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Comment by ok_dad | Hacker News Reader

It's really hard to work with people who don't put effort into their work after being in the military around people who put so much effort into getting things right. I'm not saying time equal effort, either, I'm a clock watcher at work, but at least when I'm working I focus on the goal at hand and I actually try to think about the problems I'll face after I finish some task, so that I'll do it more robustly. The military doesn't have a monopoly on this, I've met several great people who have never served, and there are many ways in which the military sucks (don't get me started). However, it's pretty unrivaled when it comes to people who try hard and perfect their craft, imo.

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You have to give it to the military - they really succeed in indoctrinating their community in their success metrics. Everyone who leaves the military has a very high opinion of their peers' professionalism, dedication, and so forth. From an outside observer's perspective, the results are not as strong - the budgetary, humanitarian, environmental, collateral, and political costs of most of the military engagements of the past 50 years have been quite bad. You never hear the veterans talk about that - it's always about the success metrics that they define for themselves (eg: casualty ratio - "we lost only 2 lives on our end, and they lost XXXXX").

Compare that to the Googlers who constantly complain about their employer, and contrast that to Google's net impact on our society. First of all, it's not a cost center but a massive revenue center, and it paid for endless road constructions and similar projects across California, New York, and all other states that Google operates in. And while we can argue about the political bias in their search results, I believe Google has made information more accessible, and that's fundamentally a good thing.

I imagine it has to do with how these two organizations approach their communities from the very beginning:

- Google: don't be evil

- Military: we have our own law where your jury can consist of as few as just 3 officers, and only 2 of them need to agree to send you to jail. Oh, and you don't get a lawyer until the investigation is finished, including your own deposition. So... still want to download all those incriminating documents and expose someone in the military?

Not saying that we should operate like the military, but it's important to realize that anyone who joins the military is ok with this set of rules. So they are fundamentally not opposed to how the military works to begin with, and it's therefore not surprising that they are largely happy with their internal success metrics.

> Compare that to the Googlers who constantly complain about their employer

The current set of Googlers that are complaining aren't the ones that built the company though. Google's success was built in the late 90's and early 2000s when they really revolutionized internet search and then email. I would argue that since 2010 they have lost this edge - even Bing and DuckDuckGo give better results now for many searches. Many of their interesting projects today are acquisitions.

I'm curious if SV's culture has changed in the last 15 years, and what future impact this may have - at least from the outside it seems like some of the brutal meritocracy attitude that made SV great has died off.

> I'm curious if SV's culture has changed in the last 15 years…

Money became more important. The amount of money to be made in the dot com boom attracted people for whom $ was the primary driver, and that changed the conversation. It changed the kinds of things that are worked on, and changed day to day life.

Pre dotcom Palo Alto wanted to help the homeless, promotes section 8 housing, SRO for the homeless, and accepts a sometimes weird culture. Had a lower medium income than some neighboring towns.

Today’s Palo Alto: “fuck off jack, I’ve got mine.”

There’s no way the next Grateful Dead, Joan Baez, or Grace Slick would emerge from today’s Silicon Valley.

Its probably just bias from only just hearing the success stories and because it was still pretty early in the time of computing, but reading about the stories/companies/projects/etc. from 70s/80s SV fills me with awe and regret that I came too late to be a part of it, whereas nowadays it’s just seems “meh”.

Having not read those stories, what was particularly inspirational about that period of time?

I suspect a lot of it would be the success of garage-based inventors, and the pure-R&D divisions in larger corporations (Xerox-PARC, HP Labs, etc.)

The former is likely harder to achieve now, much like how games development is now an affair involving large teams whereas games developed in the 1980s may have been single-person affairs. The act of making a computer and all related silicon is a much more complex affair, the last CPU design you could probably feasibly keep in your head may be the MC68000 .

The latter too is now still a thing, but much less open, and either rent-seeking through patent, or pure profit with lower tolerance for wild ideas (less risk tolerated for an obvious cost-centre).

Not the parent, but my thought is, and their comment seems to suggest, that the sheer density of exciting, new, and groundbreaking CS work is an absolutely energizing thing to read about.

What, other than maybe Stanford, did the SV of the Baez/Dead/Jefferson Airplane, have in common with the modern SV?

Having been there across the transition I'd say the culture changed enormously.

In particular I watched as a lot of the people I respected the most and identified as having made Google great, drifted away and left the firm. Most obviously all 3 leader/CEOs left. The complaining really started to ramp up after that. Larry/Sergey had ways to put those people back in their place in ways that weren't particularly aggressive but worked well (e.g. just mocking them at TGIF when a stupid question was asked). Culture needs to be renewed and cultivated. What remains now seems like a sort of hollowed out version of the culture that continues along its prior path through inertia, whilst slowly rotting away.

> even Bing and DuckDuckGo give better results now for many searches

You've just made me realise how rarely I find myself needing to add a !g to my searches on DDG these days. That used to be a multiple times a day thing. I can't remember the last time I did it.

Also, Google is no longer "not evil".

> Everyone who leaves the military has a very high opinion of their peers' professionalism, dedication, and so forth.

Are you talking about the US military and do you have some data on that? I see people with no experience of the military imagine a storybook entity (which is a very popular public concept these days), but the US military has significant retention problems, very high rates of suicide and sexual assault (signals of and, for the latter, a cause of a toxic environment), and a lot of morale, discipline, and corruption problems. As a couple of examples of the latter, around a year ago, the head of special operations said that it was their top priority. In ~ the last year, the Navy was having trouble filling higher ranks because so many officers had been kicked out due to corruption scandals (e.g., the 'Fat Leonard' scandal).

The glorification of the military might seem patriotic, but I think it's the opposite: It's a way of not seeing and addressing problems, which weakens defense and leaves the people serving to deal with the problems and suffer the consequences (including the environment, more and longer tours, and possibly their lives). It's like a case of extreme over-confidence in a CEO - a very dangerous flaw.

> Compare that to the Googlers who constantly complain about their employer

People in the military don't gripe?

Yes, you can find some seriously messed up stuff in the military. I was looking at some criminal data and seeing a huge number of attempted murder charges related to one case I thought the data might have been in error. But no, throwing a live grenade into a tent is quite serious.

