> They are leaving due to the political BS of the organization and poor leadership by those in command.
I have a brother-in-law (a chief) leaving 3 years prior to retirement for the same reason. Except it’s exactly the opposite. They’re not allowed to yell anymore, have a lot of limitations on punishment, and have to accept things like enlisted being late to work. They’re leaving because they think the military is on a downtrend and can’t control the high schoolers under their command.
There has to be more to this story. You don’t walk away at 17 because you are annoyed at having to do the paperwork required to get someone properly punished rather than doing whatever you think is best.
For reference, I’m a 21 year Chief with time at Squadrons, Ships Company, USMC commands, and a few other places.
If you can’t stand waking up everyday because of your job then at some point mental health steps in.
Since you’ve been there for 21 years, I’m sure you’ve seen the changes as well. Is the Navy the same as when you started? The crossing the line ceremony for instance. When I was in, they had to have permission to haze you. Nude mermaids are no longer on the certificates as well from what I understand. Many little things changing since he joined is what did it.
How does basic training even work now in this post yelling world? I was called “Porky the Pig” in basic. It forced me to exercise much more than threat of some fake arrest.
> How does basic training even work now in this post yelling world? I was called “Porky the Pig” in basic. It forced me to exercise much more than threat of some fake arrest.
As a non-military guy, this is what I've always found really nuts about military institutions. In normal life, people do an extraordinary array of difficult and uncomfortable things, and generally learn a whole lot for specific roles in their workplaces, without anybody raising their voice.
In normal life, an organization that bullied its employees in the way that's routine for militaries would be considered extremely dysfunctional, and you would expect to see extremely dysfunctional and toxic people flourishing in that atmosphere.
The point of bootcamp isn’t just for you to learn how to do this or that, it’s also about breaking you of your individualist civilian mentality and molding you into a soldier/sailor/marine/airman who can put the mission and their fellow service members above themselves. Being yelled at is negative reenforcement and quickly helps you understand your mistakes. Camaraderie also flourishes when you all hate your drill instructor. When you get out and join the real military, you often think back some drill instructors as the “stern but fair” types.
Navy bootcamp was surprisingly easy. You quickly figure out what they can and cannot do, how many push-ups you have to do before they’ll let you up, how long they can make you PT, etc. We still had people who couldn’t handle it and were sent home. It was probably for the best. The military isn’t always easy and it really helps to be resilient. If someone criticizes you for doing something stupid and accept that you did a stupid thing, or you can’t let it go, you may not get very far.
I know the logic, it's just, I don't think it makes that much sense any more. Fighting wars has become an increasingly technical occupation in the last couple of centuries. Therefore, a technically capable soldier who is cowardly, individualistic, and occasionally insubordinate would be, in some roles (say intelligence) superior to one who was none of those things, but didn't have the technical skills or aptitude.
Realistically, a ship is a big machine, so it would make more sense to prize people that fit the typical 'conscientious engineer' profile, warts and all, even if those people are going to be pretty awful at traditional soldiering. These kind of roles have absolutely proliferated over the years, and it makes zero sense to prize physical fitness and ability to follow orders in a lot of them.
Imagine if you were a hiring manager for a gigantic industrial complex with cutting edge technology, producing a delicate and high-stakes product, in a environment that often demands extreme creativity and imposes severe timetables. Except all your hirees have to be able to do twenty pushups and be OK with being shouted at by some guy in a big hat. That's the literal situation of human resources on an aircraft carrier, and it's insane.
This entire paragraph reinforces what's mentioned elsewhere: that modern people are completely divorced from what the military is actually required to do and how it does it.
Why does every person on an aircraft carrier need to be physically fit, follow orders, and be able to put others or the mission ahead of themselves? Because under fire, in a casualty (fire, flooding, etc.) those technically apt, out of shape people die and get other's killed. I need to know you can put on the SCBA, carry smoke curtains and hang them, etc. No, we don't have dedicated fire fighters or casualty handlers; in a SHTF situation everyone needs to pitch in. There isn't room for dead weight.
