I don't know that much about submarines, but culture of following orders and not showing any initiative is so hardly entrenched in Russian military that it might be the other way around: culture influencing boat design.
On different occasions after doing some casual war history reading, I ended up with the diffuse belief that the ability to delegate initiative to low ranking soldiers was one of the key attributes of the winning side ( for example during different israelo-arab wars ).
Then I stumbled upon a military evaluation of how the german army performed during WWII. It spent time stressing the point that german officers were constantly encouraged to show initiative and independant thinking, more so than other western european armies. Supposedly, it was a cultural trait dating back from the prussian army. It shattered my cliché view of the german army as first and foremost an organization built on discipline.
So here is my question: Is is possible there is a tendency/bias to simply view ourselves as more independant and any adversary we face as more "drone" like ? ( The same way ancient kingdoms would simply label their opponents as savages ? )
Example: A platoon sergeant may know that the platoon has been ordered to be at X location at Y time. They can do lots of interesting stuff to make that deadline. But they don't have eyes on the entire reason for being at that location because they weren't in the planning meetings at the HQ. The LT was. The LT may "show initiative" by deliberately being late/early to the location because he perhaps sees that the operation is progressing more slowly/quickly than anticipated. The sergeant's job it to know everything about his subordinates in order to get them to do what is needed. The officer's job is to understand everything about how his platoon fits into the larger picture and, occasionally, adapt orders to support that vision.
Basic takeaway is this - yes, everyone wants to run their army using (googlable keyword) Auftragstaktik. But that's very similar to saying that everyone in software business wants to run their software company like Netflix, Apple or Google at it's best - with responsible senior engineers that own their mistakes, show initiative, are skilled and don't let performance or power spats influence their ability to achieve goals.
But the reality is, that shaping such an organization (or company!) is exceedingly hard and requires massive culture shifts within people of the organization (which bring their own baggage from outside) and incentives. It's easy to say you want to be Apple, but hammering a 3rd tier company filled with backstabbing juniors into a highly performing machine is going to be an impossible task.
That's what many nations are facing when shaping their armies into better performing units - command-oriented hiearchies can be more effective when your people are poorly skilled and not culturally prepared to work together. Even US had some famous massive fails in WW2 where generals let many Americans die due to their dumb branch power struggles and egos.
(Disclaimer: I have not done any military service) The Swedish military had an educational course, now licensed to private companies, named UGL (Utveckling av Grupp och Ledare (Development of Group and Leader)). I took this course as part of a management position at a company and it focuses heavily on theoretical knowledge and practical exercises with regard to Susan Wheelan's work and research on group dynamics, i.e. what are the characteristics of different team 'levels' (1-4) and ways/prerequisites to get the team to the next level.
I've seen exercises and mentions to this model at other companies I've been at (it's quite popular and Wheelan is as I understand it an authority in this field), too, as well as various distilled forms from motivational speakers (e.g. 'being in the zone').
Very few teams rise to the highest level (before dissolution) and it takes tremendous work and good leadership, but from what I've learned it's hardly impossible. Of course, addressing the culture of backstabbing juniors is part of that process, so I guess you're right that it is impossible without change.
While on the subject, I wonder how many armed forces throughout the world have curriculums containing inter-personal relationship courses and group exercises pertaining to this. From what little exposure I've had to this subject (TV and movies, mostly US such) it seems to be something being taught naturally and 'the hard way', but maybe it's just something that doesn't come naturally to us Swedes so we need extra education in these sort of things.
Just wanted to share that the US military spends a whole lot of effort on trying to understand group and leadership dynamics. One of the things that led into Kahneman and Tversky's Nobel winning research was an attempt to predict future leadership capability among new recruits that utterly failed. Whatever leadership is, it's not easy to predict before it emerges by other traits.
There's a gap between how the US military is portrayed in movies, etc, vs its actual nature. It's the US's largest and most diverse employer, where the bulk of the staff are young people from a low income or otherwise marginalized background. They spend a lot of effort on figuring out the best ways to make that work, even if they fail at it a lot as well.
Yeah now that I think of it in hindsight I'd imagine most armed forces have this in one way or another, after all functioning as a group and solving different tasks in unison is pretty basic/mandatory for a successful unit.
>They spend a lot of effort on figuring out the best ways to make that work, even if they fail at it a lot as well.
They (armed forces around the world) must be doing something right. I don't know if it's the x years of coherent training and purpose or some forced epiphany, but anecdotally speaking I usually find people with military backgrounds -- even if only 10 months of conscription service -- to be generally more adept at overcoming hardships and have a generally more pragmatic stance toward life, as opposed to many young adults that haven't done any such training and live with a sense of loss, inability to cope with certain things (e.g. boredom) and are generally 'later' or missing out on personal development. Most people I've talked about their military service with have said it was both their worst and best time of their life simultaneously. Of course, YMMV and I'm not taking into account extremes on either side. Just makes me wonder if maybe we should have some kind of mandatory self-exploration journey after school that would benefit people.