That said, it’s easy to underestimate just how large the US military is and how many people cycle in and out every year. Just unemployment benefits alone get quite expensive during any economic downturn. Recruit millions over time and even if you reject the most obvious problem cases you will eventually get some seriously unstable people.

>Recruit millions over time and even if you reject the most obvious problem cases you will eventually get some seriously unstable people.

I think that's an erroneous way to look at it.

The fundamental problem is that the military is, and has been, made up of volunteers for a long time.

It's not that with more people you get proportionally more bad apples, it's that when you accept volunteers, you get people self-selecting and that's way worse.

You get the people who are mentally ill and not self-aware and seeking something they can't find anywhere else signing up.

Consider Tim McVeigh, who was taught to kill in Iraq. Allegedly (may be controversial) "schizotypal". That basically means "has some weird ideas, might develop schizophrenia some day, but not actively psychotic". Plenty of people could be like him - unstable in a lot of respects, but after talking to a recruiter go "nah, killing people on the other side of the world doesn't sound fun". So they don't enlist, and that shapes the military.

The only way to fix this is a return to the draft. Of course that's easier said than done. I know little about them, but people always mention Switzerland and Israel as having practically universal military service. So if it seems impossible, yet it must be possible somehow.

Forcing people to work, and only giving them a couple of years to learn the job and do it, has a poor track record. AFAIK, the US and other militaries believe the volunteer method is much more successful.

Imagine drafting in your profession. In many jobs, it takes months of training, then months for people to become truly productive - at the entry level. With the draft, you are mostly employing trainees and entry-level employees, all of them forced to be there.

> when you accept volunteers, you get people self-selecting and that's way worse. / You get the people who are mentally ill and not self-aware and seeking something they can't find anywhere else signing up.

There is some risk of that, but it looks like you are suggesting that it's the predominant motive for volunteering. People do it for many reasons. Almost all jobs in the world are filled by volunteers.

Both Switzerland and Israel have very high levels of belief in the purpose behind their country's military engagement. In Israel because (whatever you think about the causes or history of the wider conflict) most people feel, generally correctly, that the military is critically necessary to protect them from terrorism and other threats. In Switzerland because of the strong commitment to neutrality. The military is only designed to protect the country from external threats and the principle that it wouldn't get involved except in self defence is extremely important.

If the Swiss army was sent to distant countries to protect Swiss economic interest, to enforce a certain system of government, or even in 'self-defense' but against nebulous and theoretical threats, rather than the imminent risk of a direct attack, Swiss people would widely refuse to serve.

Similarly in America. If, for example, Canada carried out an aggressive land invasion of the United States, a very large number of people would be willing to serve, and accept a draft as well as poor conditions, low pay etc.

On the other hand, if there was a draft for young people to participate in controversial US overseas operations like Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, there would be widespread resistance. Many people would evade the draft either illegally (going to prison, disappearing, moving abroad) or legally (using college exemptions, National Guard, bone spurs, etc). Some people in the military would refuse to follow orders, pursue criminal or radical political activity (more than they already do), sabotage or go AWOL.

This was attempted with the Vietnam war. It wasn't stopped despite its success. It was stopped because it didn't work and threatened to destroy the entire fabric of US military forces.

I'm not sure whether you are disagreeing with anything I wrote.

>It wasn't stopped despite its success. It was stopped because it didn't work and threatened to destroy the entire fabric of US military forces.

Whether something "works" depends on what you define its purpose to be.

Saying the draft "didn't work" is exactly where I think we went wrong.

"Threatening to destroy the entire fabric of US military forces" (or of society in general) constitutes "working" if it prevents the continuation of that sort of war and in the long run, preserves a country that is as we would like it to be.

It was the war that didn't work.

It was also done in WWII and WWI, at much greater scale and to great success, as well as the Gulf War and many smaller conflicts. The UK did it for a long time before the US.

You are welcome to your beliefs about international involvement, but often people see it otherwise.

It doesn't matter what my beliefs are. If a significant minority of people who are going to be drafted believe that the war is unjust or unnecessary or that they should not be the ones to fight it, the effects which I described will happen. It is clear that for the engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan this was the case.

There was no draft for the Gulf War. The United States entered WW2 after an unprovoked act of aggression against US territory.

I'm not sure which 'smaller conflicts' you are referring to because conscription has only been used in the Korean war, the American Civil War and the American Revolutionary War, other than the 3 already mentioned.

You are technically correct about WW1. The situation has changed in the more than 100 years since that conflict.

>The United States entered WW2 after an unprovoked act of aggression against US territory

I think this common statement may be a bit misleading whether or not strictly accurate.

From what I've read, the Flying Tigers were authorized by Roosevelt, and the only reason they failed to engage in combat with Japan until after Pearl Harbor was because of unforeseen delays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Tigers

Self selecting populations can be very different from the overall norms when your talking 0.001% of the population. However, when your talking 5+% of the population you can only stray so far from those norms.

Recruit say the smartest 5% of the population and their median IQ is ~130. The tallest 5% and sure you get everyone in the NBA, but also the more normal person at 6’ 1”. Considering in the real world you can’t select the most extreme in every category and the US military is more or less forced to be fairly average compared to the US population simply because they want multiple things. Select for decent health, decent intelligence, and decent physical capacity and you can only focus so much on mental health.

>However, when your talking 5+% of the population you can only stray so far from those norms

I would expect the top (or bottom) 5% of the population in any dimension to be far from the norm.

>Select for decent health, decent intelligence, and decent physical capacity and you can only focus so much on mental health

I think these are wishful thinking, not what is actually selected for. As long as there's no draft, the military does not get to select people. Someone takes the ASVAB, and decides against going further, there's nothing that can be done. People select themselves. The minimum standards weren't that high when I last talked to a recruiter and over the years I've read a lot of articles that suggest they've gotten lower.

The military, like a lot of difficult jobs (police officer, teacher, etc.) doesn't pay proportionally.

So recruits are selected for willingness to put up with that. From an abstract economic perspective, someone who accepts lower than market pay must receive some other form of non-monetary compensation that explains it. It would be nice to attribute it always and only to patriotism, but there are other possibilities, conscious or unconscious, just like a devotion to justice and protecting people is one particular reason for becoming a police officer.

In letting people select themselves for a difficult and low paid job, you will get people who are not near average because they highly value access to things that cannot be found anywhere else, for any amount of money. And they will be concentrated together, changing the character of an organization.

