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JTarrou  6mo ago (text post)   Edited 6mo ago   3793 thread views

Violent Class: the Point of Empire.

We live in a country of 350 million people. At any given time, around 1.2 million people serve in the military, or about a third of a percent of the general population. Of that third of a percent, the "tooth to tail" ratio is 8:1 (150k), but "tooth" is combat arms which includes artillery, tankers, cav, engineers etc. Even within the Infantry there are mortarmen, mechanized, anti-tank squads etc. It's hard to say for certain, but the number of dudes in the military whose job it is to kick the doors and shoot the faces is likely no more than 50k at a given time. Of that, only a minority will deploy and a minority of those see combat. In the twenty years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has awarded right about 77k CIBs and 47k Purple Hearts out of 2-3 million total deployed over that time. Obviously, there is some overlap between those awards.

For the uninitiated, the Combat Infantryman Badge is intended to identify those members of the infantry who have actually "close(d) with and destroy the enemy with direct fires.", and the PH is known colloquially as the Enemy Marksmanship Badge. But there are some caveats. For reasons I will explain, the numbers we pull from awards like this are likely a high-end estimate, rather than a minimum, but counting the Marine 0300s and whoever all else could push the numbers up a bit.

The CIB is awarded at the company level, and only in the Army. This means if one dude in an infantry company (~100 men) gets in a firefight, the whole company gets their CIB. Much of the fighting these days is very small unit engagements, so it is quite common for only a few squads or teams in a CIB company to have actually seen the combat. OTOH, more people than infantry get into shooting scrapes, I know a couple cooks with multiple engagements just because they used to volunteer to fill out patrols that were short on people. Given the nature of the conflict, a lot of people who weren't infantry, or even combat arms have seen combat. However, if they do, it's usually because of bad luck or the military ran out of infantry to do that job. It's impossible to say definitively given the data available to me at the moment, but I very much doubt the total number exceeds the number of infantrymen with CIBs. Lots of cav guys saw action as route security, lots of random MOS people got blown up en route or pressed into some role they weren't trained for. But the guys who do the job day in and day out of locating, fixing and killing the enemy is a rather select group.

So too the Purple Heart has gone to a lot of people who don't do that sort of job. Mortars dropped into a FOB can hit anyone, and roadside IEDs don't care if you're on the road to take water to an outpost or heading out on a raid. But they are more common among the people who are in the most dangerous situations more regularly.

Let's bring it all those numbers and assumptions together for a moment, because I'm describing a group of people who are very, very abnormal, and very far out on the distribution tail of the violence bell curve. Let's round up to make the math easy and account for POGs and Marines and call it a hundred thousand men over twenty years (and yes, to the closest approximation, it is all men). It's three ten thousandths of one percent of the general population. That's the high estimate, the real number could be significantly lower still. And the number who deploy multiple times is much, much lower.

When American foreign policy decides some poor dirt farmers on the other side of the globe need some freedom in their lives, maybe one ten thousandth of one percent of the population is who gets sent to do the actual violence of empire. I am one of those men. I have a CIB and a purple heart. Within the rarified community of professional actual soldiers, I am a small fish in a tiny pond. I was not special forces (or, technically I was briefly, but not really). I was a reasonably high-speed infantryman with a penchant for guns who worked himself into a sniper platoon in a fairly trash unit. I made sergeant, ate an IED and got med-boarded out of the military. A short, somewhat spicy but relatively unremarkable military career for an infantryman.

Much of what the general public hears about combat, even "first hand accounts" is not from people who actually do this job. As I have hopefully established, this is a very small, very highly selected and very abnormal group of people. Most of what you read ore hear in war accounts is from the middle classes, which in the military means officers. Officers are not soldiers. They are managers of soldiers. During conscription, it was at least possible for a southern gentleman of letters like Eugene Sledge or a Junker scion like Junger to write an account of actual enlisted combat, if unlikely. In today's volunteer military, this is almost never the case. The venn diagram of actual front-line soldiers and people who can write competently in an educated manner for general consumption is essentially two separate circles. These are not generally guys with college degrees, because if they had one they'd be an officer. There are exceptions, but we'll perhaps get into that at another time.

This hopefully will go some way to explaining my arrogance in writing about the topic. IQ and violent tendencies tend to be negatively correlated, and I am way out on the right tail of of the distribution on both. If that seems self-aggrandizing, rest assured that neither has done me any good.

So who are these men? Who carries the torch of empire into the barbarian wastes of the Korangel? Who sits behind the machine gun of a HMMWV? Who donkey-kicks the doors off their hinges and plunges into the black interior following the blinding light of his Surefire? Who sits in a ditch for three days waiting to shoot a retarded teenager whose dad got paid $200 to have him drop an IED in a pothole?

In short, they're degens. Poor and working class kids, half of which aren't old enough to buy beer. Mostly rural whites and hispanics. Roughly a quarter are from Texas alone. The South more generally provides well over half, maybe two thirds of the total. Most of the rest are from the Midwest and West. They self select. These are guys who asked to be in the Infantry, and survived the training and indoc. Nobody winds up on the pointy end of the spear by accident. It's the worst job in the military, so the people who volunteer for it are driven by very different considerations to most. It's also the highest status within the violence hierarchy.

It's a weird group. There's a lot of immigrants, not all of them hispanic. A surprising number of professional soldiers from other countries come to the US just for the action. If you're just itching for a fight but are born somewhere too peaceful, coming to the US will greatly increase your likelihood of getting into the shit. I've met British Marines, African princes, a German seminarian who dropped out to join the US infantry. There's some tiny minority communities that are heavily overrepresented though still small in total numbers, like Native Americans, the Samoans, the Hmong and the Sikhs. East asians are rare, and black Americans, while overrepresented in the military generally, are underrepresented in this part but still common.

