Although it is true that as a nation we are increasingly self-interested, undisciplined, and focused on short-term pleasures, today’s youth are also smarter, better educated, and more independent-minded than ever before. A prime reason for the common lamentation among staff NCOs and officers of a certain age that “kids coming out of basic training just aren’t good enough anymore” is that the rewards offered by the military aren’t tailored for today’s youth, but rather for young Americans from the 1940s. Shape Behavior Through Meaningful RewardsĪmerican youth understand rewards differently than do their elders. What follows are a few painless organizational tweaks that can help reshape American military discipline. We need to prevent that from happening and maintain the rigor and vigor which boot camp instills in young men and women. Although boot camp is for many young men and women a transformative moment, a halcyon experience from which they emerge with the enthusiasm of the newly converted, we then allow them to enter massive bureaucratic organizations where they get lost and slowly return to being the people they once were. We can put soldiers in uniforms and cut their hair to make them look different from civilians, but we will always be limited in the extent to which we can remake their personalities and how permanently we can install those changes. At the same time, modern American values will continue to grow apart from traditional military values and will inexorably change the face of military culture. This puts us between a rock and a hard place: civilian oversight of the military will continue to become ever more stringent and will increasingly limit the effectiveness of traditional means of discipline and indoctrination as changing notions of social justice will be privileged over the laws of military necessity. ![]() Yet we are charged with enforcing higher standards and stricter discipline than that enjoyed by civilian society. Failing to maintain the organizational discipline of the military is far more problematic than failing to keep in lockstep with the latest technological offerings.Įvery military organization is a social construction imbued with the values, mores, expectations and hopes of all its members and faces two competing forces as it organizes young men and women for war: the need to forge fighting men through discipline and acculturation into the military system and the countervailing pressure of lifetimes spent being indoctrinated with societal values that, at least in the West, seem increasingly at odds with traditional military virtues. It is men who fight wars, not budgets or weapons, and it is the organization of the military that binds men together and gives them the purpose, common language and coherency of action that can turn political will into reality. But high technology is neither a stable nor enduring character of war. PriestleyĪs Americans, we are practical and unimaginative people, and our discussions of national defense reflect our love of numbers and hard facts: we focus on things like budgetary requirements, troop numbers, what hardware can be bought or designed and what the newest technology promises. Like its politicians and its war, society has the teenagers it deserves. ![]() Author's Note: Special thanks to Dr Chris Lamb of the Center for Strategic Research and Fletcher Schoen, scout-sniper with the 25th Infantry Division, for their help in revising this piece.
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