Modern Western culture holds individual freedom, social mobility, and self-direction in such esteem I think we may have a blind spot with regard to how random selection and assignment of people to jobs can sometimes produce better results.

With perfect filtering, they can be two standard deviations from the norm which is quite noticeable, but that’s not what’s going on.

The military rejects ~23% of applicants due to educational issues. One of the results of this is members of the military are above the average intelligence in the US. But they also reject people with excessive criminal history, significant physical disability, or even extreme weight. Though it’s a sliding scale based on rates of recruitment.

https://www.factcheck.org/2016/02/carson-botches-military-el...

>someone who accepts lower than market pay

This is putting a civilian-centric filter on the problem. Many, many people chose the military for reasons other than pay. If it were strictly for pay, almost nobody would choose the “harder” military occupations like Marines, or Army infantry, or Navy SEALs etc. Yet those often get more applicants than they have slots.

As for your statistical claim, we’re not really wired to think well about stats so we get erroneous intuitions. To be in the 95th percentile, you’re away from the norm but not as much as you may think, which is the GP’s point. A quick Google search shows 95th percentile for height is 6’2”…it’s tall but not so tall as to actually catch my attention. 95th percentile in IQ is 125, in pay is $248k, in male weight is 246 lbs. Non-normative, sure, but none so far away as to leave someone awestruck

>Many, many people chose the military for reasons other than pay.

Slow down, that's exactly what I said.

I work for (a) government, and of course I didn't choose to because it paid more than anything else. And I didn't decide not to join the Navy because it paid too little.

I’m having a hard time following your point. Are you claiming those who go into the military are disproportionately doing so for negative incentives? If so, do you apply the same logic to your coworkers in government?

I'm saying that people who accept less pay do it because they consider other factors that compensate. Those factors could be anything, and are subjective in the sense they vary for individuals. It's very common to suggest that public servants are motivated by something other than to selflessly serve the public. For example, gold plated health insurance.

What I'm claiming as a general principle is that some people have a huge advantage in opportunity cost for a certain job, and organizations can be seriously affected by concentrating those people together. And we see this all over the place.

Consider the Abu Ghraib scandal. It's not that joining the military entails that sort of thing, or that it's rightly part of the job, but if someone has an affinity for abusing prisoners, then most jobs do not offer the same opportunity. Theoretically, decent people who value doing good should be attracted to jobs that are important and underpaid, but in practice, bad people who value side benefits to an extreme degree may dominate the market of people who will take the job.

> The only way to fix this is a return to the draft.

Or you know, by not going to the other side of the world to kill people.

It's demonstrably difficult to build political opposition to such wars when most peoples' lives aren't on the line.

When a person has terminal cancer of some kinds, fentanyl and even morphine can't fully stop the pain. So there is a standard surgical procedure where they go in and cut a primary nerve.

That is in effect what was done in eliminating the draft. It did away with the feedback loop, not the problem.

>it's that when you accept volunteers, you get people self-selecting and that's way worse.

I’m not sure this is true. There’s a reason commanders generally oppose the draft; they know volunteers tend to be better service members than draftees. Imagine if your civilian job was full of people who were conscripted rather than chose that field (even if they chose it for the wrong reasons). I can imagine the amount of disciplinary problems would rise dramatically. I don’t know the statistics, but draft-era service members seemed to have serious problems from drug abuse to fratricide too.

>Imagine if your civilian job was full of people who were conscripted rather than chose that field

Well, consider juries. While they don't end up being completely random, still, there seems to be a recognition that nobody or no organization should be unilaterally trying to select the best. Or taking volunteers.

I think most people agree that juries are very important.

>draft-era service members seemed to have serious problems from drug abuse to fratricide too

Yes, I just think the problems should have been attributed to the war being fought and not the fact of the draft. Maybe the corruption of the draft; I'm not old enough to have a sense of what it was like during Vietnam, but obviously it's a cliche how people were able to avoid it.

Which reminds me of juries again - it used to be, in my state, there were tons of exemptions for jury duty, and that really biased the pool. There were reforms to eliminate most of the exemptions.

I don’t know that juries are a paragon of a great system. The joke is juries select for those who are too dumb to get out of jury duty. (Yes, I know many people do so out of civic duty, but that’s to the same point of military service)

I think you underestimate the effect of a draft on unit morale. Units can become more undisciplined because commanders have limited recourse for transgressions and people dont want to be there in the first place. Imagine if you and your coworkers were uprooted to perform some difficult, manual, potentially life threatening task. Not by choice, but by conscription; what do you think organizational morale (and productivity) would be like? I’d much rather be with people who chose that path.

>I just think the problems should have been attributed to the war being fought and not the fact of the draft.

And yet you recognize the premium Western cultures put on personal agency. The irony of your above statement is that in a “popular and just” war (if such a thing exists), there’s no need for a draft because ranks will be filled with volunteers. If you’re old enough, you probably remember the long lines at recruiting centers on Sept. 12, 2001.

>there’s no need for a draft because ranks will be filled with volunteers

This reflects the fact that the US military has learned how to carry on a substantial conflict without large numbers of casualties.

That sounds like a great achievement. But I think it's the problem.

There shouldn't be wars that can be run by a relatively small number of volunteers. That is the problem.

WWII and the US Civil War had drafts.

I wish I could find some cartoons that I remember from fairly soon after 9/11, about the dread people had that we were headed straight to hell in the military response.

I remember them as profoundly different from what you might see today with a left-wing slant, exactly because of the general sense of unity and nonpartisan feeling. Foreseeing the obvious subsequent events meant being against seemingly everyone and not just the red or blue tribe.

My recollection (of what I read more recently) is that only one congressperson voted against war in Iraq.

> Recruit millions over time and even if you reject the most obvious problem cases you will eventually get some seriously unstable people.

While it's impossible to hire millions of excellent performers, I think that focuses too much on the people and not on the organization. The institutions themselves have real problems - like other large institutions, but these are problems the citizens are responsible for addressing.

>"Recruit millions over time and even if you reject the most obvious problem cases you will eventually get some seriously unstable people."

So you think they had specifically selected bunch of unstable to work in Abu Ghraib?

Those people were abusive, not unstable. It had been going on and would have continued. North Korea is stable. Dennis Rader was stable.