We are united by a few characteristics, most generally the privileging of suffering as a badge of honor, physical violence, and a death wish. One does not join the Infantry to live a quiet life to a ripe old age. Mostly, I think we want to fuck around and find out. Like the movie says, how much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight? I had a lot of reasons for joining up, but I think the most basic was a desire to test myself and find out if I had what it took to face another man in mortal combat. To "see the elephant", or any of the other thousand euphemisms we use for fighting and killing our fellow men. To take the ultimate risk.

A recruit can get all the benefits of military service in a safer and more sustainable career. The infantry chews up men, minds and bodies, training alone eliminates hundreds of thousands. A twenty-five year old infantryman is probably middle management, a thirty-year old is probably out of the field as a platoon sergeant. The incessant road marching ruins feet, ankles and knees. The heavy packs wreck spines and shoulders. The heat, cold, wet and sleep deprivation cull the sensitive and the civilized. The social aggression removes the timid and the hazing removes the bitches.

There's an old glib saying that captures the esprit of the group. "The cowards never started and the weak quit along the way. That just leaves us.".

As a composite character, I give you the US infantryman. He is nineteen or twenty years old, grew up in a trailer park, has a kid or two with women he's not married to, is married to a woman with kids that are not his. He'll be divorced in a year. His family are construction workers, nurses, truck drivers, retail workers, garbage collectors, heavy machine operators, drug dealers, petty criminals, major criminals. He is dumber than average, hated school, has never read a book not assigned in class. He's been in jail multiple times, and probably will be again, mostly for low level stuff like underage drinking, vandalism and fighting. He binge drinks and smokes when in garrison, dips in the field. He gets in fistfights on a regular but extended basis with members of his own unit, in group conflict with other units, or with civilians on liberty. His politics, if he has any, are somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan. He drives a pickup truck, a Mustang, or a heavily riced-out import and is dead broke most of the time. He is, in short, perilously close to the underclass of our society, and there's a lot of crossover. His life is boredom, fear, pain and the brotherhood of those who live in fear and pain. His values are foreign, rude and frightening to those not of his group.

He is the world elite of the violent class. The modern equivalent of a knight, loaded down with many years' wages' worth of technology, weapons and armor. Far better trained, supplied and equipped than his adversaries. The big stick that the world hegemon swings in the anarchic world of international politics. The very tip of the spear. The point of empire.

In our modern peaceful society, that point has become very fine indeed.

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IQ and violent tendencies tend to be negatively correlated

No, IQ and criminal violence are negatively correlated.

I doubt IQ and aggression are correlated at all in any significant way. There's a very mild negative association, but it's thought to be due to dumb people being more frustrated generally.

No, IQ and criminal violence are negatively correlated.

Is it? or is it "IQ and getting prosecuted" that are negatively correlated?

Getting away with violence in the age of DNA and CCTV and cellphones isn't as easy as a senile Boomer may think.

No, its easier.

We'd need to compare how many violent attackers get prosecuted vs. how many get away with it (through their own wiles, not the indifference of the police).

True, but good luck with that.

I had a father that wanted to be the point of the spear. Luckily for me he didn't make it. Most of his military career was spent trying to get out of a tank division and not end up in jail for leaving. Timing also helped, he joined after Vietnam. He wanted to join Green Beret, and in his approximate words "they should have just dropped me off in a jungle and let me kill those gooks".

The "violent class" definitely fits. He grew up with stories of him and his friends having bb-gun wars where they'd shoot at each other with pellet rifles. He was on the cross country team in highschool, which routinely did illegal things, and simply outran the cops through back woods whenever shit hit the fan. After finally getting out of the military he did manage to complete a college degree on his second attempt. The stories I've picked up suggested that he was in a few fights in college.

I've inherited some of his anger and temper, but I've always avoided situations where that anger or temper might be directed at strangers. I also don't know how to fight, and I consider that a good thing. It would be bad if I felt I had the option of fighting.

He is no longer part of the "violent class" and I feel like I dodged a bullet. There was a temporary glance into that alternate lifestyle when I was too young to remember. My older brother and mom have stories of him coming from the bar every other night drunk and angry. They would hide under the table until he went to bed. He never beat my mother or older brother, but it was fear of living with that type of person.

Some of the "violent class" might be able to switch it off when they enter into civilian life. But I feel like I've heard plenty of stories where they could not switch it off. They've been taught violence as a way to solve problems, and they apply it throughout their lives. Argument with the wife? Violence. Kids misbehaving? Violence. Someone being a jerk in public? Violence.

My sister nearly married a cop a few years back. My main worry was that he would get violent with her. Instead he just cheated on her and dumped her a few months before the wedding. More of a typical dirtbag guy move, and not a violent dirtbag guy move.

From my somewhat sheltered perspective violence looks like a slow spreading disease. In order to handle it you have to be inoculated to it. The soldiers and police of our society are often familiar with violence before they ever experience it within their profession. They then take it home and spread it to their families. The first time I ever heard the term "generational trauma" I thought this is what it referred to.

How much of man's violence is the brutality of nature, and how much is from painful nurture?

How much of man's violence is the brutality of nature, and how much is from painful nurture?

JFC, just look at how people behave outside of civilization and then reconsider. Or what people do in video games if they can.

What people do in video games is a terrible representation of what they'd do in reality.

Women don't go around drowning people just because they delete ladders from swimming pools. The average COD player has no additional violent tendencies than might be expected from another youngish male.

They have no reason to in most cases. That’s at least part of the picture, I think we have that side of the human animal inside us, but most people live in stable enough situations where they really never have to consider violence because they have other, much better options. The woman playing sims and deleting ladders has never really been in a situation where violence was a real option, and even if she had the impulse, she has something to lose.

I'll probably cover this more in depth in the future, but I would say the spark, the inclination is nature. In some few, it is so strong that no nurture will change it, but for the vast majority, violence is a hard trade to learn. You need a lot of experience with it. One of the surprising things to me is how few of these incredibly violent men are actually all that keen on killing people. They all talk a good game about smoking haji or whatever, but when they get the chance, most will take any out they can get to keep from ending a human life. Only in the most dire danger to themselves or more likely their fellow soldiers will they actually try to kill someone. And even then in my estimation only about a third can manage it. Guys who are actually trigger happy are either scared shitless or some variety of psychopath (which is often an asset in such situations).

