> 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.
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.