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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   26842 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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It's all officers, who by definition are not soldiers and know fuck and shit about fighting all making up theories about how soldiers fight. They quite literally know nothing. They're vaguely aware that they're in charge of fighting, and a good officer might even know which sergeant he needs to tell to go fight, but they know as much about the process as a big city mayor knows about trash collection.

Very nearly 100% of all military analysis, history and theory has been catalogued and written by people who have never even seen a gunfight firsthand, much less kicked a door. Interesting so far as it goes, but to use any of it as a practical manual is ridiculous.

Do you have any idea why we still have this system where our officers (mostly, with commissioning-program exceptions) don't start as soldiers? It feels like an outdated relic of "aristocrats get to be officers, commoners just get to be enlisted" days that are now centuries past. I could imagine a system of "try to pick out your smartest recruits, and put them in charge of the others when they've had enough study and experience", but the attitude "put them in charge when they've had enough study; what good is experience?" is baffling to me. It seems like the system depends in part on at least some of the smartest recruits getting missed by or rejecting it. That happens (one of the smartest kids I knew went enlisted Air Force, and I had a friend decide "Chemical engineering has been so stultifying, I'd rather be marching on Baghdad"), but it seems dangerous to rely on.

It's not like the system has just been unaware of the importance of its NCOs, either. Supposedly one of the Army OCS test questions from ~1950 was "You are in charge of a detail of 11 men and a sergeant. There is a 25-foot flagpole lying on the sandy, brush-covered ground. You are to erect the pole. What is your first order?", to which the answer was of course "Sergeant, erect that flagpole."

Every society in history has had this distinction, it's necessary to have sufficient elite buy-in to the military to not get conquered by steppe nomads. It's dumb but it's necessary. Elites aren't going to march around under full pack and get shot at- and they won't send their sons to do it either. Flying a jet over camel jockeys with no anti-air capability, or bossing the real soldiers around? That's a convenient prep for high-status civilian roles. Serving in the infantry or driving a tank or whatever are not.

How necessary is elite buy-in for modern first world militaries? Are there not enough soldiers that the best can be selected and promoted into officer roles?

It just seems bizarre to me that you can have people making on-the-ground military decisions who have no actual fighting experience.

Very. Militaries neglected by their civilian elites tend to underperform, as it turns out you can't shoot budget cuts.

I wasn't clear (or I misunderstood what you meant by elite buy-in). Of course I understand that the elites need to want the military to perform well, but in the modern world do you really need to provide special positions in the military for the upper classes in order for the government to make sure there's adequate funding? Are senators going to stop supporting the army if their kids aren't getting officer roles?

It's just part of good civil-military relations. A separate military caste has a very bad record, historically, because the military winds up being regarded as chuds and jailbirds who don't deserve the support of broader society, and it tends to slip out of the control of evolue political appointees.

Fair enough

Again, this is a widespread practice that has been going on for a very long time. Officers in the British army used to literally buy their commissions. Officers in the Roman army (above the rank of centurion, who were basically the equivalent of modern noncommissioned officers) were political appointees and political office holders.

There has never been an army where the officer class has been made up of promoted grunts; they always come from a higher social class than the men and start their careers as officers. And armies are the most ruthlessly selected of all human institutions; any that fail to perform are literally killed off by their rivals. That makes the officer-enlisted dichotomy one hell of a Chesterton's fence; I don't know why it works, but it does.

Military service was literally tied to social class for much of the history of western civilization; the definition of noble is basically 'rich enough to provide a cavalry horse when called up to war'.

I know embarrassingly little about the military, but don't officers typically start out as soldiers? Or are full-on wars these days so rare that by the time they're promoted to officers, most of them haven't actually done much fighting?

I know embarrassingly little about the military, but don't officers typically start out as soldiers?

No. Officers and enlisted (both are soldiers) are two completely separate, parallel career tracks. Officers are the middle-class track; they require a college degree and usually start at 22. Enlisted are the working-class track, and usually start at 18. All officers outrank all enlisted (in theory, anyway; in practice, only a very stupid lieutenant would try to boss around a senior enlisted, who would quickly have a word with a higher-ranking officer to put the kid in his place). A small number of officers (referred to as mustangs) start out as enlisted, but that's rare.

Heinlein takes a shot at this system in Starship Troopers:

The Commandant continued: "That’s the Moment of Truth, gentlemen. Regrettably there is no method known to military science to tell a real officer from a glib imitation with pips on his shoulders, other than through ordeal by fire. Real ones come through — or die gallantly; imitations crack up.

"Sometimes, in cracking up, the misfits die. But the tragedy lies in the loss of others... good men, sergeants and corporals and privates, whose only lack is fatal bad fortune in finding themselves under the command of an incompetent.

"We try to avoid this. First is our unbreakable rule that every candidate must be a trained trooper, blooded under fire, a veteran of combat drops. No other army in history has stuck to this rule, although some came close. Most great military schools of the past — Saint Cyr, West Point, Sandhurst, Colorado Springs didn’t even pretend to follow it; they accepted civilian boys, trained them, commissioned them, sent them out with no battle experience to command men... and sometimes discovered too late that this smart young ‘officer’ was a fool, a poltroon, or a hysteric.

"At least we have no misfits of those sorts. We know you are good soldiers — brave and skilled, proved in battle else you would not be here. We know that your intelligence and education meet acceptable minimums. With this to start on, we eliminate as many as possible of the not-quite-competent — get them quickly back in ranks before we spoil good cap troopers by forcing them beyond their abilities. The course is very hard — because what will be expected of you later is still harder.

"In time we have a small group whose chances look fairly good. The major criterion left untested is one we cannot test here; that undefinable something which is the difference between a leader in battle... and one who merely has the earmarks but not the vocation. So we field-test for it

"Gentlemen! — you have reached that point. Are you ready to take the oath?"

But every military in the world uses a similar structure, so there must be something to recommend it.

According to the Peter principle people in a hierarchy tend to rise to the level of respective incompetence. Since it is apparently so important to have competent sergeants, I'd guess the command would prefer them remain sergeants rather than be promoted to officers.

No, almost none go that way. Officers start out in college, usually with a communications degree. Then they get a couple weeks learning military terminology, a few schools for their specialty, and then they get a platoon of dudes who don't respect them and wouldn't follow them into a public restroom. 99% aren't in combat billets. For the few who are, they spend six months to a year as second lieutenants on "the line", the only time in their career they'll regularly interact with real soldiers. Mostly they'll be bailing them out of jail and handling their pay.

After that, it's administration for twenty years, and if you're shit hot, maybe a command.

Thanks for the explanation.

No. Officers are officers and enlisted (including "non-commissioned officers") are enlisted, and going from enlisted to officer is rare (and for some reason called "going mustang"). Two separate hierarchies, the officer one being formally entirely superior to the enlisted -- that is, the newest second lieutenant could give an order to the Sergeant Major of the Army (the highest enlisted soldier). (Though in practice that ain't gonna happen)

and for some reason called "going mustang"

MUSTANG, n. An indocile horse of the western plains. In English society, the American wife of an English nobleman.

  • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

I think the military usage came first, but am not certain. I recall it being used for the character Sharpe in the eponymous books, but that may have been an anachronism.

Mustang comes from the Spanish 'mestengo', itself derived from a medieval Spanish legal class of runaway livestock which was no longer the property of the original owner due to long-straying. It basically means 'feral animal', although Americans are more familiar with its use to refer to runaway slave communities deeper in Latin America.

Or are full-on wars these days so rare

You can probably answer that question yourself.

Who am I kidding, you're blocking me.

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