It's the most positive thing I've ever learned about human beings.

Some of the "violent class" might be able to switch it off when they enter into civilian life

Nope. The only ones who can "switch it off" never had it to start with.

One of the surprising things to me is how few of these incredibly violent men are actually all that keen on killing people. They all talk a good game about smoking haji or whatever, but when they get the chance, most will take any out they can get to keep from ending a human life.

This is definitely something I've noticed both in myself and a lot of the guys I've interacted with. My working theory is that someone who's seen the elephant can't help but have an appreciation for its weight. An appreciation that is often lost upon those who's understanding of violence has been shaped chiefly by Hollywood and internet slap-fights rather than direct exposure. As the country song goes...

Of killing, I've done plenty boys, and I don't wanna do no more
but if you back me into a corner, you'll be dead before you hit the floor

Edit Link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0ZgX2Q5vNNI

or some variety of psychopath

Can you say more about what those guys were like? Also, with all these violent dudes around, were you ever afraid of someone on your side?

Hard to talk generally about such a small sample size. They tend to be partially ostracized from the unit. Everyone wants them on the patrol, no one wants to eat with them. Even infantry are leery about men who kill easily and often.

As to my fellow soldiers, yes and no. I had personality conflicts with people I couldn't whip in a fight, which is scary to a point. Some of the guys were so dumb or jumpy I was worried they'd kill me or someone else on accident. Many of the NCOs are just terrifying people, professionally so. But I was never really worried about someone on my side trying to kill me if that's the question.

Did non-psychopaths who killed people, did it change them? I mean infantry soldiers are already it sounds like mostly promiscuous, ill-tempered alcoholics, but did soldiers who killed people get worse about it all?

IMO yes, but it's hard to say for sure. Much of that would be conjecture, because aside from a few people I know personally about, who exactly shot somebody is not generally common knowledge. Guys do not talk about it outside their very close group of friends/small unit. There's a sort of conspiracy of silence. I think this is partly because it is so traumatic to most of the guys who do shoot someone, and also avoids shaming the ones who did not. Unless it's my team or patrol, I don't know who ran the gun. I might know that Second and Third squads from some unit got in a firefight, and killed three Iraqis, but I'd never know who did what out there. My sample size for all these broad statements is very small indeed.

The guys who get confirmed kills in multiple engagements usually become known by rumor, but even that could be bullshit. I know a guy who tried to game the conspiracy by claiming to have been on the gun on one particularly grisly dustup, but anyone who knew people knew it was just attention-seeking.

I've wondered if my dad is a faker. He'd certainly want to look cool to his son I suppose.

That is interesting and hopeful to hear about the soldiers that hold back. There was some famous account from WWI about them having trouble motivating their soldiers to kill each other.

Is There some sense of morality or honor playing in? For the soldiers in WWI 'i dont want to kill this poor idiot who got drafted into the same dumb war as me'. For a modern soldier, 'I dont want to kill the dumb son of a poor family that got paid $5 to drop off a thing on the side of the road'.

I've always found those accounts hard to believe. Mostly from introspection. I've tried to type out an explanation a few different ways. They all seem wrongish. I'm just gonna go with the summary, take my word for it, all of these sentences are things I have thought through thoroughly:

I don't think I'm a psychopath. I don't want to kill other people. In a war, I think it would be easy for me to kill other people and feel very little remorse. If I had to use violence to kill them, I think it would permanently fuck me up, and I don't think I'd be very good at it.

Modern warfare has done an interesting thing where they have disassociated killing people with violence. A drone pilot can press a button and kill an entire wedding party while seeing only faint black and white outlines of bodies. The kind of man that could go to that same wedding party and cut them down with a blade is a very different person. There is a spectrum between those two people, and I think the infantry is much closer to the second kind of man than they are to the drone pilot. I'd consider myself close to the drone pilot.

It is weird to think that I'm not capable of violence, but I think I'm capable of killing someone.

Some of the "violent class" might be able to switch it off when they enter into civilian life

Nope. The only ones who can "switch it off" never had it to start with.

I've had a similar belief, but I was trying to be generous.

I can't say why it is, but it is. In my limited experience, if it's a firefight, about a third of guys shoot back, a third help out, and a third freeze up or hide. Often not who I thought would be in those categories.

There's usually something that needs doing that a brave man can do in combat that isn't killing someone. Those guys dashing through fire to rescue their wounded buddies are in all likelihood trying to offset their lack of appetite for the fight itself. They discover they can display their courage and suffer with the rest of their buddies without killing. The freezers I feel bad for. They found out something about themselves that will be hard to live with too. Of the three, the second group is probably the most healthy psychologically, and will have the easiest transition back to normal life. But that's pure speculation on my part. It just seems psychologically easier.

If it isn't a firefight, or some direct danger, the firing rates plummet. Half of our sniper teams never fired a shot, and in our AO at the time, that's just crazy. No way were they missing that many opportunities. Haji buffet in those days. And those are the specially selected guys who tried out, went to specialty schools specifically to do that job. It's a hard thing to kill someone who doesn't even know you're there. There's no honor in it, no struggle, no danger. In the context of war it's "ok", but it feels like murder because psychologically it is.

In the context of war it's "ok", but it feels like murder because psychologically it is.

I wish more people who studied moral philosophy could read your experiences.

I've never been in combat. But talking to people who have, and reading up on the subject, makes it clear to me that a lot of what people have in mind when they discuss morality and politics is just a rational justification of these deep urges and hesitations.

When I was younger I always noticed that liberals would allow the killing of fetuses but not criminals, and conservatives would allow the killing of criminals but not fetuses. And there would be arguments and justifications. But very few people seriously thought about applying any of those arguments to warfare. How do you justify killing an enemy combatant who is both fully grown and also hasn't committed any serious crime? Somehow nobody seems to think there's a need. There are a few pacifists around, but I've never met a genuine pacifist. Everyone I've ever talked to about the subject seems to know that, on some level, you must be ready to send someone else to kill people in war, if you're not prepared to do it yourself.

