Let’s imagine a country similar to America, but with two major differences
Cultural attitudes towards war make very few people volunteer and conscription untenable.
People are cool with the government forcefully adopting all illegitimate children to train up for the military.
Leaving aside all questions of ethics or economics, the prepostriousness of the scenario, or the problem of a soldier elite with weak ties to society; How effective would the military be?
How best would they be trained?(Let’s assume there are competant trainers)
How much more would the government go to protect it’s 18yr+ investment?
Would there be a big gender difference what with boys and girls being treated and conditioned the same
Using children as soldiers is unfortunately commonplace in certain conflicts. You do not get super-soldiers. You get children with guns.
Take a look through some of the reports from this Google search: child soldier site:unicef.org
We worked on some of them (the reports you’ll find, not in the field) when Mrs. Devil was pregnant and for a year or so afterwards. Very chilling.
Strict, regimented and organized training might make a difference, but overall militarization of children cannot have good outcomes for their long-term psychosocial existence.
I assume in this scenario they are not utilised operationally until they are of age. The OP mentions the 18yr investment the goverment has in each soldier.
Interestingly, the SF novel, Ender’s Game, deals with this.
I assume that you have all heard of The Last Starfighter as well.
The general premise is that children’s reaction speeds are higher than adults.
In the OP’s scenario maybe, but in reality yes they do; forget about boot camp and classrooms, think “ok, kid, you’re one of us now, shoot your neighbor through the head. Shoot him, or I shoot you.”. Also, note that what’s “of age” for you or me is not necessarily every time and place’s “of age”; an America which enslaved part of its population would not be the one we know.
What was that line? “In WWII the average age of the combat soldier was 26. In Vietnam it was 19”. And in other places, it’s younger than that.
In some specialties, training for many years pays off quite well. In others, you hit diminishing returns very quickly.
Take heavy cavalry. One of the reasons there was a nobility in the middle ages was that heavy cavalry was very powerful. But to have effective heavy cavalry, you needed to train for many years, often from childhood. Those who had trained their whole life to be heavy cavalry had bargaining power.
To a lesser extent, the same can be said of archers.
Now look at musket warfare. You quickly hit diminishing returns with musket-armed soldiers. Training someone for years to use a musket and drill would not be worth it. Notice how the nobility’s influence started waning sometime after the development of the musket. The nobility no longer had as much bargaining power as they did in the middle ages.
So what roles are we talking about? Snipers, fighter pilots or officers generally would likely be much more effective if trained from birth than those who got a few years of training and experience. With most specialties though, you’d hit dimishing returns quite quickly.
The early janissaires would be another good example. Like mamluks, they seized the power. But both groups were virtually alone in providing a way forward for talent. Nowadays adult based armies try to lift the talented to the top, too.
The last thing the US armed forces need is an elite troop that would win the decisive battles in a few hours faster. What is desperately needed, is a shitload of shitty, cheap boots on the ground to win the occupations. So I assume that the OP is planning to use these soldiers inside the US. This was the original motivation for mamluks and janissaires, too. They can really put an iron boot on everybody from Wall Street bankers to hobos.
To make sure the soldiers have more compatible genetics and constitutions we’ll probably need clones, and to keep them from questioning their lives or humanizing with the enemy we should give them short lives say oh four years? ;)
A Spartan child could be trained from the age of around 7 (not birth) partly because the skills needed to succeed on the Peloponnesian battlefield were unchanging from generation to generation. Also, the phalanx formation required such close cooperation that it benefited from endless training with his peers.
Although it’s possible to exaggerate this (there are some universal constants still) modern warfare changes more rapidly. The skills needed might be different 18 years later. For example, 18 years is the difference between 1972’s Vietnam War and 1990’s Gulf war, with people surrendering to remote drones.
No need for a specialty, you could train them in teamwork, physical fitness, survival, weapons, military history etc until they are old enough to join the real military and learn a specialty.
You could, but the question is how much better would they be. How much better they would be depends on the training’s rate of return in a given specialty.
To take physical fitness as an example, running a mile more specifically: There are severely diminishing returns on that. Going from an 8 minute mile to a 7 minute mile is easy. 7 to 6 requires some dedication. 5 to 6 will require serious work. 5 to 4 requires making it a fulltime job. If they’re in the special forces, that can make a significant difference. If they’re driving tanks, not so much.
Same for military history. While spending 10 years studying military history will be useful for a field grade officer and above, a grunt wouldn’t benefit much from it.
I saw a documentary on Gurkhas that showed how children are groomed to be one of the select few who make it to the British army and lift their families out of poverty: “To many villagers, service in the British Army represents a significant economic opportunity, and in some areas soldiers’ remittances support the local economy.” There’s intense competition to be one of the few selected, which sure seemed to start pretty young, from the documentary I saw.
PLOT "In the near future, as part of a new military recruitment and training program (“Project Adam”), a group of infants are selected at birth to be raised as soldiers. Undergoing extreme mental and physical training, they become virtual sociopaths, with no understanding of anything except military routine and war. "
Possibly. Or you may get the Hitler Youth, Young Pioneers, or similar. Most countries used to take pains to get people into the army early. The British armed forces will take kids into the Combined Cadet Force from 13 I believe, and the US is probably similar.
Realistically, what you would probably be looking at is a scenario where everyone rocks up into the army when they are physically adult enough to carry a combat load (16-18 ish depending) but with 10+ years of learning how to shoot, read maps, sneak around the woods in the dark, use radios, fix radios/cars/tents, dig holes, solve problems as part of a team, and whatnot. No boot camp required since they’ve done that stuff their entire adolescence, straight into the advanced ‘killing people and blowing stuff up’ courses.
Just the outdoorsy, hands-on and physical fitness aspects would probably be an enormous boon to the Lee Erney types.
Not “possibly”, slaphead: what Rythmdvl is talking about is not Young Pioneers, it’s children with their age in single digits killing people. Getting those kids retrained to function in normal society is an enormous challenge.
Getting people trained since childhood in skills which can later have military use without creating a class that’s not “separate from society” can be done (see English archers in the 100 years war, for example, or the aforementioned medieval nobility); classes of slaves too; but what R is talking about is not “training since childhood and going to war once they’re grown up” - it’s children killing. Not children “in training to someday maybe perhaps be soldiers”, but children who are already killing.