> People in the military don't gripe?

I had this platoon leader who was wondering about how much I used to gripe about everything and I told him when joes stop complaining is when you have to worry because they’re probably plotting your death or something.

>Everyone who leaves the military has a very high opinion of their peers' professionalism, dedication, and so forth.

This sounds very biased. The VA is constantly complained about as is their benefits payments. The MRAs suck, they can’t speak about some secret stuff, none of this information is unusual or buried, it sounds like you have a very biased viewpoint, maybe from not getting to know any military.

>From an outside observer's perspective, the results are not as strong - the budgetary, humanitarian, environmental, collateral, and political costs of most of the military engagements of the past 50 years have been quite bad.

Vietnam, the fuck up in Iraq, and suicides are well known to be bad to everyone including the military, the default response to anyone who served is “thank you for your service”. Many see it as a job. I know a very friendly female marine (they complained about her kindness and said it wasn’t militant -and reflected badly on their perceptions), she was well decorated, and complained about sexism even though she was a superior to these men. Get to know some military people, your biased opinion will change.

You're conflating the military with their civilian leadership. Civilians decide what the military is going to do; the military gets the job done. If you have a problem with the direction and costs of the military, blame the civilians in charge.

See my related response to refurb's comment.

This is a bizarre take. The military doesn’t decide where to invade, our government does. And the militaries goals are well, war-focused?

It is impressive when a military can ship 100,000 soldiers and all the necessary equipment half way around the world in a month.

> The military doesn’t decide where to invade, our government does.

I would agree with this statement when it comes to defensive campaigns. But in the case of offensive campaigns, the military very much gives the government an idea of what the plan looks like, including the budget, timeline, casualties, chances of success, etc. It's worth noting here that the military very much has a vested interest in saying yes to military action, because that's good for job security. But when it turns out that you cannot get in and out of a country in the forecasted amount of time, and when that country then goes back to its former political landscape despite all of our best efforts, that failure cannot land entirely at the government's feet.

> And the militaries goals are well, war-focused?

They are, apparently, in the US. I learned that when the CEO of Flexport suggested that we use the military to temporarily unblock the supply chain crisis by leveraging our military's logistics capabilities, which resulted in at least one person leaving a dismissive comment here on HN. I realize that this might have been an isolated view, but I doubt it. In other countries, it's very much expected that the military rolls up their sleeves whenever their capabilities can be generally beneficial to their communities, regardless if it's military-related or not. It's a resource we pay for, so why not share the excess capacity if it's not detrimental to our defensive readiness? I would argue that saving a few million jobs in the US is worth not being able to fulfill the two-war doctrine for a few months.

> It is impressive when a military can ship 100,000 soldiers and all the necessary equipment half way around the world in a month.

This once again sounds like an internal KPI that the US military can without doubt be very proud of. An external observer may ask how much such an effort would cost, and how well we compare on a per soldier basis with someone like China or Russia. Who can do it for less money? Perhaps the US is still ahead, but I genuinely don't know. Does money matter when it comes to readiness? Well, when it comes to defense, probably not. But if we're talking about invading a foreign country, I think the economics very much start to be a part of the overall equation.

A good example to bring up here would be the cost of the F-35 program. Is it an impressive aircraft? You bet. Are the capabilities of that aircraft in line with its cost? My gut tells me no, and I think a lot of people would agree. Do I have any hope that this was an isolated instance, and that the next-gen aircraft program will be done more cost-efficiently? Not really.

For the record, I am not anti-military at all. I just want to point at behaviors that seem a bit out of touch, and which if rectified would position us to have all the military capabilities we need at the least necessary cost.

>it's very much expected that the military rolls up their sleeves whenever their capabilities can be generally beneficial to their communities, regardless if it's military-related or not.

I’m not sure you’re aware of the full scope of what the U.S. military does. The Marines I know spent more time on humanitarian missions than combat ones. The Army Corps of Engineers regularly provides relief efforts during natural disasters, manages watersheds and dams, etc. It’s not too say there’s no truth to your claims but the US military is huge and with any operation that large it’s easy to cherry pick examples to make cases for either side.

The US military is pretty much a transit agency. Beholden to external forces and external corruption. Having to spend skilled labor making plans that everyone knows will never see the light of day, simply because these were asked for by someone who holds the power to ask for them. Having to abide by laws and policy that any expert in the field would agree don't make any sense.

So, basically, you are painting the US military as the hapless victim of incompetent and unskilled external forces, bearing absolutely no responsibility for any of it’s failures.

That seems like blind and dichotomic wishful thinking.

The problem is more one of impersonal, emergent, bureaucratic forces. Any particular officer, defense contractor, politician, pentagon analysist, etc ... might want to change how the system as a whole runs. But they are other groups (who might even agree with the overall goal) that will oppose any particular change that impacts their own political/bureaucratic/social power or influence. The result is an institutional inertia where only changes that fit into certain well-tread paths can succeed. Solving this collective-action problem is one of the major challenges of our era in many different verticals.

This relates to one of Hemingway's famous lines, "Gradually, then suddenly." When this a mismatch between the collective desires of a large group and their current circumstance, when suddenly there is some sort meaningful change (a disaster, a drastic court-case, assignation, etc ...) all of sudden rapid change can ensue.

I'd be really interested to know what could change the US Military-Industrial Complex. Our history of political changes and wars of the past hundred years seems to have been fluctuation on a common trajectory. It seems like we need something drastic, but the consequences of whatever is more drastic, seem large enough that they could be far worse than the current status quo. But there has to be something, I'm not trying to fatalistic here.

Yes, because when you read about the great failures of the U.S. military for the last 100 years, it usually boils down to political reasons rather than a failure of military planning. For example, the U.S. military understood vietnam and afganistan to be unwinnable years before politicians were willing to admit as much in front of the American public. The stunts in central america were all dictated by politicians for political reasons as well, mostly in effort to protect American corporate interests who had their assets seized by communist governments.

> But in the case of offensive campaigns, the military very much gives the government an idea of what the plan looks like, including the budget, timeline, casualties, chances of success, etc

You're correct that the military comes up with the plans. In some scenarios they may come up with multiple plans. There may also be other parts of the government, such as the state department, coming up with alternative plans. Choosing which plan to go with and what budget to give it is the responsibility of civilian leadership.

