I described.
> most soldiers need to be told what to do most of the time.
That doesn't contradict what I said. Most soldiers might need to be told what to do most of the time, but they can still be quite capable of seeing when they are in a situation where they need to do exactly what they are told or risk mission failure, and when they are not.
Unfortunately, there is a non trivial percentage of everyone that this is clearly, demonstrably not true. Generally, we let them own the results of their own decisions here, so the blast radius is minimal. In the military, this generally is not allowed as much - as the blast radius tends to be more literal.
> there is a non trivial percentage of everyone that this is clearly, demonstrably not true.
And the military generally weeds such people out at some point during training, because they won't make good soldiers. Being a soldier requires a certain amount of judgment. It is impossible to tell someone exactly what to do; in order for any organization to be effective, a certain amount has to be left to the intelligence and judgment of the people carrying out the orders, even at the lowest level.
Post-training, did anyone get a captains mast for something they legitimately did badly/screwed up?
I haven’t met a sailor yet who didn’t have some crazy stories, but maybe the folks you knew were more disciplined.
Also, any of those happen with the following?
1) go to off limits establishment on shore leave and get drunk and cause trouble, resulting in the local authorities having to drag them into their superiors?
Despite that being explicitly against orders, and generally dumb. And that after and having about 30 bazillion slide decks about how stupid it is, and it being objectively stupid and destructive?
2) had any of them get pregnant to avoid deployment (and explicitly say so to friends), despite that being a pretty bad trade overall, and even more ridiculous to mention to others?
3) had officers commit adultery or other obvious-to-everyone-around-them-is-against-conduct-becoming-an-officer’ problems? Because I could point to plenty of ones that made the press anyway.
4) gotten themselves in deep trouble with sudden ill advised marriages, going into massive debt with illadvised car or house purchases, etc.
Each one of those is someone failing to ‘do the smart thing’ even when sometimes the smart thing is explicitly specified or strongly implied with other agreements, and it highlights the bigger issue, and why it’s important that orders exist and people follow them in combat situations (unless they are clearly so bad they are illegal).
If you have a plan that requires folks to be consistent, do the ‘smart thing’, and do the same thing at the same time, that is not natural and it doesn’t scale well.
It requires heavy training, constant reinforcement, and diligence. And it still gets screwed up. Make everyone exhausted, stressed out, and generally in the shittiest situation they’ve ever been in? It gets harder/worse.
And it still won’t happen everywhere perfectly, regardless of how smart everyone thinks they are, or the degree of training, because humans and reality don’t work that way.
‘Orders’ is a way of distilling the hopefully valuable parts of what needs to happen in a way that specifies the thing that needs to happen unambiguously and without over-specification.
Ideally they can be evaluated if someone (or groups of someones) did actually do them, and traceable back to who issued them in a way that conflicting orders can be untangled, authority of the one issuing them can be verified, and accountability for bad orders can be traced back (even if they aren’t very often).
That may mean there is an order to reposition your ship to specific co-ordinates with no explanation. Or fire on something without understanding why. Or take a shot that personally makes you feel terrible or you don’t agree with.
The safety and cohesiveness of the group is more important, explicitly, in the military as that is also what protects the individuals in those situations.
Depending on the circumstances depends on how plausible it is those orders are legitimate, and I tried to call out that blind obedience is bad. No one should be doing something clearly wrong because an order said so.
But the requirement for obedience to an order is much, much higher because there are many legitimate combat (and some non combat) situations where it is impossible to get everyone to agree on, let alone follow, a single course of action in time, and if the single course of action is not followed, terrible consequences for the people involved are assured.
And with a sufficiently large group of people, you could never get consensus on a right course of action. So without enforced discipline, the military would be ineffective.
And during peacetime, the foundation for the military that would be fighting the next war is being set.
None of these refute the actual claim I made, which was not any of the claims you are implicitly imputing to me here (and was a weaker claim that any of those).
In my actual experience, I directly observed your #0--which is how I'm numbering the captain's mast example--and #4, heard reliable accounts of #1 but never directly saw it myself, and didn't have any knowledge of #2 or #3 in units I was part of, but of course there have been press stories. I was not claiming that any of these things don't happen.
However, the sailors I directly observed in cases #0 and #4 were still quite capable of doing the thing I said soldiers were capable of.
There's a great old documentary about soldier training that makes the same point very well. Basically, soldiers are conditioned to do all kinds of arbitrary things on command so that it will override their natural aversion to danger / causing harm in the field. It's on YouTube but I'm not sure if there's a better quality version somewhere else:
“you don’t have a military, you have a social club with tanks.”
