Unmasking Insubordination
mwi.usma.edu
mwi.usma.edu
For example, in training, why is it that the soldiers agree to polish their boots, iron their uniforms etcetera - e.g. generally perform a ton of ancillary tasks to the actual job?
I don't think it's solely because someone said so. There's a level of respect for the ritual that comes from somewhere. Like, they might think that today they can't be arsed with polishing the boots, but that it's a point of pride to do it. Or there's a competitive aspect with the others.
Maybe it actually is just because the commander will bark at them otherwise - but that just cycles around to the motivation to the commander.
Once you figure that out, does that illustrate that there's something unique about mask wearing?
Like, you have this empirical data that soldiers will literally run into a battlefield and dodge landmines and all the rest of it, you've created a framework in which that's an order they'll obey.
I dunno, it feels like the article is really light on the "whys". The thing your mental model told you should happen is not happening - so try to understand it?
Try to figure out why people don't want to do this thing?
If they lose that conditioning or fail to comply, there are many negative consequences for them. From minor things like being passed over for promotion, to jail.
When you become familiar with, and have experience with people and what combat operations actually entails, it becomes obvious why this is the case, and why it is necessary.
Soldiers who do not follow orders, even sometimes nonsensical ones, die or get others killed. Sometimes everyone.
It is impossible and unwise to explain the needs and situation behind every order in a combat situation. Even if there was no leaks, assuming every grunt will have the capacity and meta awareness of the situation to process it correctly and not get confused just doesn’t work. It also opens up reinterpreting orders in ways that have unexpected consequences and end up breaking larger unit movements that depend on specific side effects and actions.
It also has negative side effects of course - inefficiencies, difficulty adjusting to changing circumstances, opportunities for corruption and abuse.
Blind obedience is a double edged sword, for the same reason our brain generally has mechanisms to shy away from us chopping our own hand off. You don’t want that.
But you need to ensure that orders are followed when it matters, or you don’t have a military, you have a social club with tanks.
But then we come to the question of why this one thing is different. Because that's how you're going to solve it right?
And the article just doesn't seem to expound on it. It's observed, and that's just it, there's paragraphs of waffle. There's not even like, an anonymous quote from the guy asking one of the other recruits/OC's/whatever (I'm slightly more au fait with UK military terms as you might be able to tell) why they're not doing it.
There's an implicit extrapolation that slippage on this particular point implies slippage across the board. But that isn't explored either - it's kind of just stated as if it's a physical consequence which doesn't seem clear at all to me.
As an absurd example - if you suddenly turned up, in theatre, with the soldiers' wives, and asked them to shoot them, I'd imagine a lot of them would refuse. But that wouldn't in any way imply that you now have some increased subordination risk in the future. It would imply that your order was absurd. Obviously, in this wholly artificial and constructed case, we know that because we've constructed it to be so, but you get my point.
In the article there appears to be zero thought given to the concept that if a huge group of people, people who, as you well describe, have been drilled and moulded into accepting almost any order without question, are refusing to do what you're asking them to do, that there might be some fundamental issue with what you're asking them to do.
I don't really know what the actual answer is, I mean obviously the act of putting a thing on your face is trivial when described in those terms, but something else is going on here.
The simplest explanation is that there isn't a fundamental issue.
For civilians, you might claim that there is some sort of deep principle of freedom at stake, however ridiculous it might be given that those same people are all happy enough to comply with the laws most places have about covering up their naughty bits. But this is the military. They signed up for a job where many of their freedoms go out the window. This very clearly among them.
If you look at who's wearing masks and who isn't, [1] it's obvious that this is a political. And if you read the news, it has been deeply politicized. Soldiers refusing to wear masks is a political statement: they in practice view allegiance to party (and/or news channel) above allegiance to the chain of command.
The "something else" going on here is the same sort of propaganda-driven undermining of belief in rule of law that has been going on for years, and has resulted in the attempt to sack Congress and a majority of Republicans believing that the last presidential election wasn't legitimate. [2]
This is all pretty much in line with how democracies slide into autocracies. Given that the Trump administration considered using the military to seize voting machines in Dcember 2020, [3] people should be very nervous about signs that the military has become this deeply politicized.
[1] https://www.roanoke.edu/about/news/rc_poll_political_anxiety...
[2] https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/one-year-on-republicans...
