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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 t

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. [0]: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/96-103/pdfs/96-103.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/96-103/pdfs/96-103.pdf [1]: https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/pages/report_number_serve.xhtml https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/pages/report_number_serve.xht...

CobaltFire 5y ago
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.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  > 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.
  - tekknik 4y ago
    That was a lot of scrolling for a lot of nothing. Do you have anything to say or just filling space?

CobaltFire 5y ago

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.

pasabagi 5y ago
> 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.
- tekknik 4y ago
  That was a lot of scrolling for a lot of nothing. Do you have anything to say or just filling space?