I think there is something to learn from this. What I think is: If you want abortion but not capital punishment, whatever. If you want capital punishment but not abortion, whatever. If you want both, whatever. Probably all of this kind of political arguing is merely the philosophical manifestation of the kind of thing you describe in the field: A third freeze, a third help out, and a third shoot.

In my limited experience, if it's a firefight, about a third of guys shoot back, a third help out, and a third freeze up or hide. Often not who I thought would be in those categories.

Out of curiosity, how would you guess a person could tell what category he is in without actually being in a firefight?

how would you guess a person could tell what category he is in without actually being in a firefight?

You don't.

That's why you actually have to go do it to find out.

Are you sure? We test a person's intelligence, sociability, emotionality, creativity, and anything else we like using a pencil and paper. Such tests are effective at predicting real world outcomes/ Tests of Neuroticism specifically have been used to predict panic proneness. You don't think that any kind of psychological screening could serve as an effective predictor of who will shoot, who will help, and who will freeze?

The military tried to find this test before, but the only major correlate was number of fights as a child, I believe. Which is sort of hard to control for. Last I knew, they gave up trying.

I suspect you might be able to find such a test, but it would be difficult to create and administer and perhaps even unethical.

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It’s seems to me you are saying that the trait is innately psychological. Or is this a cultural trait that is very deeply embedded in American Culture.

The Haji Buffet in the American culture isn’t the other. It’s basically the old political standard here that we disagree because of mistake theory. The Haji planting an IED just has wrong beliefs today and are basically unbaptized. When Bush ordered missile strikes it was missiles wrapped in Democracy and women’s schools. Today the right wing meme would be bullets with pride flags. The dead militant in American psychosis is a future ally. (Funny Noora Bin Laden is full fledged red American loving today).

I wander if the things that you speak of soldiers being hesitant to shoot would be completely different if the culture was different and the guy being killed was just a guy wanting to take your women and land. Israel I am guessing works a bit more on conflict theory.

Quick question- I’ve heard that special forces guys are usually surprisingly smart, is there a bit of a division between guys on their way to special forces and guys stuck as regular grunts?

Yes and no, I'm speaking from the Navy/Marine side rather than the Army, but IME the thing that typically set special programs guys apart was "conscientious/mindfulness". Not necessarily "smarter" than the average grunt but always on the ball and often a step ahead.

Citations with ASVAB scores needed.

Are you really asking me to name names? Not going to happen.

As I've said before, the main reason I'm so skeptical of rationalist's IQ fetishism that I've known too many Cat 3Bs (ostensibly in the 30 - 40th percentile of itelligence) who I would trust to run a complex and evolving operation without hesitation, and at the same time the most aggressively stupid and ignorant person I've ever had the misfortune to interact with on a professional basis was a State Department rep who had a Masters in Political Science from Yale and a MENSA card.

Simply put, I have seen first hand that a 150 point IQ does not preclude one being "a fucking retard" and vice versa. Stupid is as stupid does.

Yeah, the specialty schools like Airborne require a certain score on the ASVAB, not super high but a bit above average. There's a lot of technical stuff to learn for that sort of thing, and languages as well. Actual operators are usually fairly intelligent, although often not in ways that make a ton of sense to people who think "academic" when they think "intelligent".

A lot of guys can't climb the ladder because their test scores are too low.

I recently completed basic training in the Canadian military. About 8 of the 50 who graduated with me were going to infantry next. Personally, they didn't seem dumber than anyone else, and over all my platoon in basic seemed about average intelligence, with maybe the dumbest and smartest tails cut off.

I do agree everyone who went infantry was motivated by a desire to "be a badass", David Goggins in particular as a major inspiration to a lot of people.

Eh, could be a lot of cultural and structural differences, could be a small sample size. Could be different standards for admission. When I went in, they were scraping the barrel for bodies. The ASVAB cutoff got lowered to a thirty (out of a hundred), and you could get a waiver down to an eighteen (on a multiple choice test). A monkey could have passed.

The ASVAB cutoff got lowered to a thirty (out of a hundred), and you could get a waiver down to an eighteen (on a multiple choice test). A monkey could have passed.

How many choices per question? Don't say three, please.

Four.....

I thought you had to be joking, so I did a quick search to find sample questions. Four choices in the multiple choice, and among the first four sample questions I pulled up there's one homophone mistake and one typo. Please someone tell me "officialasvab.com" is actually unofficial and I should have gone to some sort of "asvab.gov"?

No wonder claymores have to be marked "this side toward the enemy".

...and MREs with "prop against a rock or something", that's the joke ;-)

Absolutely. I am still quite new to the military while you’ve had a long career, I just wanted to throw my own anecdote in.

Fascinating post. Some questions:

  1. How did those who enlisted at 25-26 fare?
  2. How big is the difference between your average GI Joe and SOF? Would you say the IQ level is higher there?
  3. The story of the German seminarian is fascinating. I wonder about those kinds of people. How did the ones who dropped out of "normal" society fare once they left the service?
  4. Can you tell me more about the colourful characters you met?
  5. Do you think the few infantrymen with an IQ above 110 were more effective or was it not that different?
  6. The veterans who went through multiple tours and saw the elephant repeatedly, how did they strike you?

Sorry about the long list of questions, I'm just very interested.

1: Better than most psychologically, but physically worse unless they were super in shape.

2: SOF has a much higher floor, but there's overlap there.

3: Couldn't say, that dude was one of my drill sergeants when I went in. Good dude, nearly broke my neck for running in the stairwell once.

4: Another of my drill sergeants had a masters in microbiology from some ivy league school. He rode a Harley and dipped the biggest chaw I ever did see. That was a man loved his job.

5: More effective than average, just because they didn't make the dumbest class of mistakes. No effect on their psychological fitness that I could see.