[3] https://www.vox.com/2022/2/1/22912394/trump-giuliani-seize-v...
Yes, a soldier is supposed to push back against an illegal order (say, to slaughter a bunch of civilians). But wearing a mask doesn't meet that standard. Neither does accepting a vaccine when the soldier already accepted many far more risky vaccines (like for anthrax) against much more unlikely risks (no one is attacking American troops or their allies with anthrax, but Covid is actively attacking).
While this is true, it's also true that soldiers are not fools, and they know when they are in situations where they need to follow orders blindly or fail in the mission--and when they are not. And leaders who treat every situation as though it were the first kind, even when every soldier can plainly see it is a situation of the second kind, are not doing themselves or their units any favors.
That's still quite high enough to perceive simple things like what I described.
> most soldiers need to be told what to do most of the time.
That doesn't contradict what I said. Most soldiers might need to be told what to do most of the time, but they can still be quite capable of seeing when they are in a situation where they need to do exactly what they are told or risk mission failure, and when they are not.
And the military generally weeds such people out at some point during training, because they won't make good soldiers. Being a soldier requires a certain amount of judgment. It is impossible to tell someone exactly what to do; in order for any organization to be effective, a certain amount has to be left to the intelligence and judgment of the people carrying out the orders, even at the lowest level.
Post-training, did anyone get a captains mast for something they legitimately did badly/screwed up?
I haven’t met a sailor yet who didn’t have some crazy stories, but maybe the folks you knew were more disciplined.
Also, any of those happen with the following?
1) go to off limits establishment on shore leave and get drunk and cause trouble, resulting in the local authorities having to drag them into their superiors?
Despite that being explicitly against orders, and generally dumb. And that after and having about 30 bazillion slide decks about how stupid it is, and it being objectively stupid and destructive?
2) had any of them get pregnant to avoid deployment (and explicitly say so to friends), despite that being a pretty bad trade overall, and even more ridiculous to mention to others?
3) had officers commit adultery or other obvious-to-everyone-around-them-is-against-conduct-becoming-an-officer’ problems? Because I could point to plenty of ones that made the press anyway.
4) gotten themselves in deep trouble with sudden ill advised marriages, going into massive debt with illadvised car or house purchases, etc.
Each one of those is someone failing to ‘do the smart thing’ even when sometimes the smart thing is explicitly specified or strongly implied with other agreements, and it highlights the bigger issue, and why it’s important that orders exist and people follow them in combat situations (unless they are clearly so bad they are illegal).
If you have a plan that requires folks to be consistent, do the ‘smart thing’, and do the same thing at the same time, that is not natural and it doesn’t scale well.
It requires heavy training, constant reinforcement, and diligence. And it still gets screwed up. Make everyone exhausted, stressed out, and generally in the shittiest situation they’ve ever been in? It gets harder/worse.
And it still won’t happen everywhere perfectly, regardless of how smart everyone thinks they are, or the degree of training, because humans and reality don’t work that way.
‘Orders’ is a way of distilling the hopefully valuable parts of what needs to happen in a way that specifies the thing that needs to happen unambiguously and without over-specification.
Ideally they can be evaluated if someone (or groups of someones) did actually do them, and traceable back to who issued them in a way that conflicting orders can be untangled, authority of the one issuing them can be verified, and accountability for bad orders can be traced back (even if they aren’t very often).
That may mean there is an order to reposition your ship to specific co-ordinates with no explanation. Or fire on something without understanding why. Or take a shot that personally makes you feel terrible or you don’t agree with.
The safety and cohesiveness of the group is more important, explicitly, in the military as that is also what protects the individuals in those situations.
Depending on the circumstances depends on how plausible it is those orders are legitimate, and I tried to call out that blind obedience is bad. No one should be doing something clearly wrong because an order said so.
But the requirement for obedience to an order is much, much higher because there are many legitimate combat (and some non combat) situations where it is impossible to get everyone to agree on, let alone follow, a single course of action in time, and if the single course of action is not followed, terrible consequences for the people involved are assured.
And with a sufficiently large group of people, you could never get consensus on a right course of action. So without enforced discipline, the military would be ineffective.
And during peacetime, the foundation for the military that would be fighting the next war is being set.
None of these refute the actual claim I made, which was not any of the claims you are implicitly imputing to me here (and was a weaker claim that any of those).