Leadership means not blaming the little guys when suddenly the whole enterprise fails. Who is the leader who turned our military into “a social club with tanks?” That person deserves removal at the very least, because they clearly are not able to lead. So who is the leader we should hold responsible?
A colonel at my job shared this video about a submarine commander who just joined a new ship. He didn't have time to learn a whole new vessel, so he switched from giving orders to expressing intents. He found that all the way down to the lowest level, everyone was more aware and invested in what was going on.
The tl;dr is, one thinking person can't compete with an entire thinking crew.
That works once everyone is already a cohesive, functioning group. If you can get that culture on a ship going, and keep it going? Yes, that is far far better.
What happens if you are handed a group who isn’t already disciplined, knows their jobs well, works together/has the sharp interpersonal bits ground off, etc?
The whole orders, strong command authority, etc. thing is because that is the minimum functional level that is shown to work in combat situations, not because it is the maximum possible or the ideal.
It provides the tools to deal with a lot of common brokenness in groups. It means ‘easy’ breaking of ties or deadlocks in a well known way, avoids most of the confusing ambiguity about what to do when no one is able to process what is going on or things are changing very rapidly, it provides a scalable and field expedient way to deal with bad actors or sudden unexpected personnel issues while also keeping at least the possibility of clear accountability (chain of command), and it formalizes a set of explicit interdependencies and expectations between those who are giving orders (officers) and those doing most of the dangerous or shitty work (enlisted).
it also has negative side effects, and rarely is anyone actually happy with it, but it has generally worked for what it has been required to do and be.
Soldiers aren't in fear of their commanders when they don't polish their boots. They are in fear of their peers, who will put them in physical and mental hurt if they continue to screw up and make the rest of their peers suffer as a result of their actions. It's not always beatings either. Good luck continuing a military program like west point when every single cadet has decided to ostracize you and you don't have a single person to speak to at all. Good luck doing anything when you've been deprived of basic human functions like just speaking to someone.
I don’t agree with that. In my boot camp experience the fear from peers imposing physical or mental hurt was barely a factor for many of us. It was a matter of personal pride that made you want to spit shine boots and iron dress greens. We’d do it all together before lights out in preparation for the next day. It was a ritual during informal time to reflect on the day. Granted there’s the notion of a “blanket party” but that’s hardly the motivating factor and minimizes the personal drive to do well because you want to. It’s a volunteer military, not drafted by force and fear.
> the author seems to have a laser-like focus on the material fact that he feels insubordination has occured and that this is a problem
Indeed, how is it that in the 19th century the conscripted lined up in rank and file against grapeshot cannonade, went over the top in the war to end all wars, and only 1 of 3 discharged their weapons in WWII? Perhaps it is only the victory of management science that we more precisely know the extent to which the individual subordinates himself dutifully and unthinkingly to command.
> I don't think it's solely because someone said so.
The extent to which management reckons the rank and file's pliancy reliable -- without its image being rescued by romance (a la The Charge of the Light Brigade) -- relies upon the realism of quid pro quo and economic desperation. Where would we be without our crime-procedurals, super-hero movies, and high-school signing contracts? The omnipotence fantasy consists in wrongs that are righted, but when the bullshit wears so thin that everyone sees through it...what then? Rebel around some cultural touch-stone?
> Try to figure out why people don't want to do this thing?
I prefer management remain clueless. Can anyone imagine anything more horrifying than unthinking executors of commands? Executors who may wink out the lives of wedding parties a continent removed? I will laud you for echoing an American "leftist" commonplace for wishing to discover root-causes (exactly as quaint as "without even the appearance of impropriety").
But I cast my lot with all who reply "I prefer not to."
I think the focus is on accomplishing things. Even small things like you mentioned. If you make your bed first thing each morning and have a bad day, you will still come home to a well made bed (an accomplishment) that you can enjoy.
Every little accomplishment in life is important and motivating. They keep you going onto the next thing.
For example, in training, why is it that the soldiers agree to polish their boots, iron their uniforms etcetera - e.g. generally perform a ton of ancillary tasks to the actual job?
I don't think it's solely because someone said so. There's a level of respect for the ritual that comes from somewhere. Like, they might think that today they can't be arsed with polishing the boots, but that it's a point of pride to do it. Or there's a competitive aspect with the others.
Maybe it actually is just because the commander will bark at them otherwise - but that just cycles around to the motivation to the commander.
Once you figure that out, does that illustrate that there's something unique about mask wearing?
Like, you have this empirical data that soldiers will literally run into a battlefield and dodge landmines and all the rest of it, you've created a framework in which that's an order they'll obey.
I dunno, it feels like the article is really light on the "whys". The thing your mental model told you should happen is not happening - so try to understand it?
Try to figure out why people don't want to do this thing?