Discipline is not orthogonal to creative thinking. Wartime activities are not like they read after the fact. As the saying goes, "no plan survives first contact with the enemy". This means that junior officers and NCO's and even soldiers are expected to assess their changing situations and needs in order to satisfy (or retire from) the mission.
What kind of discipline is needed to start following the platoon sergeant when the platoon commander is down? It's even more critical at this point.
Fielding troops in a fight where they have incomplete knowledge requires empowering them with the authority to act in order to fulfill their potential.
Then there are militaries militaries where officers are chosen by some system of prestige (like a watery tart lobbing scimitars). These require absolute adherence to structure so as not to undermine the authority of those with the divine right/political connections.
Now, while this is all idealized, there comes a rank, above which promotion tends to be political as well as about success. The German military certainly had their issues with this, where there was a very real fear that went beyond merely not getting promoted.
They eventually got buried in numbers (Russia) and buried in materiel (US). The US also eventually got around to allowing the same independent thinking, and the German independent thinking got eroded as Hitler meddled more and more in the war.
Also, While the soviets were overall outnumbering the germans , Operation Bagaration is another example of superb strategic and tactical out maneuvering. The domination was total and the entire army group center was anhilated, in such a way that the mere numerical superiority couldn't really account for.
And even when local numerical superiority favored the germans, the soviets were able to win.
Plus, the "hitler overruled his generals" is another very persistent exaggeration that mostly came from post war nazi generals memoirs. As you might expect, those memoirs were very self serving and were a convenient way to wash away responsibility and incompetence. In reality, most of the bad decisions were taken by the army command, and hitler only became more dominant after the German army had already suffered huge defeat. And even at that point, he wasn't exactly overruling the brightest plans. Most of those generals in the army command didn't even support the plans that ended up being massive victories for the nazis, like the invasion of france for example.
Worth mentioning as well that German forces were poorly laid out, prepared and concentrated in Normandy right from day one. The German high command and even Hitler leaned more towards Pas de Calais as the landing area and on the day of the invasion itself, many German commanders and some forces were in fact on leave, aside from the general understaffing of the Normandy defense areas.
Also, while the German generals wrote extremely self-serving memoirs after the war about how they were thwarted by Hitler's orders, the dictator did indeed increasingly override them in many catastrophic ways. There is a mountain of clear documentary evidence of this. His orders countermanding military logic were mostly written and well preserved later (unlike his much more secretive, almost entirely verbal instructions for the orchestration of Nazi genocides during the Holocaust).
Don't read too much into my answer. I'm not an expert, and I hadn't even thought about the question until my first reply on this thread. It's an off-the-cuff impression, not a well-thought-out position.
That said - the word on initiative and discipline is right. Prussian military tradition gave German officers very wide latitude to make their own decisions, until it interfered with the political state or their superiors commands.
That said, even great officers can't win against overwhelming odds and opponents with dramatic material superiority.
In Russia it's definitely not the case. Mindless, drone like military mentality is very well-known and entrenched in the culture.
This is possible, but the US tries to keep an accurate (or even slightly overinflated; see prewar predictions of Russia's combat effectiveness) idea of how skilled potential adversaries are.
As other comments have pointed out, Auftragstaktik (also known as mission tactics) is an ideal many armies try to reach for. It's possible that it's the ideal form of command and control, but that's not guaranteed. Mission tactics is sorta kinda not really Agile for the military (in the sense it was originally intended by the Agile Manifesto). This can work, or it can result in something like Google where promotions are tied to going off and making something new, not maintaining what you already have.
This sort of thinking is particularly dangerous in war though, because war is a continuation of politics by violent means, and therefore strategy and tactics _must_ be tied to the overall international politics of the state. Individual initiative can result in somebody finding a brilliant new strategy or coming up with a genius plan that would've never made it through an overbearing top-down command structure, or it can result in something like the Japanese military in the Second World War or the German military during both World Wars.
The Japanese military of the Second World War was essentially the head of a military dictatorship, with the added complication that the Army and Navy hated each other. Japanese grand strategy was largely driven by the actions of junior officers who'd go out and do something ridiculous, like when a Japanese lieutenant tried to destroy a rail line and blame the incident on the Chinese, giving his superiors a pretext to invade China, as in the case of the Mukden Incident. Japanese officers, empowered to make decisions for the nation by their own individual initiative, were ultimately responsible for the massive unnecessary loss of life by their continual refusal to even consider negotiations, even far after it was clear to everyone involved on both sides that the Japanese couldn't win.
