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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 It feels like an outdated relic of "aristocrats get to be officers, commoners just get to be enlisted" days that are now centuries past.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
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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'.
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