Comment on Anon follows orders

• thebestaquaman@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Not really, it’s more nuanced than that. It’s about an inevitable division of responsibilities. In an effective fighting force, every individual cannot be equally responsible for all levels of strategy/tactics. At the same time, in an effective fighting force, every individual must have a rather high degree of trust in their nearest commander and brothers in arms.

  The consequence of this is that an effective fighting force inevitably becomes susceptible to misuse by higher-ups. If you’re able to highjack enough of the command chain, it becomes very difficult for the remaining parts to figure out what’s going on and do the right thing. It’s more than just “soldiers are brainwashed”.

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  • Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    it’s more nuanced than that

    That’s what the “with more words” was about. They weren’t giving a nuanced analysis. They were simply stating something in plain language that easily explains the situation for polite conversation.

    We get that it’s systemic but it is still true that a symptom of those systemic forces is soldiers are preconditioned to follow orders of their command without questions due to an ingrained sense of implicit trust which is fundamental to the function of military structure.

    Now there are the many different flavors of Imperialist philosophy in favor of centralized systems that assert it is an unfortunate necessity to maintain the interests of the state and there is also the philosophy of anarchism which asserts that a decentralized, federated military is possible which avoids the trappings of centralized authority overreach but that is a much deeper discussion about a completely different topic that I’m a bit rusty in my reading on.

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