To go further, I haven't found that those "conscientious engineer" profile people are even worth the time. The people who we get into the jobs are often far more competent than you would give them credit for, while still being fit and capable of taking orders. We get plenty of that profile in my jobs (I used to be one if I'm being honest) and though they excel at the technical aspects of the job they are so bad at everything else that's required that they often end up getting hurt or getting others hurt even in daily activities. Performing demanding technical tasks (like running software updates on a linux distro, only the bash script is corrupted so you've got to understand WTF is happening, pull the required info from the aircraft's systems, slip it into the patch so it will be authorized, then push it manually) in 40lbs of safety equipment on a flight deck with moving ordnance and launching/recovering aircraft is something we need a well rounded person for, not a prima donna.
Basically you are making an outsiders mistake of thinking you understand what's required to make that ship function. If you are interested in learning what's really required there are any number of people in this topic that would likely be happy to tell you. I'm one.
My feeling is that a lot of people work in dangerous workplaces, where mistakes can and do kill people. The miltary is one of those workplaces: if you look at the stats[0] you can see that ordinary workplace injuries absolutely dwarf combat-related injuries.
Even in wartime[1], the number of deaths from enemy action rarely exceed those from accident.
What makes this worse is that the military is a pretty dangerous workplace. Even in peacetime, the US military typically loses more people to accidents than any other profession (I suspect a lot of this is down to people being 'on the job' even when they're not, but even accounting for that, the stats are bad).
If you compare the military to other institutions that do similar things the military doesn't look good. If you have an underperforming car plant that keeps on maiming employees, and the last two car models were both hideously expensive flops, then you don't go around telling people that they 'don't understand' the special requirements of your institution. You reform. I think a lot of the people in the US military are on that page already (judging from the stuff I've read about the upcoming overhaul of the marines), but in general, I think militaries would be better off if they were way more open to civilian criticism.
We are absolutely open to criticism; my point is you don't even know WHAT to criticize.
Your entire argument is predicated on a flawed understanding of what we do and the resources we have to do it.
Note that I'm not saying we are perfect (or even close), and there are so many things we could do better I could write a book, but you are moving goalposts rather than addressing the points I brought up.
The plain and simple fact is that the things we do and the conditions we do them under aren't analogous to anything in the civilian sector (with some very small exceptions) and need to be looked at and understood as such.
I'll be the first person to tell people they probably shouldn't join, but it has nothing to do with this particular argument that you are making.
> my point is you don't even know WHAT to criticize.
Yeah, sure. That's what I'm responding to with all the stats. The nice thing about numbers is that they are fungible. Anybody can read a chart and tell you the US military is really bad at workplace safety, whether or not there is a war going on.
It's a bit like the US police force. You can show a bunch of figures to a LEO, and the figures for law enforcement in the US are worst in class - the US spends more and gets less from its police than almost any other nation on earth - and they'll just say straight up that you don't understand their jobs, not realizing that the figures clearly show they don't understand their jobs either.
Now, the US military is much better than the US police force, but there's the same underlying problem. It doesn't have to fix its problems because there's no soldier's unions, there's no competitor coming in to eat its lunch, and the only oversight is the worst kind of political interference.
If I was in the military, I'd see it Iraq and Afghanistan as a golden opportunity for reform, just as the Sino-Vietnamese war was for the chinese PLA. You can use defeat as a bludgeon against entrenched tradition. It's no good in that situation just saying to outsiders that they don't understand your special requirements - you want to actually encourage academics, journalists, etc, especially the unsympathetic ones, to pitch in and try and work out what went so awfully wrong.
The first step in that would be to absolutely draw every parallel and draw every lesson you can from the civilian sector, because that's your testing bed for organizational strategy. That's what people like Robert MacNamara did in WW2 - they took civilian traditions like accountancy and statistics, and applied them to the USAF, to devastating effect. If you're in a situation where you feel like there's some experiential special sauce, it needs to be absolutely pinned down, quantized, and described, so you can work out how its effecting all the other metrics.
