I have obsessed about learning about
history for more than two decades. There are downsides to it and
there are upsides.
Some benefits that I came to recognise
are that I don't mistake many news about petty things as news about
hugely important things, another benefit is that I don't fall for
terrible politicians easily (though it happened once when I paid
attention to but a few of his policies) and finally, knowing history
teaches about the dominance of path dependency in our world. Just
about everything is a product of the past – and what path was taken
years, decades or even centuries age has a lasting impact on the
present and future.
History also shows us how things have
changed; the military used to be the single biggest organisation in
almost every European society only a couple decades ago, and
accordingly it had the most demand for innovation in how to run and
grow an organisation. Some management and personnel affairs tools of
today have their roots in 19th and early 20th
century military organisations' innovations. The civilian world
became more innovative at the latest shortly after the Second World
War, and the newer management tools have almost all been devised in
large civilian corporations, civilian start up companies,
universities or (these are the most stupid ones) business consulting
companies.
Enough of the introduction – did you ever
think about what training for the job as a soldier would look like if
the very concept of a military was invented only recently? Would it
look as it does or would it look very differently (which would mean
that the current training orthodoxy is a product of learning AND
especially path dependency).
I suppose if we had to start from
scratch we would look for an analogy – such as the police – and
adapt their professional training model. Police forces and the
military have a lot of similarities, including the rank system and
uniforms.
Police forces in Germany have a
thorough education and training program. You need to study for years
at a university of applied sciences to become a basic police(wo)man and, and
then you typically spend some time at the Bereitschaftspolizei,
which is a kind of mobile reserve of the police forces. You may
encounter them patrolling at crime hotspots, but more typical uses
are security at football matches, security at demonstrations and
other missions that require lots of law enforcement manpower in one
place.
Another path is that one may study law
for even more years and enter the upper career group of the police
(equivalent to officers).
Let's compare this to a typical Western military
professional training.
First, you enter a basic training that
typically turns you into a rifleman (at least if you join land
forces), and it lasts typically two to four months. Then you are sent
to many different courses or attend smaller courses First Aid et
cetera) where you're stationed at. Noncommissioned officers and
officers usually attend especially long (months) courses to become an
NCO or officer, and senior officers may do so as well to be promoted
past a certain NCO grade. Studying at a university of any kind is
typically reserved for officers, and the timing and nature of such
studies varies greatly. There are also military academies in some countries which unleash very young men as lieutenants onto the armed forces after months or few years of (para)military education.
(The watered-down personnel system and
requirements of the current Bundeswehr are so painful to think of
that I won't describe them – in fact my description above is
rather representative of careers in the early 1990's, things have gone
downhill since.)
Overall, it can be said that only
(soon-to-be) officers get a professional training with a broad
theoretical base that's somewhat similar to what's typical in the
civilian world.
NCOs and especially enlisted personnel
on the other hand get hardly any professional training, and all of it
is AFTER they entered the active forces.
Compare this to two years professional
training (part time on the job, part time school) that you need to
become a hair stylist in Germany, and two years worth of university
studies to become an NCO equivalent in a bureaucracy!
_ _ _ _ _
At some point the armed services
world-wide seem to have begun to lag behind equivalents in the
civilian world in their ambitions for professional education and
theoretical competency of the noncommissioned officers and especially
the enlisted personnel.
I don't think that soldiering is so
much easier than hair styling that there's little to no room for
improvement. It's also rarely very different from civilian
bureaucracy jobs
I suppose there were multiple reasons
for why the armed services began to lag:
- They didn't need to compete with civilian careers because of conscription. School graduates prefer a job with a respected and useful training over a similarly-paid job with a pointless training – the armed services simply grabbed personnel by threatening them with jail.
- To be an enlisted soldier is no good for the long term due to poor pay. Theoretically enlisted soldiers could serve in physically demanding specialties until hey lost fitness due to injury or age and proceed to more cushy support specialties afterwards. There are enough of the latter that enlisted soldier could be a lifetime career. It's the poor pay that rules this out.
- The armed services don't think that two years university of applied sciences training makes sense for enlisted personnel that typically enlists for two to four years due to their tunnel vision on active strength (which makes perfect sense if you think of them as a bureaucracy). It doesn't matter much to them that this personnel would continue to be reserve personnel for two more decades.
- There were no wars between great powers in which one power benefited from a substantially lesser lag. There's not enough incentive to overcome inertia as long as the benefits of it are not demonstrated to good effect. Much of the private sector is in a fierce competition or at least able to compare profitability, and thus has much more incentives to improve itself.
