Physical strength, stamina and agility all also plays huge role.
Military does not want you angry, military wants you to obey and be easy to control. Anger makes people less controllable. They want to you to do what you are told, anger is not important.
Good faith question for you: where did you get the knowledge about the military that you used to make that comment from?
Would you please mention some titles? Thank you.
Also, children are quicker to replace. It takes only 12 years to produce a 12 year old soldier, and war-torn countries tend to have a skewed age distribution.
Militaries recruit young adults primarily because they’re at peak physical shape but they haven’t settled into careers yet. It would be hard to build an effective military if we recruited a bunch of middle-aged men out of desk jobs and tried to get them back in young person shape.
> When they learn rules, they are binary about them. When they learn to lie, cheat, steal, they go hog wild with it.
Your post is also quite binary, without nuance. I also have kids and haven’t seen this unilateral sociopathy at a certain age. On the contrary, kids are relatively complex emotionally and are capable of empathy from a young age. That doesn’t mean they never test the limits, but they don’t (generally) turn into lie-cheat-steal machines like you’re suggesting, nor are they completely incapable of controlling their emotional impulses. Give kids a little more credit. You haven’t completely figured them out as an adult (or maybe you forgot how frustrating it was when overconfident adults assumed the worst of you and thought they had it all figured out)
The other problem with older people is that once you stop spending your workday taking orders from a capricious bureaucracy (school) it's hard to get people to voluntarily go back. Draw whatever trope-ey parallels you want with working for an employer but private industry is very different from school and military in its level of seemingly capricious micromanagement.
A bunch of 20 or 30-somethings who've been exposed to the realities of life and how dirty the world is are probably more likely to be able to deal with the more morally questionable aspects of military service but it's not worth the other tradeoffs of working with those demographics.
Nah, there's a big difference between how much an 18 and a 26 year old will tolerate, not what they can. The reason the military wants 18 year olds is the same as why unhealthy startups want kids fresh out of college. They're too stupid to know when they can get away with asserting themselves.
> A bunch of 20 or 30-somethings who've been exposed to the realities of life and how dirty the world is are probably more likely to be able to deal with the more morally questionable aspects of military service but it's not worth the other tradeoffs of working with those demographics.
To strenuously disagree while agreeing: 20 or 30 year olds are more likely to be able to deal with the morally questionable aspects of military service, and that is an absolutely undesirable characteristic for a military. Militaries want you to deal with morally questionable situations in the way they've told you to deal with morally questionable situations. Using your own moral initiative, even resulting in a good outcome, deserves punishment. If you make a mistake in applying the rules you've been given, even resulting in a horrible outcome, you will get absolutely protected by the military.
That's the contract: try your best to do what you've been told. and we'll move heaven and earth to protect you.
As for "lie-cheat-steal machines", I've personally observed it across thousands of children. It mainly happens at 11-13 years of age, middle school in the USA. When I worked for Southland Corporation (7-11), we tried everything to keep a store adjacent to a middle school operating. Finally sold it. Kids go through earlier phases of this when they first discover lying. Each kid differently, of course.
"On the contrary, kids are relatively complex emotionally and are capable of empathy from a young age."
That's not "On the contrary". Kids are, indeed. Emotionally complex and empathetic doesn't preclude naive innocence at all.
Nonesense. First, you did not personally observed thousands of 11-13 years old.
Second, 11-13 years are pretty empathetic and already have a lot of values in them. They do lie, just like most adults do, but they don't steal and don't cheat all that much. They are already building pretty nuanced value system.
> Why do you refuse it the benefit of the doubt ?
Benefit of the doubt that parent met thousands of 11-13 years old? And all of them were stealing cheating machines?
Any school is going to have a population of those kids, and those kids are indeed a problem for nearby businesses, but that 10-20% can't be generalized to biological developmental stages.