In my actual experience, I directly observed your #0--which is how I'm numbering the captain's mast example--and #4, heard reliable accounts of #1 but never directly saw it myself, and didn't have any knowledge of #2 or #3 in units I was part of, but of course there have been press stories. I was not claiming that any of these things don't happen.
However, the sailors I directly observed in cases #0 and #4 were still quite capable of doing the thing I said soldiers were capable of.
I am extremely skeptical. As a judge advocate, I see the personnel files of every accused service member and the majority of witnesses in any given case that comes through my office. While IQ tests are not routinely given, the GT score (a rough proxy derived from the ASVAB/AFQT) is in every personnel file. I have seen an 84 once and below-84 once.
What's your source for this implausible claim?
Not only that, but orders need to align with the morals and ethics of the soldiers that will follow them, and the soldiers must believe the orders were given in good faith. It’s not necessary that the order even makes sense (soldiers don’t have to always understand why) but the action AND the MOTIVATION for the order must comport with the values of the soldier. If you tell me to charge to my death in machine gun fire to win the battle or save my unit, I’m a lot more likely to do so if I trust you than if I believe you just don’t like me and want me gone.
In this case, I think that many soldiers do not believe that their general officers are acting in good faith, and therefore are resistant to blind obedience.
War: Anybody's Son Will Do
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P_G2u1RrLOk
I haven't watched this since high school but it stuck in my mind.
Leadership means not blaming the little guys when suddenly the whole enterprise fails. Who is the leader who turned our military into “a social club with tanks?” That person deserves removal at the very least, because they clearly are not able to lead. So who is the leader we should hold responsible?
The problem with the ‘accountability == removal’ is sometimes you run out of people you can remove, but it still doesn’t work. :s
I guess a Dictator does solve that, technically though, since then they’re the final accountable source? No wonder people keep electing dictators. :s
The tl;dr is, one thinking person can't compete with an entire thinking crew.
What happens if you are handed a group who isn’t already disciplined, knows their jobs well, works together/has the sharp interpersonal bits ground off, etc?
The whole orders, strong command authority, etc. thing is because that is the minimum functional level that is shown to work in combat situations, not because it is the maximum possible or the ideal.
It provides the tools to deal with a lot of common brokenness in groups. It means ‘easy’ breaking of ties or deadlocks in a well known way, avoids most of the confusing ambiguity about what to do when no one is able to process what is going on or things are changing very rapidly, it provides a scalable and field expedient way to deal with bad actors or sudden unexpected personnel issues while also keeping at least the possibility of clear accountability (chain of command), and it formalizes a set of explicit interdependencies and expectations between those who are giving orders (officers) and those doing most of the dangerous or shitty work (enlisted).
it also has negative side effects, and rarely is anyone actually happy with it, but it has generally worked for what it has been required to do and be.
Every little accomplishment in life is important and motivating. They keep you going onto the next thing.
Indeed, how is it that in the 19th century the conscripted lined up in rank and file against grapeshot cannonade, went over the top in the war to end all wars, and only 1 of 3 discharged their weapons in WWII? Perhaps it is only the victory of management science that we more precisely know the extent to which the individual subordinates himself dutifully and unthinkingly to command.
> I don't think it's solely because someone said so.
The extent to which management reckons the rank and file's pliancy reliable -- without its image being rescued by romance (a la The Charge of the Light Brigade) -- relies upon the realism of quid pro quo and economic desperation. Where would we be without our crime-procedurals, super-hero movies, and high-school signing contracts? The omnipotence fantasy consists in wrongs that are righted, but when the bullshit wears so thin that everyone sees through it...what then? Rebel around some cultural touch-stone?
> Try to figure out why people don't want to do this thing?
I prefer management remain clueless. Can anyone imagine anything more horrifying than unthinking executors of commands? Executors who may wink out the lives of wedding parties a continent removed? I will laud you for echoing an American "leftist" commonplace for wishing to discover root-causes (exactly as quaint as "without even the appearance of impropriety").
But I cast my lot with all who reply "I prefer not to."
https://web.archive.org/web/20220207215914/https://mwi.usma....
Less violent methods of disobedience would include imaginative interpretations of an order.
What is refinement?