6: War changes a man, and a lot of it changes him a lot. They strike me as having become something both a bit more and a bit less than completely human. Like a guru or a hooker.

War changes a man, and a lot of it changes him a lot. They strike me as having become something both a bit more and a bit less than completely human. Like a guru or a hooker.

I'm interested, as someone in the healthcare field, to hear your take on whether being exposed to the kind of shit you see in hospitals also changes people. I hope I'm not insulting you here.

Not at all. I think it very much does. There's a stereotype about soldiers and nurses for a reason. We both have a bone-deep understanding of life and death, and an urge to blow off the steam that the repression necessary to operate with that knowledge produces. We have perspective on the rest of our lives that most do not.

It's not exactly the same, but it is parallel.

Maybe you could ask @self_made_human; he's an Indian physician. I don't know if he's an attending yet, but he most definitely saw some shit - and probably a little more of it per unit of time than his American counterparts. For what it is worth, I'm a fourth-year medical student at an American teaching hospital.

For what it is worth, I have never been to war, served in the military, or ever had anyone try to kill me. Other than maybe three fistfights growing up - all of which I either drew or lost - I haven't been exposed to violence. I've never feared for my life at the hands of another human being. My father was a peacetime military officer that grew up in a very rough neighborhood and managed to claw his way out; that experience left him with scars that he carries to this day, nearly fifty years later.

I guess I'd like to muse on what I saw so far in the healthcare field, the effects it had on me personally, and the effect that I've observed it having on my classmates and friends, some of whom are more senior to me and who are residents. One of them is already an attending. It is not at all a traumatic or painful experience for me to put into words. However: Scott Alexander himself - no slouch in the writing department - wrote in his blog entry Who By Very Slow Decay about the kinds of things that went on in hospitals. What I saw was rather similar, but more incurable disease and fewer elderly people with dementia. He believed, and correctly I might argue, that he was not up to the task of attempting to describe what he saw in words. I'm trying to do so, and I don't mind - I even enjoy it - but I'm not the writer that Mr. Alexander is, and Mr. Alexander is not the poet that Wilfred Owen or Oscar Wilde were.

I wouldn't want to bore you with cliched or inadequate descriptions of the kind of Hell that hospitals are; Scott's done a better job of that than I. I'll say that as time goes on, healthcare providers, hell pretty much anyone exposed to the healthcare industry for any length of time, become basically slightly cheerful nihilists. They're not cynical, more like nihilistic in the sense described by Camus. The more that you know about what is happening to the patients, the more or faster that happens - but a nurse's aide who works for a couple years also experiences the kind of transformation I'm talking about.

I've tried to describe it - especially the experience of rotating through a pediatric cancer ward. I've always come up short, but the best way I've come up with is this: Imagine being a combat medic. But: unlike real-world combat medics, you get to work in a magic suit that is damn near bulletproof. The personal risk that you deal with is relatively low. Maybe if you're rather unlucky you'll get punched in the face by a parent once a decade or so. Usually security deals with this kind of thing effectively. You also get to eat three meals a day, work maybe eight or twelve hours a day in a comfortable, temperature-controlled hospital, and go home every night to sleep in your own bed.

You see the good, the bad, and the ugly of humanity. Dipshit parents trying to take their kids, being treated for a type of cancer with an excellent prognosis and an 85 percent chance of surviving five years, a 70 percent chance of full cure...out of the hospital for "treatment" with essential oils and herbal remedies that will ensure their death within two months. Parents trying but failing in a noble, sad, gross, admirable way to shield their kids from the reality of their impending death. Children, twelve years old, never letting on how bad things truly are. Doctors becoming nihilistic and weeping in between patients. None of us had the skill with words to describe it, and I know this description like every other I have tried to attempt has fallen short. I am not Wilfred Owen reincarnated, and it would take someone with his skill to describe the things we saw.

If there is a God, the Almighty works in ways beyond our understanding, or else set the universe in motion and does not intervene in human affairs, or does so maybe once or twice in a thousand years.

A more metaphysical musing: War and disease are Gnon's prosecution lawyers. They decide, or make the case: This person should die, that person should be maimed for life, this person will be exhausted and fatigued for a year and a half but mostly recover. The healthcare system are the defense attorneys: they say "Not today, not here". As I understand the practice of lawyers, often the prosecution and the defense make deals, are friendly, understand what is likely. Something similar obtains in healthcare - healthcare providers have a pretty fair idea of the ultimate course of a disease, and do their best to keep patients aware of the outcomes that can be had. I know next to nothing about the day to day practice of law, but if this guy is anything like the average public defender, doctors for the most part operate in a pretty similar way.

I am not saying that the average physician is some kind of brilliant hotshot badass; I think that the medical profession gained an awful lot of status by being essentially the delivery system for the advances that university researchers and research doctors managed to produce: germ theory, vaccination, antibiotics. More than a few attendings have essentially said that physicians were more or less a kind of very well-paid tradesman working on very expensive machines, and that the lion's share of healthcare advances came from germ theory, vaccination, and antibiotics plus obstetric care. Everything else was just marginal gains and window dressing.

but he most definitely saw some shit - and probably a little more of it per unit of time than his American counterparts

You bet: https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/s/qo3AMUGnhe

I can't imagine an American doctor sees a tenth of this unless they volunteer to go to Haiti or something along those lines.

That being said, I work in far more upscale places these days, while I'm studying for the psychiatry entrance exams for the UK. You shouldn't expect much of a difference in terms of quality of care or amenities at that level, even if you compare it to the US or the rest of the West.

Former Intel POG here. This is very applicable to the infantry IME but less applicable to support MOS. E.g. your Intel weenies and S6 IT guys are more likely to be middle class fuckups/failsons than lower class degens. Arguably I find the infantry guys more admirable, especially after being IED'd once and shot at the other time I left the wire on a patrol. Shit's real. Reading and collating intel reports is way less terrifying even if your NCOIC is scary as fuck.

