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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38023 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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You might be interested in ACoUP’s blogging on military psychology, specifically Total Generalship

morale will get men into uniform, it will sustain them on large marches and cold nights and it will get them to the battle, but it will not get them through the battle. Instead, cohesion gets men through the terror of actual combat, when fear has driven ‘the cause’ far from mind. But of course cohesion isn’t enough on its own either, since it provides no reason to advance or attack or really to do anything at all except stick together.

…

Actual responsiveness to evolving conditions didn’t come from the general at all, but was an emergent property of junior officers empowered to make independent decisions combined with armies that had sufficient training and discipline to act on those decisions in the moment. Such armies could be very effective, but they were also difficult to produce (as were the capable junior officers) and so a relative rarity.

Basically, hunkering down and waiting for a change is a really common historical response, the natural combination of bystander effect and mortal fear. Armies rely on officers and training to try and get around this, and it’s part of the reason a disciplined military tends to steamroll larger ones. The Metro police appear to have had their training and personal initiative kick in, while the Uvalde cops congealed at the perimeter.

The Metro police appear to have had their training and personal initiative kick in, while the Uvalde cops congealed at the perimeter.

Even if we grant this as excusable, they were completely willing to prevent others from going in and doing the job. So that really lays the insult of comparing them to these guys thick.

So yeah, whatever training the Uvalde guys had, it clearly isn't ideal.

Oh yeah. I’m not trying to excuse their behavior. Out of all the possible options they defaulted to a pretty awful one.

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