I admit it may be disputed that they began to lag in modern times and that they lagged - save for professional warrior castes such as knights - since the invention of standing armies. I think they began to lag because in Germany the dual system of training for jobs has begun to vastly exceed the training and education of enlisted troops at the very least. The terrible post-Cold War changes in the personnel system of the Bundeswehr (I don't mean the end of conscription here) also meant that reaching officer or NCO rank requires much less (if any) previous relevant education than to reach equivalent civilian positions.
The armed forces have improved the overall approach to professional education little post-WW2, while the civilian economy and civilian bureaucracies have greatly increased their expectations of candidates.
Well, what SHOULD professional military
education look like today?
This depends greatly on how you sources
your NCOs and officers. It's been a very successful model to let
everyone begin as enlisted (wo)man, advance to junior NCO if suitable
and then advance to either senior NCO or junior officer if suitable.
Training models in which "gentlemen" get a quick intro
about how to behave as officer* and then join the ranks as officer
have been less successful.
The 'through the ranks' model on the
other hand appears to have collapsed in all-volunteer forces where
the smartest candidates can only be lured into military service by
promising good pay from day one – and the inflexible bureaucracies
and politicians have found but one way to do so; they handed out advanced ranks ("Neckermann Stuffz") – NCO and lieutenant – as entry positions. This is understandable for
emergency room-experienced medical doctors, bridge engineers and the
like – but it's idiotic rank inflation if applied as widely as
nowadays in many Western armed services.
I think we
should go back to the West German model of the Cold War era; you can
advance to officer rank through the ranks, but many promising recruits enter the
force knowing that while they're at the lowest rank, they are
officially o track towards NCO or officer positions and will become
NCO or officer unless they fuck up. We have the rank suffixes UA and
OA (Unteroffiziersanwärter and Offiziersanwärter; NCO
candidate and officer candidate)
for this.
I don't think that basic military
training has to happen at a university of applied sciences. It should
rather take the German model for craftsman education and training as
a model. Three days active service at a military unit per week, two
days theoretical studies at a school per week. There's plenty theory
to learn; safety rules, navigation, don't rape your comrade (sigh),
driving theory, radio operation, friend or foe identification,
reporting, supply system, hierarchy – armed services have hundreds
of field and technical manuals full of theory, dozens of which are
more or less relevant to every soldier. The practical part would
follow the concept of trainees in major corporations; they would be
sent to different units to do different things and learn about the
organisation in general.
After two years of such studying we
would have a well-rounded basic soldier, and the armed service would
have enough test results and superior's reports to judge how best to
allocate the (wo)man. This might include him or her being sent
straight to NCO school, another year of theory and practical
experiences.
Juniors NCOs who served well and showed
promise for much more could be sent a university of applied sciences
for three years. The outcome would be training for and promotion to
senior NCO or lieutenant rank and a bachelor's degree in
business/administration/logistics/psychology.
Enlisted personnel that did service well
but didn't show enough promise for more should instead receive a
proper job training that's respected in the civilian economy as well;
car mechanic, aviation mechanic, gas turbine mechanic, heavy
lorry driver, nurse and so on. Enlisted personnel of the active force
should have an option to serve till retirement at enough pay to
sustain a family of four if the spouse works half time on minimum
wage.
Medical doctors could and should be
hired differently. I suppose one should give soldiers who passes the
basic two years training an opportunity to get a subsidised civilian
university education as a general physician, emergency surgeon or oculist followed by a
mandatory one year emergency room experience and then they could be
reservists with several weeks active service per year till the age of
60. This should yield enough of them on active duty at any given time
for the actual needs of the armed services.**
A parallel militia system could still make do
with a 6 month basic training with standardised six month militia NCO and militia officer courses more akin to the current active forces personnel system. The reason for this is that quantity helps a lot and many young men could be motivated for such short reservist duties who could not be motivated to enter a military career. The compensation for the short training would be a severe limitation of missions they would be considered capable of. The militia level of competence would likely be comparable to air force security units' competence.
_ _ _ _ _
Well, that's just my opinion, man. Other
opinions differ, and no doubt wildly so.
Nevertheless, I think I made it clear
that the current professional training models in use appear to be
obsolete remnants caused by path dependency and sustained by inertia in
absence of exogenous shocks. They are NOT optimally designed to
prepare young men and women for high effectiveness on the job as a
soldier in an army or air force.
S O
*: A little bit of exaggeration here.
**: The current medical branch of the
German armed services is inflated and oversized beyond belief. Its
personnel figures are worthless as an indicator for how much such
personnel armed services actually need in peacetime.
.
