Here's a way to start your weekend early while awaiting the next round of NCAA "March Madness" to begin - a casual mix of ideas; some good, some not-so-good.
And so it goes...
Richard 
The Times They Are A-Changing: A Few Thoughts on American Military Discipline and Organization
SWJ, 22 Mar 2013
Part 1 of 2
Like its politicians and its war, society has the teenagers it deserves. - J. B. Priestley
As 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. But high technology is neither a stable nor enduring character of war. 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. Failing to maintain the organizational discipline of the military is far more problematic than failing to keep in lockstep with the latest technological offerings.
Every 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. Yet we are charged with enforcing higher standards and stricter discipline than that enjoyed by civilian society. 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. 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. 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. 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 need to prevent that from happening and maintain the rigor and vigor which boot camp instills in young men and women. What follows are a few painless organizational tweaks that can help reshape American military discipline.
Shape Behavior Through Meaningful Rewards
American youth understand rewards differently than do their elders. 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. 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. If we aren’t getting what we want from younger service members, it’s at least partly because our system of punishment and rewards is broken. They need tangible reasons to act the way they are supposed to, or they will simply slip back into old habits.
There are few rewards in the military commonly given to junior members which carry any value beyond that of public praise. Although we might say that doing a job well done is inherently rewarding, most 18 and 19 year olds do not share that view. Most see the military as a stepping stone to other careers, meaning that if we do not actually provide rewards there is no real incentive for them to do more than “just good enough”. Creating a reward structure that is actually meaningful to junior service members (hint: they really aren’t impressed by Certificates of Commendation) and encourages individual contributions to unit effectiveness would be an important step.
What we have currently is an “award structure” not a “reward structure” –ribbons and medals all have deep existential meaning for those of us who feel personally tied through tradition to the past and future communities of the military; but most young men and women have greater attachment and would be more encouraged by material rewards. And indeed, in an “all-volunteer, professional military” it would make sense for us to incentivize performance with monetary rewards much as is done in the rest of society. In fact, for the majority of history battlefield performance has been directly tied to monetary and material rewards through the accumulation of plunder, the granting of prizes, and the awarding of the titles, lands and property of the conquered to one’s loyal soldiers. It was only in the late modern era, with its use of mass conscript armies motivated by patriotism or revolutionary zeal that rewards became bureaucratized into awards and the quotidian replaced by the symbolic.
Obviously, I am not suggesting that we encourage the taking of booty on the battlefield – and arguably any sort of rewards for individual bravery on the post-modern battlefield is self-defeating – but certainly, at least in garrison, rewarding individuals and units who perform better than others is a wholly logical and American thing to do. Pushing young Americans to do better and then rewarding them for their effort in a way they understand simply makes sense. Giving them not only the leadership and management skills to be effective military and civilian leaders, but also that responsibility, rather than emphasizing trade skills and the chance to get out early to go to college, is another.
(Cont'd)
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