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Comment by mter | Hacker News Reader

You have to treat your NCO/officers like humans, but there's no need to care about your joes. Tell joe to get things done and they can't stop until it's done or they get extra duty. If they refuse/complain? Article 15. And no one is going to risk requesting court martial instead of just getting the article 15 so commands have pretty wide latitude to do whatever they want.

> To be effective you can't just rely on shedding dead weight like in the civilian sector.

You can though. You shuffle the complete duds/ineffective people off to S&T or an ops shop where they can't get anyone killed. You micromanage the unmotivated and threaten with article 15s. The completely unfit? They're "encouraged" to be failure to adapt or to go AWOL.

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There is some degree of that, but the military is all volunteer and retention matters. There are still consequences to being a jerk. They're just slower to appear.

It sounds like you might be familiar with how it was in the 70s-90s as the military was trying to figure out the transition between conscription and voluntarily service.

Where the brass all came up under the old style, but all the new blood was 100% voluntary. It wasn't fun growing pains. I served in the early 2000s and there was still some remnants if this, but mostly it wasn't like that.

> Tell joe to get things done and they can't stop until it's done or they get extra duty. If they refuse/complain? Article 15.

You can do that and have a lot of AWOLs and desertions; which does reflect poorly, eventually. It is common in high op tempo units to have a lot discipline issues though, because leaders have to push hard and months with no down time tears people down; mentally physically and emotionally.

Can someone please explain Article 15 in terms of an analogous civilian workplace infraction and a typical military non-judicial punishment?

For example, if Joe shows up with a hangover 2 hours late for work at as a machine operator and cops an attitude with his manager, then he might get a…

Don't think of it as anything that guy is saying, because he's full of shit. Let's start with his example of the officers telling the non-rates (e=3 and below) what to do. That's already generally unrealistic. Officcer's tell nco's who manage the lower ranks.

Article 15's are also called NJP (non-judicial punishment). You stand before the commanding officer in lieu of going to trial (court martial in the military).

One outcome of bullshit article 15's like mentioned above is someone calling the CO's bluff and going to trial. This would make the officer look like a fool and could end his career right there.

The result of an NJP could be loss of rank, confinement to quarters or loss of half pay for up to 3 months. Probably the most common would be DUI's.

It doesn't really fit into that setup. When given an article 15, you can demand a trial by court-martial, so it doesn't really have a parallel in the civilian job market. It's usually kinda like house-arrest. So maybe think of it as some combination of a demotion, a fine, and a couple weeks in jail.

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