I think what you wrote makes perfect sense and I could get behind not caring so much about some standards for some positions. What would you propose for the support jobs like “Culinary Specialists” or “Logistics Specialists”?
My thinking is that a peacetime military is basically a skeleton that needs to be able to be rapidly fleshed out when it becomes necessary. That's not exactly a novel thought, but I think there's a lot of room to explore when you stop thinking about fighting wars, and start thinking about how to build the machine that builds an army (preferably within weeks) if a war breaks out.
European countries can be quite good at this: the whole logic of Finland's conscription system is to have it so that if a war breaks out, you can mobilize the whole nation within a short time, and everybody knows where they fit in.
In previous big wars, nations have typically just slashed their standards when the war broke out to meet manpower quotas. It would be better, generally speaking, to build an institution that can, in an emergency, use everyone. That would mean, in peacetime, working out if there are profitable places to put people to use, so when you get a deluge of asthmatic flat-footed civilians signing up because a big war has broken out, you don't waste time trying to make them into infantry.
Obviously, my view is informed by being a peacenik. If you want an army to do offensive, expeditionary operations on a budget, there's much less to change. Having a big and capable HR department would be important if you were going to get all the dysfunctional people in a country to fight in an actual war, but it would be better, in a small professional force, to just not induct anybody who doesn't meet a bunch of stringent standards.
At this point you are just trying to force fit your ideals to the real world. Please stop, you clearly don’t understand. the original post i made is clear, make your army hard. or lose your country. maybe you’re russian…
> As a non-military guy, this is what I've always found really nuts about military institutions. In normal life, people do an extraordinary array of difficult and uncomfortable things, and generally learn a whole lot for specific roles in their workplaces, without anybody raising their voice.
I've worked at large orgs, to include F500s and national-tier multinationals with plenty of yelling.
> In normal life, an organization that bullied its employees in the way that's routine for militaries would be considered extremely dysfunctional, and you would expect to see extremely dysfunctional and toxic people flourishing in that atmosphere.
Bollocks. I've worked with plenty of ruthless, absolutely out-to-get-you sociopaths in brand-name corporations that I'd bet most of you'd know. Just cuz there wasn't out-and-out yelling doesn't mean it was nice, and most were far more dysfunctional than the military orgs I was involved with while enlisted.
There is something to be said for not shying away from conflict and having it out.
I take your point, but if somebody called me a 'porky pig' in the first month of a new job, I'd probably a) quit, and b) assume the organization was seriously messed up. I'm not a particularly sensitive person, but I don't want to waste my time on an organization where high levels of interpersonal aggression is normal.
Intuitively, you'd expect organizations that have management styles that make everybody miserable to have high turnover and low productivity. That's why it doesn't make sense to me when militaries actively teach and propagate management styles that are, by normal standards, misery-inducing.
>I take your point, but if somebody called me a 'porky pig' in the first month of a new job, I'd probably a) quit, and b) assume the organization was seriously messed up.
Even if that job requires physical fitness?
As another stated, it's a good thing that such people quit basic training.
I was a Chief and got out at 16. They made me CMEO so instead of doing my job, I was handling Equal Opportunity and Harassment complaints, which are taken very seriously. When I was told of something, I had mandatory reporting timelines and had to send messages to big Navy, NCIS, etc. Nearly all of the complaints were from junior sailors who lacked the resiliency to withstand an ass chewing or were suicidal because their Chief made them work late correcting something they messed up. It was all very strange and it wasn’t worth the mediocre retirement pay. I am much happier as a civilian.
I have a brother-in-law (a chief) leaving 3 years prior to retirement for the same reason. Except it’s exactly the opposite. They’re not allowed to yell anymore, have a lot of limitations on punishment, and have to accept things like enlisted being late to work. They’re leaving because they think the military is on a downtrend and can’t control the high schoolers under their command.