If this doesn't make an AAQC, I'll eat my hat, or a convenient packet of crayons.

I suppose it's a testament to how well oiled the American war machine is that it performs so adroitly despite the deficiencies you point to in the rank and file. I suppose there's a reason your NCOs are the envy of the rest of the world, they're earning their keep.

I don't see most of it as deficiencies. For academia, sure, but this ain't academia. It isn't a middle class occupation. These men are as they must be, in all their flawed and tragic glory. If you care about money, this ain't the place for you. If you care about safety and comfort, fuck off. If you care about family and relationships, keep dreaming. You can only serve one master, and it had better be your team.

War is a great criminal enterprise, and the men who can tolerate or even excel at it are not generally wired up for civilian success. The things that are adaptive in one environment are not in another.

Well, at least they're gainfully employed and directing their discontent at socially sanctioned targets, so I'm content to let them be.

While I very much enjoy roleplaying as a soldier, as rigorously as the best milsim games allow, I don't think I'd enjoy real war. The boredom alone would make my ADHD brain crave the sweet release of loitering munitions.

Still, war is cool, we have to get something out of the sheer loss of lives and productivity, until we can solve our problems more reasonably.

As a composite character, I give you the US infantryman. He is nineteen or twenty years old, grew up in a trailer park, has a kid or two with women he's not married to, is married to a woman with kids that are not his. He'll be divorced in a year. His family are construction workers, nurses, truck drivers, retail workers, garbage collectors, heavy machine operators, drug dealers, petty criminals, major criminals. He is dumber than average, hated school, has never read a book not assigned in class. He's been in jail multiple times, and probably will be again, mostly for low level stuff like underage drinking, vandalism and fighting. He binge drinks and smokes when in garrison, dips in the field. He gets in fistfights on a regular but extended basis with members of his own unit, in group conflict with other units, or with civilians on liberty. His politics, if he has any, are somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan. He drives a pickup truck, a Mustang, or a heavily riced-out import and is dead broke most of the time. He is, in short, perilously close to the underclass of our society, and there's a lot of crossover. His life is boredom, fear, pain and the brotherhood of those who live in fear and pain. His values are foreign, rude and frightening to those not of his group.

Your description is fascinating to me because I would have assumed this to be the modern equivalent of one of McNamara's Morons. The self-destructive and perhaps anti-social behavior are the kind of thing I wouldn't expect from a modern soldier, because my understanding was that everyone looked at MMs and concluded that they were better dead than alive.

Or maybe MMs were even more abysmal than this.

Except OP is just making it up. Likely enlisted are more aggresive than the median person, but there's little reason to think they're notably dumber than average.

https://unz.com/isteve/average-iq-of-enlisted-men/

Back during and before 9/11, US enlisted probably had 5-7 IQ points on the average American. Now it's probably about the same.

Or maybe MMs were even more abysmal than this.

They had IQ <85, usually <80.

US Army average white recruit IQ was 105 in early 2000s, they never recruited even blacks <92 IQ.

You’ll note that this is specifically a selected group within the army and that 92(or 95) is in fact dumber than average.

Are you sure army is funneling its dumbest recruits into infantry, and not something like logistics ?

A lot less people die if someone's a little slow driving a truck or prangs it a bit.

No it isn't, what's happening in the Army is presumably what happens in the Marines. Combat Arms self-select. As @JTarrou says, the cowards never started and the weak (or those lacking the "martyr's spark") never finished.

Most vets tell me nearly nobody who volunteers for infantry washes out once they pass the minimum selection qualifications, but that most people who wash out of one MOS or another wind up in a warehouse or as a cook. It’s apparently common to pick an infantry MOS because you can transfer to special forces, and then to not make the cut.

This was certainly my experience. Jobs like stacking boxes and peeling potatoes is where a guy would end up if he hadn't shown the aptitude and/or affinity for anything else.

McNamara's Morons were literal r-words though. He pulled in men who couldn't even throw a grenade, even after hours of instruction on exactly how to do so.

Our current class of infantry is probably the smartest and best educated in human history. Read what Napoleon used to write about his infantry. Military discipline is quite good. Self-destruction and anti-social leanings are pre-requisites. The normal and the well-adjusted rarely choose of their own free will to go to war these days, much less as the guy in front. Much of what I'm describing isn't even individual characteristics, but just part of the culture both in the source populations and the military itself. You can't have an army without a core of violence. To get that, you need violent men. That means a culture of violence, with a set of norms and status carrots and sticks to keep it all more or less under control.

It's a culture very foreign to those who grew up middle class, but very recognizable to those who grew up in harder environments. As I said, rude and frightening to the outsider. For those who climbed Sand Hill and drank the Kool-aid, it is a life unlike any other. All the best and worst times of my life happened there.

I feel like this fits in here somewhere with the talk about our infantry being smart. Nobles use to have the traits you speak of. In Venice it was the elites who did more of the murdering and assaulting. Pulled it from marginal Revolution.

https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/jailbirds-of-a-feather-flock-together

Yep, when your elites do a significant portion of the fighting, they have to practice! And mostly, they'll practice on each other. A violent class is always violent, not just in war.

When elites are part of the actual martial tradition, you can expect duelling, dangerous sports and lots of fighting to be popular among those elites. You can mark the slow decline of the American elite martial tradition to the elimination of that culture, mostly because the many of the most prominent members of it chose the wrong side in the Civil War. Duelling dies out and becomes gunfighting among prole cowboys and criminals.

That's the thing about a warrior elite, you can't stop them fighting. At best you can point them at people you'd rather have them fight.

How many duels you see on college campuses today? What are the values inculcated by our school system, popular child-raising techniques an general culture? Who is it that, if they are sufficiently angered, might shoot it out in the street in the US today? Who carries guns? College professors? Programmers? CEOs?

The blood is still there, the culture is still there, it's just moved down to the lower classes.

The Morons were significantly dumber, borderline incapable of functioning in society, and that's on the higher end.

