How much better, if any, would soldiers trained from birth be?

In My Humble Opinion
41

No, this is not the real goal of military training. Have you ever met anyone who went through basic training? Or spent years in the military?

You’ve heard of the Boy Scouts, yes?

Of course, the real reason no government takes infants and trains them from birth to be soldiers is that it takes 18 years to do so, and that’s expensive. Why not have their parents pay their expenses for those 18 years, THEN draft them and put a rifle in their hands?

How exactly would a military academy for young children be different than an orphanage? Like, lots of extra screaming and abuse to toughen them up? How are you going to train kids to obey orders when everyone giving them orders is an abusive asshole? You’re not training them to obey orders, you’re training them to hate, fear, and despise authority figures. The first thing to happen when you put a gun in the hands of one of these kids is he pulls a Gomer Pyle and splashes his driill instructors brains all over the barracks.

42

The idea here is not that we would put 8 years old boys and girls in combat, is it?
Because that, my fellow Dopers, is just silly.
However, if you can imagine the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts being modified into something that allowed some combat training (like how to break down a semi-automatic rifle, clean it, and then fire it effectively, AND get a scout badge) well then we might have something.

Haven’t any of you been scouts? It is rather ‘regimental’. You all wear uniforms. You all camp out at night. You eat crappy food and you are forced to march for long distances wearing packs. Sounds just a bit like “Army-Lite”. I never made Eagle, but those who did were treated like freaking rock-stars. That is because it takes a huge amount of dedication to a goal. THAT, it what we want from our proposed children soldiers.

So, after thinking about it, I think we already have a children’s corp ready to take their hands to weapons when they reach the age of majority.

Now, if we are talking about giving a Webelo (that would be a 12-13 year old Cub Scouts) an AK-47 and sending him to Iran to invade and take a nuclear facility… hmmm maybe not so much.

This resonates with the ‘take all children and raise them in a creche’ thread from ZPG.
It is a really, really crazy notion.

My son joined the Marines at 18.
Holy OG, was his mother unhappy.
Fortunately, he was never in combat.

I have grandchildren that run around pretending to kill ‘terrorists’ with their unarmed (but real) rifles. Just like we used to do playing ‘Army’ or ‘Cowboys and Indians’. Except my mother required that it be airguns and not real working rifles. Even so, there was more than one incident of ‘not so’ friendly fire.

“You could out someone’s eye with that Daisy 50, Billy”
“You bet, maw, and from 75 yards!”

Here in the USA we have always trained our young men (and now women) to be warriors.
It is part of our culture.
We just don’t send them out until they are ready.

That would about 18 or so.

43

This is probably the best serious answer.

44

Except, how exactly do you train children in this way?

It’s a scientific fact that children that grow up without being loved will turn into fuckups. You can’t train a kid to be loyal to you unless you’re loyal to the kid. You can’t train a kid to respect authority unless they see that authority earns their respect. You can’t treat a child as an object and not have them grow up thinking of you as an object.

So to take the examples cited above, the warrior caste either ruled the society, or came to rule the society, because they weren’t loyal to their masters, or the nation, they were loyal to each other. So raising a bunch of slaves to be ultimate soldiers is a great idea if you don’t mind them shooting you in the face and making themselves the rulers of your country.

If all you want are tough kids who will obey orders no matter how stupid or crazy or suicidal then follow the example of the Soviets in WWII. Conscript millions of 18 year olds, and if the first few don’t obey orders, have them shot and then give the orders again. This is simple and effective and the teenagers are provided to the state for free by their parents.

Or if you want elite troops, then conscript millions of teenagers, give them some tests, and make the best 1% your elite troops. And again you don’t have to waste time training some kid who’s going to break his neck at 16 in a snowboarding accident, or the kid who’s going to grow up weak and asthmatic, or the kid who’s going to crack under the strain and put a bullet in his brain. Some kids will be better than others, and you just make the best your elite troops.

Of course in most authoritarian countries the “elite” troops aren’t elite fighters, instead of being chosen for their fighting ability they are chosen for their loyalty to the regime and willingness to obey orders. So when you want a village of political unreliables massacred, you call in your elite Republican Guard. When you want to actually fight another army you keep your pampered elites well away from the front and let your more questionable conscripts take the casualties.