> It's worth noting here that the military very much has a vested interest in saying yes to military action, because that's good for job security.

Whose job security is it good for? The private who just joined isn't involved in these conversations. The people who are in these conversation are well established and in the later parts of their careers so they don't need to worry so much about job security.

> But when it turns out that you cannot get in and out of a country in the forecasted amount of time, and when that country then goes back to its former political landscape despite all of our best efforts, that failure cannot land entirely at the government's feet.

Why not? What happened to "the buck stops here"?

> This once again sounds like an internal KPI that the US military can without doubt be very proud of. An external observer may ask how much such an effort would cost, and how well we compare on a per soldier basis with someone like China or Russia

Sounds like the sort of things people in relevant committees in congress would probably ask questions about. If they don't like the answers they could probably even make some headway in getting that changed.

> A good example to bring up here would be the cost of the F-35 program. Is it an impressive aircraft? You bet. Are the capabilities of that aircraft in line with its cost? My gut tells me no, and I think a lot of people would agree. Do I have any hope that this was an isolated instance, and that the next-gen aircraft program will be done more cost-efficiently? Not really.

These kind of purchases are very political. How spread out is the manufacturing for this jet? How many different congressional districts in the US have at least one part being made there? Here are a couple articles about the government buying military equipment the military doesn't need or want [0][1].

[0] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/12/18/congress-agai... [1] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tell...

> From an outside observer's perspective, the results are not as strong - the budgetary, humanitarian, environmental, collateral, and political costs of most of the military engagements of the past 50 years have been quite bad.

For the most part, all of those issues fall squarely upon the leadership. Military personell have a duty to fufil lawful orders, and you can't simply resign and take a different job if given a lawful order you don't think is a good thing for all of those reasons.

In contrast, when working for an employer, you have at least some ability to refuse to do things you don't think are a good idea. Worst case, you're fired or resign and need to find other work. But you're very unlikely to be court martialed and imprisoned. Or even sued.

As long as their internal success metrics align with civilian interest, I am ok with that. But some can't integrate back especially when jobs require creativity, extensive domain knowledge and experience, and multi-tasking with multi-roles. It is that later that most veterans can't function well. In their previous life, things are predefined and roles are limited to just 1 or 2. Civilians have to juggle a lot and has no clear cut directions how things work out. Employers also won't tolerate your disabilities if that can be taken over by any other normal persons.

> But some can't integrate back ...

It's more than a few; it's a widespread problem. It's always a challenge for people from the military to not only adjust to civilian life, but to build up the networks of contacts, etc. that deliver us jobs and many other resources.

As a practical matter, what I've seen in SV companies, is that there are networks from folks that new each other in the service. Once one gets a role in a company, many other skilled veterans are sure to follow. The same thing happens to group from other prior companies that get hired in a waves, often following a particular senior leader brought in for a new initiative, or a new startup. I guess this doesn't scale to veterans as a whole, but it does show how even a little support can go a long way.

This applies to many excluded groups. People hire from networks; if you don't make any effort, your network will be the status quo, which last from generation to generation. With a little effort, you can expand your network to excluded groups. From even a purely self-interested perspective, access to more talent and a more diverse set of ideas and experiences is never a bad thing, and being exluded means there is more undiscovered talent.

One simple method is to tell the recruiter that you want at least N serious candidates from excluded groups for each job. This causes the recruiter to also expand their network.

Most military people I've met were from all over the political spectrum. A lot of people I knew just joined to get free tuition in college. They don't have fun when they have to do their regular drill and work is generally stressful and not exciting. They have drug test timing down to a science. That's the sort of environment that apparently breeds real camaraderie, at least.

> costs of most of the military engagements

that's not on the personnel inside the military to decide what war to wage, but on the politicians and civilians.

The military is a tool - how well the tool works is a good metric to have. Whether the tool is used for good or evil, or whatever purpose the owner of the tool deems, is not on the tool itself to measure.

See my related response to refurb's comment.

The current Googlers complain when the morning shake is not warm enough to their liking. Not to mention too many Googlers (and other tech companies employees, esp in the US) forget that they are getting paid to build products and no one cares about their political ideology.

There are upsides and downsides to everything. I did say "don't get me started" on that topic, because while I have lots of good things to say about the personnel in the military, you'll note I didn't say anything about the military in general.

> Not saying that we should operate like the military, but it's important to realize that anyone who joins the military is ok with this set of rules.

I think there are probably a fair number of everyday people who enlist without thinking about such things as what they would do if they needed to expose a war crime to the media or how their due process protections would compare to civilian life.

Now, they would probably know and be okay with getting treated like dirt in boot camp, having restrictions about where to live, where they can go in their free time, etc. But probably not as much about the more philosophical institutional beliefs about authority, ethics, what to optimize for, etc.

The only construction project Google ever did in my city was use ancient (loud as hell) equipment to rip these big grooves down mile after mile of perfectly good neighborhood streets in all of our poor communities to cheaply install their “fiber internet” experiment that they abandoned 1 year later. And our streets are still covered with the rubber crap they filled the grooves with. More of it comes up every time it rains. It gets all over our pets and everything. I hate Google so much.

Surely, someone did at some point do some work on the roads in your neighborhood outside of the example you're bringing up? Well, that's taxpayer money, and Google is a big taxpayer.

If you were going to complain about wasteful spending and failing projects in the DoD, I would respect your reasoning more. Instead, when it got to "humanitarian this, environmental that" you turned into Charlie Brown's teacher.

I don't know why anything "humanitarian" should be taken with a grain of salt. You surely are not going to argue that something like the Syrian humanitarian crisis is comparable with a cartoon character?

On the environmental side, I am not surprised to see people raising eyebrows, because the US military's impact there is vastly underreported. A lot of effort went into exempting the US military from the Kyoto Protocol - and that's for a good reason, since the US military alone emits more CO2 than many industrialized nations. So if you don't believe in global warming, there's nothing I can do to reason with you. But if you do, you might realize that the environmental impact alone might be more damaging than some of the other items I mentioned.

Think of it this way - if the US military cleaned up its act, we could remove the emission control devices from all US cars and still come out on top.

US veterans aren't universally indoctrinated like that, there are exceptions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mykWTaLsRbw

>it's important to realize that anyone who joins the military is ok with this set of rules.

