Or how about, instead of taking a bunch of young children and raising them in military orphanages, you just insist that the public schools add to their curricula programs X, Y, and Z to address deficiencies the military is seeing in incoming recruits. So if the military wants everyone to be able to run 10 miles before they hit boot camp, make that a waiverable PE requirement to graduate high school. Rather than, you know, taking a bunch of 5 year olds and having them raised by drill instructors.
Were they supposed to masturbate publicly?:eek:
That would be later, if the boy enlisted in the USMC 
(I’m not joking! The stuff that would go on in the Marine berthing compartments in the amphibious navy at sea…target practice with fuckbooks laid on the floor, judged for accuracy, distance and volume.)
Did you guys think I addressed the OP adequately? Military culture isn’t about “hurting people and breaking things.” It’s a culture that people live their everyday lives in, and it doesn’t lend itself to healthy childhood development. The closest analogy I could give is the English Public School system: all of those horrors, with none of the compensation of being in the upper class of society
You can look at kids in the NBA and see how they started in Little League, or the NFL and Pop Warner, but soldiering thoroughly reconfigures the participant’s entire life: replacing his family and removing his privacy and redirecting his sexuality and putting how he learns to “work the system” into a closed environment. Better than utter chaos for kids, but only just.
Here’s a list of defunct military academies. Although the article states that more than half are “still around,” that’s not accurate: it’s a method of treating our kids that we’ve largely put behind us. Too late for this kid, my dad (pdf photo)
OK, tough shit for the kids, but would it improve society at large, instead of having all these wild teenagers running around? Consider the analogy made between the Army and the old Eastern Bloc: a lot of nasty in-fighting at the top; layers of stupid bureaucracy in the middle; and at the bottom a mass of foot-dragging, surly but cowed workers. That’s the real, eternal military. It isn’t what they show in the recruiting ads. Imagine a world where everybody in the Mid-middle Class and below had the attitude of a DMV clerk. That’s what the OP’s scenario would produce.
Right. The thing about cultures where children were trained how to fight at very young ages is that it occured in the context of the family unit. It was your father, your older brothers, your uncles, your cousins, and so on that were training you, not random strangers. Or you could be fostered out to another family, but if you were then you were treated as a member of that family. And you were trained, not to obey orders without question and do as you are told, but to be a member of the ruling class, and being a warrior was what made you a member of the ruling class.
So the training of a medieval knight began at a very young age. But these knights in training weren’t slaves, they were being inducted into the ruling class by their elders. And notably, in the few cases where rulers really did try to use slave soldiers trained from childhood, these slave soldiers turned themselves into the new ruling class.
Something more like what the OP suggested would be the Soviet Nakhimov and Suvorov Schools, military boarding schools originally founded for some of the many war orphans of the Second World War, which have been suggested as an attempt to create a caste of Soviet Janissaries. As far as I know, they were never particularly effective.
Though I notice here that the Ekaterinburg Suvorov school proudly claims, “Eight graduates have been awarded title of Hero of the Soviet Union and Russian Federation, and more than a few officers who graduated from the school have high government awards for success in military and political activity, and for valor shown in fulfilling the tasks of the Motherland.” Maybe they were more successful than I thought.
Eagle scout or Girl Scout Gold Award will only get you E-2, not E-3.
I wonder how many people in this thread, if any have actually served in the military. I served in the USAF and while my opinion of it is not complimentary we need to correct a few notions.
The nature of boot camp is driven by the nature of the recruits. The military has a brief time to get yo to work together, and thus uses the most brutal, effective technique to get you to work as a team. The adversarial relationship is formed because the DI’s have to undue all the years of training you’ve already had in being a special snowflake. They have to “reset” you to a more default state so that you can be trained to be responsive to the needs of the military.
Children raised into military culture would not need or benefit from such harsh techniques; as they would have had 16-18 years rather than six weeks to slowly accumulate and polish the skills valued by basic instruction. Teamwork and utilization of skills would be second nature to them, and physical fitness would simply be a part of life rather then the realm of the athletically gifted. Other useful skills like marksmanship, survival, and basic mechanical aptitude can be taught as electives are now. None of this would damage children in any way whatsoever. It would merely ensure that they all come preprogrammed with the basic skills to adapt into military service.
That’s more or less what I was trying to say- they’d have the proper values for military service inculcated from a very young age.
I never actually said it in my posts, but I agree- there wouldn’t be much need for boot-camp style training. Hell, you could probably set something up with day cares and schools such that present-day kids would get the same values training without anything harsh, and without even any militaristic overtones.