While the average grunt might be a little blunter than his bayonet, I don't think they're quite there.

Interesting, thanks for the writeup on a world i think most of us would otherwise never be exposed to. Based on the comment about the tip of the spear being very fine indeed, do you think it abnormally so for the post-korean and/or Vietnam war era? And is the implication that you think the US military is particularly impotent at the moment?

Quite the opposite. As fewer and fewer people do the actual fighting, the ones who do get better and better. The source populations that reward such service are becoming a military class. We are also more and more estranged from the officer class, which exerts less and less influence.

Far from impotent, I contend we are seeing the beginning separation of a military caste. And you only need to get a good majority of fifty thousand guys on side to have the monopoly on violence in the US.

He is the world elite of the violent class. The modern equivalent of a knight, loaded down with many years' wages' worth of technology, weapons and armor.

The knights of yore were essentially ye olde officers, no? Leading troops in battle, managing a bunch of squires and militiamen and whatnot, stuff like that...like a cross between Green Berets and modern day officers or something. Granted, I'm a civilian, no military experience but have family that were officers.

Also, an arithmetic error - those 100k guys are not 3/10,000 of a percent, they're more like 3/100 of a percent of the US population of around 300m people.

No, Knights were cavalry. Officers were officers. Knights fought amongst other knights in the cavalry, they charged only with other heavily armored knights.

There was some overlap, in that Knights always had some men directly under them, grooms and squires and servants, many of whom also fought. And the commanders were drawn from the knightly classes.

No, Knights were cavalry. Officers were officers. Knights fought amongst other knights in the cavalry, they charged only with other heavily armored knights.

Yes and no. A knight was first and foremost a petty noble owing service to his suzerain. Serving him as a heavy cavalryman along with additional heavy cavalrymen he had to provide was a common form of service, but not the only one.

If we skip half a millenium to the 18th and 19th centuries we see that officers commanding infantry armies and tall ships are mostly drawn from... again, nobility, with some countries making this an explicit requirement.

What about the time we have skipped? What about mercenary companies and their officers? Well, Prospero Colonna was literally a Colonna, not a lowly knight. John Hawkwood was of dubious origins, but everyone treated him as a knight. Georg von Frundsberg was a knight. Götz von Berlichingen was an Imperial knight. Nicholas of Salm was made an officer first and a count later. Swiss pikemen didn't have noble officers for obvious reasons.

I'm thinking more along the lines of Roman armies, working backwards, which had Senatorial rank commanders, Plebian infantry, and Equestrian cavalry. Equestrians are the forgotten Roman class in general histories of the time, but their distinction was being rich enough to own a horse and equipment, but not full nobility who could lead an army. Equestrian is frequently translated as knight, the concept more or less carries through linguistic drift to the French chevalier to chivalry. The nobility leading infantry of later times are closer to Patricians than to Equestrians.

There is no modern equivalent to a knightly class because soldiers don't provide their own equipment and it's very easy (compared to medieval standards) to train someone to use modern equipment in a period of six months to a year. ((Which is also why the idea of a modern warrior caste is goofball fantasy))

If one entered the Armed forces by being able to provide a privately purchased tank, that would be a true modern knight equivalent.

If one entered the Armed forces by being able to provide a privately purchased tank, that would be a true modern knight equivalent.

Again, I agree and disagree with you here. It's not the ability to buy equipment, it's the duty to serve in exchange for some other privileges that set a warrior caste apart, be they equestrians or knights or Don cossacks. The modal boot is closer to a Gurkha, enlisting because their civilian future looks even bleaker than being shot at by bearded men in dresses.

If anything, Russian CEOs that have to provide a fully manned and outfitted volunteer battalion for the war in Ukraine are closer to the warrior nobility of old in spirit.

The nobility leading infantry of later times are closer to Patricians than to Equestrians.

The patricians didn’t lead infantry, the centurions- who worked their way up through the ranks- did. Patricians were tribunes and generals, whose job was mostly managing the kinds of tasks it takes to keep an army going. Non commissioned officers did the actual battlefield command, except for the very top, and the managing soldiers.

In the old days, yes. In those days, the elites were the ones who did the fighting, or at least some significant portion of it. They had a culture of martial virtue (as they saw it). They trained incessantly from childhood. You don't go to a seminar to learn how to fight, you have to be raised that way. You have to understand at a molecular level the terrible logic of violence. You have to have had practice. You don't want your first fight to be to the death.

This is no longer the case, the elites as a class do not fight, they do not train to fight, they are totally incapable of it. The social model of a fighting elite with real skin in the game has been dead at least since WW1, IMO. There was for a time a sort of rump petty rural elite who could provide a few educated and intelligent officers who wouldn't pass out at the sight of blood or shit themselves during a mortar drop. Those days are mostly over. Violence is abhorred among the educated set, so much so that they are incapable of distinguishing a mean tweet from a bullet. This is not a culture that produces warriors.

What he describes is much more akin to Doppelsöldners than knights. Elite volunteer grunts that get a bit extra pay and are expected to do the most intense fighting.

As the infantry shrinks we are increasingly left with Doppelsöldners and officers (knights).

Key difference today is that the officers do not and cannot fight.

Such men may command soldiers, but they will never command respect.

People are getting hung up on the social status of officers rather than the capabilities.

I guess you're correct that at least American commissioned officers are too far from the fighting to be considered knights, even when squinting hard, but the regular soldiers are too far away from the social, educational and command aspects.

Knights were very specific to their time and don't really have a modern equivalent. In fact, the structure of our armies seen much more similar to the Roman model than the medieval one.

I was speaking about the gear and the training rather than the command aspects, but it should be noted that NCOs provide those aspects in the field. The higher ranking grunts very much command men in combat, and they are the only ones to do so. Everyone else is on the other end of a radio.

I do agree we don't have a feudal system, and that Republican Rome is a better comparison more generally. I'm making a much rougher and more specific comparison.

Beautifully written.

Officers are not soldiers. They are managers of soldiers.