45

Those are the official military academies, which are colleges owned by the military and you need to be college-age to enter. What ZPG Zealot was talking about are boarding high schools/middle schools which call themselves “military” but have no actual legal association with the US military.

46

Right. These are the military academies that asshole parents in 80s teen comedies were always threatening to ship the slovenly heroes off to. But they aren’t actually affiliated with the military, they’re just boarding schools with a military theme. I have no idea on statistics for military-themed high schools and how many kids go on to enlist in the military and how they do compared to kids who went to traditional schools. You’d also have to consider the selection bias, the kids whose parents decide send them off to schools like these aren’t a random sample.

47

In practice, it would be exactly like an orphanage, except the end goal would be to prepare them to contribute to the military instead of society as a whole.

48

“I don’t know, but I’ve been told… IT’S A HARD KNOCK LIFE, FOR US!”

49

Now imagine Annie with a gun

50

Yes, and so what’s the point? You have an orphanage that shoves a bunch of political propaganda down the kids throats? And this will turn them into super-soldiers how, exactly?

Thing is, the best case scenario for such a military orphanage is that it just doesn’t work. The kids grow up and turn out to be fuckups as soldiers. And all you’ve done is waste a bunch of time and money and created a bunch of miserable neurotic people who are going to spend the rest of their lives making a bunch of other people miserable.

Worst case and these military orphans turn out to actually have the loyalty and cohesion and fighting spirit you wanted. And then they kick the ass of your regular troops and make themselves the rulers of the country.

A free country requires a military that also believes in freedom. And that means the soldiers have to be regular people who consider themselves part of the larger society, who see the values and goals of the military as aligned with the values and goals of the larger society. If the people who make up the military don’t give a shit about the country, then you’d better hope to hell that they aren’t organized or good at fighting, or else your country is going to become a military dictatorship.

But if your country is already a military dictatorship this idea still isn’t a good one, because no military dictator wants to end up shot by his own troops. Dictators don’t rule by themselves, they have people who carry out the orders because they are part of the power structure of the country. So once the military caste takes control, they have to purge the former power base of the dictator, and so why keep the dictator? How does the dictator retain control over both factions, the original power base and the new military caste when these factions are fighting each other for control of the country?

Note that all dictators have their private “elite” troops, as I said before. But these troops are populated with the children of the people who benefit from the dictatorship. This is why they are chosen, because of their loyalty. The parents are the ones who instill loyalty to the leader in these kids, not state brainwashing. And note that it’s not all fake propaganda, these people really do benefit from being part of the leader’s favorites. Good food, good schools, good jobs, problems get squashed for you, and so on.

51

Our Navy SEALS, Special Forces, Army Rangers and other Special Operations troops are already some of the most highly trained, skilled and motivated soldiers in the world. In the context of controvertial wars like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, what additional capabilities would this trained from birth sodiers provide? It seems to be part of the American fallacy that better weapons win wars when what is needed is better overall strategy and implementation.

Yeah, but they aren’t usually the most elite soldiers against anything more than barely armed civilians.

52

I don’t think this hypothetical child-training program would result in more-elite soldiers, just MORE elite soldiers. And there would be a larger pool to draw officers from, I guess.

I don’t see why this system would need to isolate kids from the rest of society and from their parents in order to succeed. Are cadets at military academies totally isolated from society and from their parents? No, obviously not - this youth training thing would just be an earlier-age version of that.

53

Really? Where are you getting this from?

Nowhere does it say anything about which point you dump them into the front line and ask them to get their kill face on. Realistically, a country ‘similar to America’ is going to realise full well that putting pre-adolescents into combat is a waste of time. They’re not strong enough to carry heavy weapons around, they can’t handle extended periods of physical and mental stress well enough, they aren’t tall enough to see over the dashboard of a transport truck or reach the pedals of a tank - it’s just silly. Child soldiers are dangerous in the way crazy armed people usually are, but a competent army is mainly going to find them difficult in the sense of being slightly smaller targets.

On the other hand properly trained soldiers who have adult physique but the well-known teenage enthusiasm for risky, exhilarating activity plus an untainted dose of youthful idealism and zeal are often rather effective.