I argue that the interaction between brokerage and command centrism leads commanders to pursue four types of responses to orders they deem inappropriate: they can refine their orders, defy their orders, obey their orders, or exit their military roles. All brokers remain in their military roles in hopes of maintaining their brokerage-derived social power – command-centric brokers work with their superiors to refine and improve their orders; brokers who are not command centric defy their orders outright. Non-brokers who are not command centric feel little obligation to support their superiors and have little social power to lose by changing their social positions, so they respond to inappropriate orders by exiting their roles in the military. Non-brokers who are command centric, however, lack the power that might make them risk disobedience and, because they identify strongly with the command authority that issued their orders, they do not see exit as legitimate. They therefore simply obey.
> The philosophy and principles of mission command give subordinate leaders room to implement their superiors’ intent using disciplined initiative. This is the resistant behavior that Hundman characterizes as refinement. Leaders at lower echelons are best able to understand the practical ramifications of any policy implementation. General Mark Milley, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went so far as to say that subordinates needed to exercise “disciplined disobedience” and ignore specific orders to achieve their higher commanders’ intent. On the battlefield, this enables subordinate leaders to react to changing situations and take advantage of new opportunities as they arise, without needing to seek approval from their superiors. Historically the Army has made great use of mission command, enabling victories from the defense of Little Round Top to the thunder runs into Baghdad. [emphasis added]
Usually the watch officer picks up the lesson quickly. But even there, far from any battlefield, and with hundreds of pages of detailed instructions, you'll find the need for reasonable interpretation on the part of those taking orders, and reasonable accomodation on the part of those giving them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule
Which also involves gumming up the works with very strict adherence to instructions, rules, and guidelines.
"soldiers who are resistant to a military order fall into one of four categories recently described by Eric Hundman: grudging obedience, refinement, exiting service, and defiance."
But I'd say not masking is more "grudging obedience" not "defiance". It's minor, and easily correctable if challenged. They start court-martialing for a single mask violation, then it starts to look like defiance. But if the structure from top to bottom "accepts" that non-masking is context-sensitively and accepted (sometimes), not adhering to the "letter of the law" is just skating by or cheesing-it. Not open defiance. Yeah, that sounds a LOT like the real military.
To me this means the issue there is the chain of command. Look, it's either a serious issue or it isn't. If you send mixed signals, then what do you expect?
The second thing is that, in the real world, orders can't be "stupid". If your orders are to run into a machine gun nest and certainly die but as a hero for the greater, etc. even that can work. See that ain't stupid - that just sucks for you.
But if it's stupid you are saying - do this for no reason because bureaucratic stupid, stupid. And you are going to get at best grudging acceptance. I'm not saying it's actually stupid. I'm saying the behavior of all ranks indicates they "think" and act as if it was thought "stupid". I mean, when you are young and healthy and a war-fighter - do you really think that "useless" masking to avoid a "minor flu-like" virus might not just seem "stupid".
To be clear, I'm not saying it is stupid or is just the flu or whatever. But it's clear to me that a bunch of military and first-responders that have a very different risk posture might very well be just thinking along those lines and they act as such. They aren't acting stupidly or randomly. There's a reason that there is such blowback.
How to strip-search people is taught to every TSA agent. Would any argument questioning the legality of an order to strip-search every single traveler be ridiculous too?
TSA agents are not members of the military, though. They are employees of the TSA, and the relationship is not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but to an employment contract and normal civilian laws around labor.
Granted, out of context I find the quoted reasoning equally unconvincing: servicemembers (presumably military?) may also sometimes trained on how to commit suicide in the event they find themselves in circumstances with greater risk of peril, but that doesn’t mean it would be lawful to arbitrarily order them to do that.
Quite the opposite, a soldier duty, at least in the US is to protect not the Government, but the Constitution. If the government betrays the Constitution, it is the duty of the soldiers to disobey. At this point, civil war is upon us and history will be the final judge, not a military tribunal.
On the other hand there is basically zero jurisprudence of a soldier ever getting in trouble for following an order they thought was given under competent military authority, even though it was illegal. So it can be hard for a soldier to rely on the mercy of the courts in this situation. Though that is still not justification for carrying out an illegal order.
Are you kidding me ? It was called the Nuremberg trials. Following orders has not been a valid defence ever since.
A comparable incident would be the My Lai massacre, after which 20+ soldiers and officers were tried of various charges, only 1 was convicted, and even that 1 soldier was promptly paroled by the President.
