There was drinking going on the other day. I got into a disagreement with a person I have a habit of disagreeing with. This was the email I sent him:
You said before that the military is not about making choices. I’d like to prove you wrong.
For the lowest level airman basic, for the private, for the whatever the hell the navy calls it, this may be the case. But you lose that rank nearly as soon as you get out of enlisted training. For officers, we never go through that step. I will paraphrase: “Being a soldier, in the distant past, may have been standing dumb and following orders. Caesar may have only needed soldiers for cannon fodder. But the soldier today is so highly trained that in any other field he would be rated a master.” Robert A. Heinlein. This is, at its core, a true statement. Soldiering is not about playing dumb and standing still; it is about knowing tactics, equipment systems, etc. to such a high degree of proficiency that nobody else can beat you with them.
The military follows a heierarchical rank structure. That does not mean that we defer all decision-making to higher ranks indefinately, until god makes every decision and hands it back to the individuals. It means that in the case of an unsolvable problem, we always know where to go. And if there isn’t time for it, we are expected to make the right choice anyway.
You can’t forget that for officers, we undergo four years of continuous college-level courses, plus a minimum of a month of field training, before we are allowed to command. What do they teach us during all that time? In essence, leadership. They teach us to be leaders of men, authorities in our own field capable of leading the true experts in any given subject, the enlisted people, to a given task. Not only coaxing them to actually do it, but to come up with the tasks, the ordering, the procedures in the first place. I will quote again: “Never tell your men how to do something. Tell them instead what to do, and you will be surprised by their ingenuity.” I forget who said this originally, but it is undeniably true. Moreover, every good officer and enlisted man holds to this principle. Operational knowledge is inversely porportional to rank; therefore, all operational decisions are handled at the lowest level possible. This means that no matter what your rank is, or who you have as a supervisor, you know more than your supervisor about your particular area of expertise. Higher ranks simply mean that you have to have an overview knowledge of more fields. What this all means is that no matter what, your supervisor will be eager to have you solve all the operational problems. If things succeed, he gets credit for being a good manager; if they fail, it’s clearly your fault. This may not be fair. I think it is. No matter; you always have choices. What you choose typically affects the mission, which affects the success of your whole unit and so on up. “For the sake of a nail… the kingdom was lost” etc. If you don’t know that reference, ask me sometime, or anyone knowledgable.
It is a common public misperception that an individual soldier has about as much autonomy as an ant in a hive. Capable of complex behavior en masse; rediculously stupid as an individual. This is false. Delegation and assumption of responsibilities occur at all levels of the military, because every member of the military is wholly human and to at least some extent has problem-solving capabilities. There is really no space for the big grunt with an IQ of 60. Unless you are the absolute lowest rank in charge of nobody but yourself, you are leading one or more people. And even then, you are handed problems and have to work out your own ways to solve them. The type of problem that you are handed in that situation will be the kind solvable by an individual, and may not require all that much thought: “Take out that pillbox;” “Guard this door;” etc. However, even the man guarding the door has to ascertain, and take responsibility for his judgement in ascertaining, the validity of the credentials given him by each person desiring access.
Disagree with me. Raise valid points. I will counter them. You say that my chosen career is essentially mindless; I want to correct whatever essential misunderstanding leads you to that conclusion.
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