So the stories about the US army being led by its NCO's are true. What do platoon COs do, then? In the armed forces of Russia the platoon CO and the company CO/XO/PO are stuck with their enlisted men. At least the company commander gets his own IFV.

What do platoon COs do, then?

In the US Army they're called Platoon Leaders.

Mostly paperwork, meetings, get mentored by the more senior officers.

Generally they are the platoon's liason with higher command, and will communicate mission orders and objectives to the sergeants that turn it into a detailed operational plan. They are also responsible for bringing things up the chain of command that need attention and advocating for their troops on resource allocation, and generally for administrative requirements like seeing that everyone is qualified and completes required training and producing reports of various kinds.

Ouch. I don't know what's worse, being a glorified desk rat or a frontline officer.

What do platoon COs do, then?

They sign things that need signing and attend meetings with higher, then relay that stupidity to the soldiers. In my experience, which is perhaps not completely generalizable, they never leave the wire.

When did this change? I read Why Men Love War a couple of weeks ago, and the author was a platoon leader that was in Vietnam and saw combat. Other media representations of the war in Vietnam also feature junior officers out there in the jungle, to say nothing of WWII movies and books.

A perusal of casualties from the Iraq War reveals no shortage of junior officers KIA, so I'm not really sure I buy the story that junior officers don't go into the field (it also doesn't comport with the experiences related by friends who were in Army/Marines combat units and were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan).

Different mission types help with this. In Vietnam, entire platoons / companies / battalions would go out on missions and move through significant areas with minimal communications without returning to base. The echelon leader would generally be with them in person for the purpose of maintaining control of the unit, or else they were limited to radios and maps. In the Iraq/Afghan Wars, the Americans didn't do that sort of mission type as much, as the goal was counter-insurgency rather than patrol, monitoring technology meant command and control was often best where the Commander could visualize the troops rather than visually see them. Plus, the unit would regularly return back to a more secure base at the end of their day, which is where the visualization tools would be secured, etc. etc.

It's not that officers didn't go out on missions, it's more that it depended on what type of unit and what type of mission. The types of units where Platoon Leaders are more likely to join in are also the sort of units with more arms and teeth... which are not the sort that insurgents generally prefer to target.

Could be a cultural thing to I was on the Marine side and our JOs were often with us out in the field, at the same time @JTarrou's description of their job still reads as accurate, detailed operational planning was still very much the Detachement SNCO's responsibility.

He did specify he was in a "fairly trash unit" and I highly suspect that the officers not being good leaders had a lot to do with that. Didn't track with my experience either, but maybe I was in better units.

media representations

That's the real answer. Not to say officers have never, ever gotten into the shit, but it's rare. It was rare in Vietnam, and it's much rarer now. But officers are who write the books about combat. They have the education and the inclination. Officers often belong to connected families. And there is a strong class thing here. Grunts are low-class trash, no one wants a story about a guy who is a total stud in combat, gets hounded out of the military for being too good at his job, beats his wife and drinks himself to death. But that's a much more common story than "West Point Lieutenant saves his unit".

But that's a much more common story than "West Point Lieutenant saves his unit".

Or, "staff sergeant doesn't like the new Lt and tricks him into walking straight into a Japanese machine gun". Not written by an officer, though.

This is very different from the British tradition, where subalterns are expected to lead from the front. The British army usually has higher casualty rates for officers then enlisted - see for example this list of Afghanistan KIA where 28/136 were commissioned officers.

Eh, we lost a couple officers too, but it was their own stupidity. The one time two captains decided to go on patrol they wandered off into the city with their interpreter like blondes at a music festival and started chatting up randos on the street. VBIED got em. Couldn't have happened to a nicer couple of dipshits. Might have contributed to none of the other officers trying it, which was a relief to me. Nothing I needed less in my life than a retarded Lieutenant trying to secret-squirrel his way into a medal.

A very interesting read, thank you for posting this here. I think what I'm most interested in that was briefly mentioned but not gone into in detail is the nuances of being an unusually intelligent person within this group and the social dynamics that could result in. Did that make it harder to fit in because you're different from everyone else in some noticeable way? Is there stigma against intelligent people, or is it simply the stigma against perceived cowardice that correlates with intelligence? Did being a strong, competent, aggressive person like everyone else mean they respected you anyway and didn't care about you being smart, or did you have to prove yourself above and beyond what the more typical infantry people did? Or were you able to leverage your intelligence towards making your life even easier than everyone else?

Did that make it harder to fit in because you're different from everyone else in some noticeable way?

Yes, to a point. I was part of the unit, but my social group was smaller than most, my interests foreign. For my part, I was as prickly in person as I am on the internet, so I wasn't exactly winning friends and influencing people.

Is there stigma against intelligent people, or is it simply the stigma against perceived cowardice that correlates with intelligence?

Not as such, I don't think. There's definitely a bit of stigma against intellectualism, but I think that's politically mediated.

Did being a strong, competent, aggressive person like everyone else mean they respected you anyway and didn't care about you being smart, or did you have to prove yourself above and beyond what the more typical infantry people did?

If I'd been strong and aggressive maybe. I might be a bit of a barbarian psychologically, but I'm still a skinny nerd from a pacifist religious family. I had to prove competence. Early on, all my team leaders would saddle me with the heaviest gun for road marches, and make me do cas-evac drills and hand-to-hand with the biggest guys. They had to be sure I could pull my weight, literally. I didn't hold it against them, but fuck was Malo heavy. I held up my end and they got the message pretty quick. Of course, positive attention from the NCOs is almost as bad as negative attention.

For the other joes, I could hold my liquor and I'd fight anyone win or lose, so I was respected if not loved. My sketchy camp cooking gave me the most popularity.

Or were you able to leverage your intelligence towards making your life even easier than everyone else?

A bit, but just for classroom stuff, which isn't difficult anyway. Military curriculum is set up to teach absolutely anyone who can tie their shoelaces and a few who can't. It's not exactly the GRE.

Good edit.

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