Despite that, it is still theoretically possible to be tried and convicted of crimes despite having a military order to do so (and this was true even before Nuremberg). My point is that in practice having an order to do something counts for a great deal.
History is written by the victorious side, so until the US keep is hegemonic military position weaken, it will not happen.
It is arguable the us has committed plenty of crimes against humanity in the past 75 years of world domination.
I flagged it b/c the link isn't working. If there's something else I should do instead let me know (at which point I'll happily un-flag it :) )
ETA: Ok, I've un-flagged it. Next time I'll check out archive.org or else just skip it.
My thinking was that the article was so new here on HN (7 points, zero comment when I found it) that the problem must have been that the link was bad, not that the web server buckled under the load). C'est la vie :)
(Edit: and if the archive.org link works, paste it here for others.)
It's a leader's job to establish credibility and to protect morale in order to ensure that troops are responsive to commands. This article's focus on the soldier's insubordination rather than their own baseness is tone-deaf and lacks any sort of self reflection.
It's clear that masking young, healthy adults who are tasked with the responsibility of rushing into oncoming bullets and missiles if need be, to mask themselves for going on now well into our third year of covid, which was never a particular threat for young people, is bad for morale. It's absurd and non-sensical.
Meanwhile the dark tone set by the title and the subsequent remedies proposed make me more concerned than I've perhaps ever been about the direction our armed forces are under.
If dealing with clothing regulations that you dislike is a problem for you, the military is probably the wrong career choice. If you’re not going to perform a task that the average 2nd grader is able to comply with, why should we assume that you’ll run up that hill?
In my non-military gig, we fired a bunch of people for this. It’s a stupid stand for freedom or whatever that was very expensive for those individuals.
Oh God I hope this isn't a problem, I've been using my fleece myself from time to time (though without the rank tab in this situation, to 'civilianize' it).
https://taskandpurpose.com/culture/army-fleece-jacket-unifor...
Subordination is a means to an end, that is to say, a meaningful goal, not an end in of itself.
What is that goal and what do the masks do to achieve it?
Anyways, I must not be the only one noticing the inanity of our military leadership coming out of West Point:
"US military struggled to attract National Guard and reserve troops in 2021 fiscal year" https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/14/politics/military-recruitment...
Fwiw I'm pretty much in agreement that now or the very near future would be the good time to end mask mandates for the coronavirus disease. But I don't think that gives service members license to disobey orders.
Quite possibly, yes. My experience (which of course is limited: the military is very big--and it's also well out of date by now, as it's been quite some time since I was in the military) has been that in truly effective units, such "exact state of the uniform" regulations are not strictly enforced day to day, for that very reason: any time spent on enforcing them could be better spent on something of practical value for mission effectiveness. There are special contexts, of course: if you're attending a special military ceremony, your uniform will be expected to be immaculate, even if nobody enforces that day to day in your working environment. But that "special contexts" is the point: the regulations are interpreted according to context, in terms of the overall objective of mission effectiveness.
No, what is absurd and nonsensical is the idea that soldiers can disobey orders that can directly compromise mission readiness. Sure, a 22 year old E-4 might not be likely to get seriously ill from covid, but there are plenty of enlisted soldiers, sailors, and airmen in their 40's and 50's who are more at risk. Having a few commanding officers or pilots or other key people end up being unavailable at a critical time can compromise the mission. It is a health countermeasure that is a minor inconvenience and not a difficult order to follow.
In the military there are many, many rules that might seem like they don't make sense but nevertheless are part of keeping discipline in the military. You can't wear your hat indoors. If you're driving on base and it's time for reverie you have to stop, get out of your car, and stand at attention. You're not allowed to drink alcohol on ships, even when you're off duty. How does it make sense for masking during a pandemic to be the hill to die on?
Interestingly, I have the exact opposite take. You've joined an organization where you're expected to put yourself in mortal danger. There are a whole host of rules in the military that are basically arbitrary (e.g. aspects of the dress code standards), but are there to show order and to differentiate a professional fighting force from a gang of thugs.
What I find "absurd and nonsensical" is that masks are the hill people are (figuratively, as opposed to the actual literal danger in their jobs) willing to die on. To me it just shows how 100% tribal the entire mask discussion has become - for soldiers it can certainly have nothing to do with any perceived danger or loss of control, as there are already exponentially worse other examples that soldiers have submitted to for years.