There's a pile and a half of people who only join the military for a much higher payout of benefits for essentially unskilled work, or only so the military will pay to educate them into skilled work certification, or only because they made some mistakes and it's that or a felony charge (typically with jail time), and they're all typically just hoping to fly under the radar of such things until they get out with what they want going in rather than genuinely approving of the military doing to them the sorts of things the military does.

Obviously not all, but many of these also come out with majorly reoriented priorities. We can pass value judgements on the goodness of the imposed priorities all we want, but they're pretty irrelevant to and just distract from the phenomenon itself: "Indoctrination" is absolutely the correct word to use, so much we need very little, if any, additional description. The US military, and pretty much every military under the sun, uses an intense bout of classical stress conditioning to induce the sort of immediate, unquestioning dedication you've needed for hundreds of years in an effective infantry formation to teach boot camp recruits how to be in the mindset of just efficiently and stoicly doing their job as the brass designed you, the very small cog in the very large machine of a superpower-scale techno-mechanized combined arms war machine, to do it. In software, experimentation is king everywhere with a healthy outlook, because wastes of time give just finite losses of money while breakout successes are comparatively infinite in money gains, so most risks are worth it until they're clearly working or not working. In the military, when the rubber hits the road, other people are depending on you to do your job just as everyone expects it to go so they can integrate you into their job, which includes shooting and getting shot at somewhere down the net. Flying by the seat of your pants in such an environment could possibly get your fellows killed when things don't pan out and you fail to deliver, so the simple stations the vast majority of military members fill just don't really tolerate independent thought without going up several ranks of approval. The type of risk just isn't seen as acceptable in that context regardless of why you're taking it, even if it's specifically for the military's long-term interest. The philosophy is that the juice is never worth the squeeze in combat, and since we're a combat force on the label we'll spread that philosophy of "just do what the man with the fancier patch says" to every desk worker and wrench turner as well as trigger puller. And we'll spread it through the most irresistible teaching method we're still allowed to.

Sorry for that ramble, but it's really important to not deemphasize the absolute psychological impact classical conditioning in such an overwhelming social context can have. There's a reason they march you for miles at first when they almost don't care how fat you get once you've got an actual job. There's a reason Marine boot camp intentionally prevents you from sleeping just about whenever possible the first few days you show up while knowing resistance to sleep is impossible to train. There's a reason hazing underperformers is just about as old as history itself. It's because you can make anyone do anything if you just beat them enough, if you just stress them more than they've experienced before. Stress basically compels obedience, and obedience is very habit forming. Is there some selection bias like you describe in play today? Absolutely, but I don't think anyone familiar enough with the psychological phenomenon I'm not doing a great job describing would think much would change if it wasn't around. We've all read about Stockholm/Lima syndrome after all, where people with neutral or reverse sympathies fall just as easily, and it's essentially the same phenomenon. Enough stress turns everyone, even independent thinking people or bullheaded rebellious people, into receptive sponges.

> You have to give it to the military - they really succeed in indoctrinating their community in their success metrics. Everyone who leaves the military has a very high opinion of their peers' professionalism, dedication, and so forth.

Same in every bureaucracy.

I served in the Israeli military, like every 18 year old male.

In ours, there are many places where people don't care.

A lot depends on the role one plays. some are very meaningful. In some you carry a direct and deep responsibility(for your team mates lives, for the people you protect). In some places, you'll get punished severely if you make a mistake, So you really try not to. So you try to do a good job.

In others ? Not so much. So you do the bare minimum and skate by. Many people are like that. It's a general "recommendation" for the new soldier.

Now compare that to civilian life - in most jobs you're just a cog, you get paid the minimum your employer can manage, and most of the benefit of doing a better job is making the boss richer. So why give a fuck ?

You are always a cog in the wheel, in a miltary the boss in addition making money can also kill you for a useless goal, the $2 trillion and thousands killed and injured over 20 years in afganistan is a recent example .

Being motivated about a job whether miltary /civilian should be about what you can do not if its corrupt /inefficient /incompetent almost any large institutuion usually is

// Being motivated about a job whether miltary /civilian should be about what you can do

Usually why people care about that is in-job competition and status hierarchies and ego.

But the role of those psychological/biological mechanisms(for ex. the serotonin system), in apes, for example, is to drive you to compete on mates and food. To get access to real, valuable resources.

Modern organizations are using those mechanisms to motivate you, without giving you any access to real resources. Another form of exploitation.

Some chose not to play that game.

I totally don’t see it this way — the machine that we’re all cogs in does in fact give you access to recourses. Being the best burger flipper gives you job security.

Today we have access to insane resources that our early humans couldn’t have even dreamt about, even for the relatively poor people today.

The machine provides a massive supply chain of a variety of food and medicine that was unheard of for ~all of human history. Flipping burgers for an hour makes you ~$10, with which you can buy food for two people for a whole day (or more). That’s less work for more reward than ever before in history.

So the reward system does work — you’re still competing, and the rewards are massive, relative to apes and early humans.

Being the best burger flipper gives you zero job security because your boss will believe they can’t afford you if you suddenly realize how much you are worth. They may preemptively let you go, if they’re a good boss that wants to see you grow.

There’s no such thing as job security without a form of a contract.

Also, you should look up the minimum wage in the 60’s and 70’s and adjust it for inflation. They were getting paid $40USD+ per hour in today’s dollars. So, no $10 is not a lot.

I don't care about the machine. It will work just the same without my participation(in most roles).

// Being the best burger flipper gives you job security.

Burger flippers earn close to the minimum wage. They always have decent job security, it's easy to find a similar job(not necessarily as a burger flipper).

"That’s less work for more reward than ever before in history"

This is absolutely, myopic, demonstrably wrong at so many levels, from the fact that minimum wage has been stagnant for decades to eising cost of living

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/24/this-char...

It seems to me that your comment is the myopic one. GP was talking about long time scales. The reason the industrial revolution was so amazing was the level of efficiency it brought with it. There is no arguing that we get more for less work than any time previous to that. Whether that's worth the cost of everyone being a cog in the industrial machine is however a valid question.

People actually get promoted in the military, though

This is a fantastic comment. Yes, in many tech companies it seems like career growth is dead unless you know someone.