The German military's descent into individual initiative madness began after Napoleon beat what was assumed to be the most powerful army in Europe at Jena-Auerstedt. Clausewitz, who formulated the "war is a continuation of politics by other means" line above, essentially saw the battle as proof that it was impossible to plan a battle from the top down due to the inherent friction and fog of war of military operations, which the German military refined into their concept of Auftragstaktik. After the Austro-Prussian and the Franco-Prussian Wars, the German Command Staff was convinced they'd found the key to key to winning battles by empowering their subordinates. Unfortunately, they also applied that principle upwards and worked to lessen civilian oversight of the military.
Of course, the tangled web of alliances, treaties, and mobilization timetables made the First World War somewhat inevitable, but what's striking is just how little effort went into preventing it at all: the German military was convinced that once the die was cast there was no point in trying to stop the war. The civilian government, convinced by the military that the best way to operate was to give the military an objective and then stay out of their way, let them. I want to be clear: there's many instances throughout history of the military gaining control over the government, but in Germany's case the military didn't gain control over the civilian government, nor did they want to. They simply wanted the civilian government to have as little power as possible over them. Later in the war the government was absorbed by the military, but it didn't start out that way.
This separation of concerns led to the "stab in the back" myth after the war, where the Germans believed that the army was unfairly tampered with by the government. The causes of the rise of Hitler and Nazism involve more than just Auftragstaktik writ large, but the concept of giving subordinates an objective and letting them go certainly didn't help. In particular, the Nazi state was marked by constant infighting by independent agencies: the military had numerous intelligence agencies with overlapping responsibilities who competed for information for example.
Now it may seem a bit of a leap to blame small-unit tactics for Fascism, but in the same way war is just politics extended into warfighting, doctrine is just culture extended into warfighting. The success of FAANG companies and startups is often attributed to the development of modern Agile-type software development practices, which shape the workflow, leadership style, and culture of successful companies, while toxic Agile practices are often blamed for the death of others. In the same way, the indoctrination of military leaders that the best way to lead is to empower subordinates, and the reinforcement of that principle throughout the leader's career all the way to the top, is responsible for, for example, the brilliant success of the first Gulf War, and the mediocre quagmire of the second Gulf War.
Returning to your original question, yes, the US and the West in general tends to view individual initiative as better than other systems, and we like to believe we're better at it that other militaries, due to the great success of mission tactics throughout history. But at the same time the West, in particular Germany who's had particularly bad experiences with mission tactics gone wrong, try to limit just how empowered the military can be, by ensuring the military stays under strict civilian control. As you might be able to guess from my general interest in military history, I'm a strong supported of a powerful military, but despite that I'm an even stronger supporter of a civilian controlled military.
And the German government should have wanted to keep the peace: for one, the Schlieffen plan was so aggressive because the German Command Staff knew they were weaker economically than the Allied Powers, so their hope was to defeat the Allies before they could bring the full force of their economy to bear. For another, even Field Marshal Schlieffen was increasingly less confident in its success as time went on. It wasn't really even an exact plan to be followed in the first place; it was essentially a thought experiment about what if Germany went to war, and as more intelligence about the modernity of France and Russia's militaries came in, Schlieffen kept revising it to be the best it could be, but viewed the entire strategic situation as unlikely to give Germany success.
But the German government wasn't interested in diplomacy anyway because of the military's political power. In the popular conception, it was the military that had won against Austria and France, and even though it was Bismarck's diplomacy that granted Germany great power status, it was always thought that was on the back of German military power, an impression Bismarck was happy to reinforce. German Emperor Wilhem II was brought up in a militaristic culture, and threw out Bismarck shortly after assuming the throne. It was all downhill from there, as he assumed military officers were the best at essentially any job, infusing the entire government culture with a deference to the military.
Essentially, by the 1910s the German civilian government didn't view diplomacy as useful once the possibility of war was high. They believed the military would probably win any fight they got in, lessening the impact of diplomatic failure. The military did nothing to change their minds about that either. They interpreted Clausewitz's "war is a continuation of politics by other means" to mean that war replaced politics in the event of conflict. They were strongly in favor of the idea that it didn't matter how the war started, what was important was how the war was won.
The German military's insistence of initiative on the part of subordinates led them to disregard of higher non-military concerns: if the captain's concern was with taking orders from his colonel and disseminating orders to his lieutenants, why worry about what the generals thought? They didn't have any idea what was going on on the ground, which is why they stressed individual initiative so much in the first place. If the generals' concern was to take orders from the General Staff and disseminate orders to the colonels, why worry about what the emperor thought? He had delegated the task of making war to the Staff, and they had given the generals orders and guidance to go about making war. If the chief of staff's concern was making war, why worry about what the other parts of the government cared? The emperor had given him a directive to plan for war, and his job was to break down those orders one level for his generals.