My impression was that the Pioneers were basically scouts with a bit of communist indoctrination on top. Lots of learning useful skills, how to cooperate with others in doing things, respecting a hierarchy while imbibing the True Philosophy of Our Rulers.
Although, thinking about it, that’s probably exactly what Baden Powell started out too, it’s just in the west we prefer to gloss over the political aspect of things.:eek:

We also try to train kids in mathematics, reading, nutrition, hygiene and so on, with equally varying degrees of success. Which is probably the best argument against the scheme as envisaged by the OP.
It might end up rearing a generation of uber-warriors who’d rather turn on, tune in and drop out than live the warrior lifestyle any longer, and how embarrassing would that be when you wanted to invade someone and your Spartans turned up in tie-dye handing out hugs and spliffs?

54

My dad lived the OP’s scenario. In the 1940’s My grandmother was a single mother in show business, so in exasperation she shipped him off to military school at age 8. (If Wikipedia were up today, I’d link to the list of defunct military schools in the US as long as your arm)

Some of the things he’s told up about a child in a military environment:

Bedwetting (as any scared little boy would do) was cured by having the offender hand his mattress up to dry at the end of the parade ground.

Fights between boys were resolved by pulling the offenders apart, then scheduling them to go at each other on Friday night in the boxing ring.

Any boy seeking privacy was assumed to be a masturbator. Any two boys palling around in private were assumed to be homosexual. No other proof was required: guilt was fixed firmly and permanently. This may not seem like a big deal to the casual reader, but that culture was extremely hostile to both these practices.

If a boy was unable to adapt to military culture, and its routine punishments proved ineffective, he would be dismissed from the academy. But first he would have a private counseling session with the commandant, a retired army major; who would bounce the kid around his office one last time for the good of society at large.

After my dad left military school, he naturally enlisted in the military. After boot camp, he was asked to stay on as a drill sergeant. He met my mom, who didn’t want to “life out” as a military wife, so he went into civilian industry.

I don’t think my dad was conditioned to be an elite warrior by his experience, but he was thoroughly institutionalized. Not much different from the boys who’d been sent to reform school then graduated into the adult penal system.

55

Kids don’t belong in the military. Child soldiers are an abomination. African nations force kids to fight their wars for them and from a humanitarian point of view it’s disgusting.

56

Sometimes I really, truly believe that I’m on a lot of peoples’ ignore list. The reason why is that so many of my posts go totally ignored, as you can see from the post above this one.

Oh my God - NOBODY is talking about actually sending in “child soldiers” to fight and KILL anyone. As I have said already, and as others have said,

  1. the “child soldiers” in the African nations you’re talking about are NOT SOLDIERS, they have no real training, they’re total incompetents, most of them are on drugs or drunk, they are led by lots of other incompetent “warlords” who themselves have very little training…these are just hoodlums with guns (which they can’t even hold properly.)

  2. the kids in this proposed scenario (you know, the one we’re talking about in this thread) would not enter the ACTUAL MILITARY until they were over 18. All of the training up until that point would be just that…TRAINING.

Jesus H. Christ, people.

57

Yes, as I said before they’re “elite” only in the sense that they get better treatment and have more prestige. They aren’t elite fighters. Their job is not to fight enemy soldiers, but rather the internal enemies of the regime. Break up strikes and demonstrations, put down mutinies, dissappear journalists, seize embassies, massacre civilians and so on.

58

But what if the hobo had a shotgun?

59

Maybe that is how it started out. By the 70s (when I was in the “Young Pioneers”) it was a pro-forma organization that every kid belonged to (literally - every kid in my school of the right age was a “Young Pioneer”) and that really had nothing to do with scouting except maybe once a year with a field trip.

60

The military apparently considers that some childhood training is effective at making good soldiers; if you’re an Eagle Scout and you enlist in the US Military, you go in automatically as an E-3, I believe.

Not to junior mod, but the question isn’t whether or not child soldiers are a good idea; they’re not. But it is conceivable (and IMO likely) that adult soldiers trained from childhood to be soldiers are more effective soldiers as a result. Like someone said, they might not be better than the best we have now, but instead of a few battalions of say… Ranger or Airborne caliber troops, a nation instituting such training might have a much larger proportion of their troops of that caliber, which could either be distributed among normal soldiers, or concentrated in ‘elite’ units.