It is just as true in the military as well, most well defined organizations are pyramid in their hierarchy, career growth almost by definition is going to stagnate higher you go up the ladder and depend on factors that may or may not be in your control.

Federal employees move up the pay scale at regular intervals. No other career promises that.

> useless goal

Is bringing peace, civil rights, and good governance to a corrupt, poor, and violent country useless? (Obviously, we ended up failing in large part.)

Well, considering America's recent military endeavors have done the opposite, you have to wonder how many times you can hear that until you conclude it was always a bald-faced lie to mask our economic interests.

Dropping bombs on a country rarely makes it less prone to conflict unless you intend to occupy it, it just gives more recruiting material to the "violent" radicals.

> to mask our economic interests

If "our" means the US and it's people as a collective, then it really seems clear that it wasn't in our collective economic interests either. If our means military contractors, then yes they made out very well.

It was in interests of the oil companies as well, and by extension the interests of the leaders of the country who are effectively on their payroll.

But yes, "our" in this case was perhaps a poor choice of words to refer to the interests of, for lack of a better term, the ruling class, whose interests do not align with the vast majority of the country.

the ghani administration was nothing more than an american imperialist puppet government, forcing american "ideals" (see: consumerism and globalism) on a people who want nothing to do with it.

“God has promised us victory, and Bush has promised us defeat. We’ll see which promise is more truthful,”

- Mullah Omar.

Mostly: the concept of a nation.

Afghanistan isn't a nation. And you can't externally force people to believe they're part of a nation.

Either they do, in which case they're willing to accept sacrifices for the greater good of their fellow citizens, or they aren't.

Agree that "useless" was a bit harsh. Perhaps "unachievable"?

It's a bit like dieting. You take someone who has been chubby their entire life, put them through a bootcamp, and then look at their weight 5 years later. The stats are not looking good in those cases, and I think they largely reflect our efforts in up-leveling the political landscape in historically corrupt countries.

I am not saying that we shouldn't keep trying. But I think we should internalize that the chances of success are slim, and then make that a part of our upfront decisioning process on budget, casualties, political cost, etc.

Yeah violating self-determination of a country without also permanently occupying it can be seen as useless.

Interesting. Based on your experience, would you say it's a consequence of filling the ranks with draftees?

Despite the rose-colored (gold-colored) glasses in some comments, I'm sure every military, and every other large organization, has the same things. We are dealing with millions of human beings. I've never worked with even 10 that were all so highly motivated.

> after being in the military around people who put so much effort into getting things right

I met some really bright, hard working people when I was in the military. But I met a huge number of slackers doing the absolute minimum required to skate by. I don't think the military has any particular monopoly on driven individuals.

It's pretty common to join for tuition too.

I didn't serve myself but I ran a small consultancy for a few years and one of the primary predictive factors whether or not a new hire would do well was former military experience. I don't attribute it to core personality issues or intelligence or anything like that, I think it's just training and experience that was consistent with the expectations for the type of work we did (small infosec firm).

I remember the sales director at a company I worked for telling me he liked to hire ex-military people because they were compliant. If he told them to cold call 100 people then they would do exactly that.

My experience in hiring ex enlisted folks is 100% great.

With officers…less than that. They are used to more infrastructure than a startup can or wants to provide.

I was an officer (personally, I think I was decent, but who knows), I can agree on that to a point: former enlisted folks who are technical experts are by far above most former officers, and I have to say one of the reasons I left was because the officer corp is basically rotten these days with the same crappy, entitled managers that you see in the civilian world. However, the good officers were and are a cut above the rest. The problem is adverse selection by the shitty officers who thrive in that crap environment and wouldn't last a week as a civilian manager because they have no carrot, just sticks.

Anyways, this is kind of off topic, so I'll take my leave.

I had a friend who was involved in the early US Air Force cyberwarfare stuff. He had a story of a (much more) senior officer visiting, seeing the people, who were also officers and had CS MSs and PhDs, doing their work, and throwing a fit. Air Force officers, you see, don't do work; they manage people who do work. Doing things was a job for the enlisted.

This is definitely the institutional culture within the US Army. Technical work is seen as being beneath an officer. I'm an officer in a specialized IT career field (BA and MS in CS, starting a PhD program next year) and we constantly struggle against this culture. The Army wants us to have graduate degrees in engineering or scientific disciplines so that we can almost exclusively fill management positions overseeing enlisted troops, warrant officers, contractors, and low-level federal civilians with high school diplomas doing the technical work.

Those of us who get hands-on to be in touch with reality, add value, and sharpen our skillset do so at risk to our careers. We are only rewarded for what we do as leaders, especially expanding our scope of responsibility (mission, people, budget, etc.).

When I was an officer in the aviation branch, it was the same problem. The rewards for briefing PowerPoint slides were greater than the rewards for competently flying helicopters.

> The Army wants us to have graduate degrees in engineering or scientific disciplines so that we can almost exclusively fill management positions

The former AF/SF CSO observed that the lack of technical expertise in commanding officers is a problem. [0]

> Please stop putting a Major or Lt Col. (despite their devotion, exceptional attitude, and culture) in charge of ICAM, Zero Trust or Cloud for 1 to 4 million users when they have no previous experience in that field – we are setting up critical infrastructure to fail. [...] They do not know what to execute on or what to prioritize which leads to endless risk reduction efforts and diluted focus. IT is a highly skilled and trained job; Staff it as such.

But 100% agreed with you that top-loading degrees isn't a solution either.

It feels like the military's historical solution to a lot of problems (forced, regular duty station rotation, with assumed interchangeability based on rank) isn't suited to the types of technical project it's now being asked to execute quickly and successfully.

There's a huge amount of good that comes from rotating people, but it feels like there's a new local optima that needs to be found.

A starter might be to make technical position rotations more pull / resume / experienced -based, and less solely on billet rank. I.e. Does a given position want you? Or who of a stack of applicants do they want most, for the job they're currently executing?

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/time-say-goodbye-nicolas-m-ch...

>>>It feels like the military's historical solution to a lot of problems (forced, regular duty station rotation, with assumed interchangeability based on rank) isn't suited to the types of technical project it's now being asked to execute quickly and successfully.

This is my experience as well. We have combat-arms guys who would probably be exceptional infantry regiment commanders or fighter squadron commanders, brought into a combined-arms, high-level headquarters where they are expected to weigh in on things like EM signature reduction, and issues with how IT infrastructure impacts their ability to execute Command & Control....and they don't even know what most of the relevant terminology means. By the time they learn enough via OJT they PCS to another duty station.

I'm so sick of field-grade officers saying "I dunno, I'm just a dumb grunt." Then drop papers and resign your commission! Stop hiding behind your ignorance or faux-modesty. Educate yourself to confidently fight fifth-generation warfare, or go away.

I agree with most of what you wrote, but I will say that "I'm just a dumb grunt" is better than senior leaders who just spew buzzwords like "Big Data, AI, Cloud, 5G, Zero Trust, etc." as if they know what they are talking about, and convincing everyone above them that they are technical wizards.

Yeah, when I read a white paper for the next Combat Operations Center and saw they wanted to "run AI applications on a local server at the tactical edge" I knew the document wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. You can tell some O-6 or GS-15 who read a Popular Science article insisted on that being in there.

Then I ask people who the fuck is gonna tune the models when the "AI app" spits out garbage at a battalion CP? Are we gonna train Marines on linear algebra, tensors, and adversarial neural networks? Or even bother to run them through an AI code bootcamp? Are we gonna be shocked when our Lance Corporal AI technicians leave the Marine Corps to 10x their salaries in Silicon Valley?.... I get blank stares in return.

It's stuff like this that tempts me to send up a trial balloon when landing in management at new companies.

Find someone at the bottom of the totem pole, ask them to include a bullshit, non-sensical, or actually harmful slide in a presentation as a favor to you, then see how far it percolates back up before someone challenges it.

The Army has moved in the last three years to a market-based assignment system like you describe. It might be addressing some organizational problems, but not really this one.

I think the fundamental problem is that the Army doesn't value technical work enough to pay for senior people to fill technical positions. There is no technical career path for individual contributors. Officers (the only people paid something comparable to engineers in the civilian world) are in management positions from the very beginning of their career, so they get almost zero experience doing technical things as individual contributors. This leaves us with no senior leaders qualified to be in charge of technical things (like Mr. Chaillan said) nor any senior technical individual contributors to advise them and do the work.

> Officers (the only people paid something comparable to engineers in the civilian world) are in management positions from the very beginning of their career, so they get almost zero experience doing technical things as individual contributors.

I don't know if the Army uses them for IT functions, but isn't that the exact issue with technical fields more broadly for which Warrant Officers exist?

Warrant officers in technical fields are able to remain more technically focused, but they are largely pushed into management too. At CW3 the Army says that they are field-grade officers who are basically interchangeable with an O-4.

The other issue is that many warrant officers still just have a high school diploma, or a check-the-block degree from an online diploma mill. They have deep institutional knowledge and vocational experience, but they aren't going to do technical innovation. This isn't like hiring a senior researcher or engineer.

I'm not as familiar with Army rank usage as Navy.

On the Army enlisted side, what does an E7-9 typically do if in an IT/technical role?

On the officer side, great observation. And pretty much mirrors the private industry: companies without individual contributor career paths are struggling to retain experienced technical talent and deliver complex projects.

At E-7, E-8, E-9 there is no technical role. They will still have a career field like IT, maintenance, artillery, etc. and work in those types of units, but they will do purely HR/administrative functions.

That’s somewhat amusing coming from an Air Force officer, as all the pilots are officers.

Especially the Air Force should know better since the people doing the work for flying things are officers...

Flying is at pinnancle of jobs at an airforce. There are thousands of roles that is needed for a one plane to be ready to fly by a pilot.

Perhaps the more accurate statement officers do the what they see as cool jobs all boring ones are delegated.

Although the polar opposite can very often be true. The enlisted guy troubleshoots the obscure fault in the oxygen generator while his officer drafts messages detailing the problem, works to get parts ordered, and attends meetings about the whole fiasco.

Aren't the people doing the flying mostly low level officers such as lieutenants and maybe captains?

No, tactical flying is highly technical and requires years to master. Most lieutenants and junior captains (winged aviators, mind you) that check into a squadron are tactically useless for the first 12-18 months as we train them up and they aeronautically adapt. Your three-to-four year Captains will do most of the flying but even the CO generally flies 1-2 times a week (Marine aviation).

The only employer I had in my life, among quite a few, where leadership had that devotion t the operational aspects of their jobs was Amazon. I like to work with those people. I guess that culture is what gives Amazon its continuous edge over the competition.

> I like the work with those people

I agree. Developing my own technical proficiency and teaching the next generations has been the only thing keeping me going in an organization otherwise wrought with inefficiency and stupidity. In my experience aviation is fairly unique in this aspect (in the context of the military writ large).

Having returned to aerospace since then, I can agree. Also with military written large!

> Anyways, this is kind of off topic, so I'll take my leave.

Thanks for replying. I don’t think it’s off topic. Startups should know that former enlisted personnel make great hires.

> They are used to more infrastructure than a startup can or wants to provide.

I've seen this with ex-Googlers on the software side, and ex-Apple folks from the hardware side who go independent tend to hit it too ("what do you mean our Chinese suppliers are refusing to retool their whole process for us?")

Does anyone have a neutral example? All the examples I have of military people who are in or adjacent to this part of Amazon have been disastrous. Full of themselves and not particularly high performance.

In my experience, ex military people are just like any other ex government office people. Mostly afraid to be known as having made mistakes, a bit too cocksure, and leaning on their “when I was at X”.

Maybe it’s different in different sub sections of the armed services. However, the local characteristics make sense considering the environment they were in (I only know two combat veterans). After all, similar mistakes lead to the Navy routinely bashing ships into each other.

I think it’s likely that the rubber meets the road very little in the US armed forces. Perhaps the people experienced in that have different characteristics.

Its incredibly painful to read Americans perspective about work. I'm sorry if that comes across as rude, but this is incredible:

> I'm a clock watcher at work, ...

As is your right! As you should! What you're really saying is: I do value my lifetime. I do value the time with my partner, kids, friends. I do value my hobbies and spare time. I appreciate that I exist not just to serve some corporate (or government) goal.

What a sad world to be so brainwashed by american corporate culture that you call this 'clock watching'. Sorry I really don't want to come across as rude or insulting as the term is ladden, but there's no other way to express this.

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