Exactly. Military discipline is about following (lawful) orders when when doing so carries a signigicant risk of dying. Flexibility and independent thought are cultivated only within the context of carrying out the mission. Military training is about taking civilians and turning them into soldiers; it is not a government school for wayward boys.
When I worked in residential treatment, one of my supervisors criticized the Outward Bound program as taking troubled kids and turning them into troubled kids who knew how to work on a wagon train. My first hand experience with gang members in the military (ca. 1980) was pretty similar. They went from being petty street criminals to being petty street criminals who knew how to march, scrub a latrine, and shoot a rifle,
The most violent and far reaching gang around- Mara Salvatrucha- was formed by ex-soilders in El Salvador. America is no El Salvador, but this shows that military service can sometimes foster gang formation. Nor are Israeli youngsters the model of excellent mental health- and Israel isn’t winning many awards for how it uses it’s military nowdays. Israel doesn’t have an under privileged group like we do (except the Palestinians, look how thats working out) to form gangs, but the scars are still there and will manifest themselves one day.
Speculation is fun, but the origins of gangs is no mystery. They began with legit social clubs who felt like police protection wasn’t adequate in their area (or was indeed harmful) and sought to keep the peace themselves. In the late sixties/early seventies (not coincidentally a period where many young people were touched by the Vietnam war and the draft) was an era where more radical, political and heavily armed people began to join- and police clashes with them increased. Soon (some people will venture, thanks to government influence) the gangs began to turn on themselves. Soon criminal enterprises and feuds became more important than protection and social change, and this escalated to the situation we had in the 90’s. A lack of economic opportunities in affected areas only exacerbated the problem. Luckily, we’ve seen a sharp decline in gang violence since its peak in the 90s.
If we want to fix the “gang problem”, we need to keep doing whatever we just did, and perhaps address the concerns that led to the formation of gangs.
Must be workable even if it is rare. USATODAY.com - Judge offers a choice: Join the Army or go to jail
Care to prove that assertion?
BTW, Abbie Normal, what’s the judge’s plan when the military determines the man’s unqualified for enlistment (if they do so determine)?
Oh, Abbie Normal, did you read the entire article to which you linked? The judge didn’t offer the choice. Rather, the judge stated that she would decline sentencing if the offendor actually enlists in the military. That decision of the judge was based on the offendor’s attorney’s statment
The article also noted
Presumably, “We do that with misdemeanors all the time” means “declining to impose a sentence if the offendor meets conditions” and does not mean “We offer offendors the choice of the military or jail all the time.”
And the offense? Oh, domestic violence, or at least an attempt at domestic violence:
I understand the military is not too impressed by that particular activity.
Good point, if he tries to enlist and cannot what happens? I know they give waivers for certain negative things for an potential enlistee, but did the judge check beforehand? I read that article, and instantly thought of this thread. But as for it happening, before I read that I didn’t think it did either. Reminds me of part of a cadence we used to use.
“Got a letter in the mail, go to war or go to jail” or something along those lines, always thought it was just a cadence.
As for my opinion on this, I would not have wanted someone in my tank with me, that did not want to be there. Talk about uncomfortable.
On preview I seen that you read the article much better then I. And slightly OT but can you even hold a gun if you where charged with domestic violence?
Huh? Which part of it isn’t self-evident?
It seems to me pretty obvious that the military does teach military discipline. Soldiers have to obey orders, after all. And it seems equally obvious that the military doesn’t necessarily teach self-discipline.
I mean, if that’s what they were doing, then at some point they just wouldn’t need the military discipline anymore, right? “Okay, Private, you’ve been in for fourteen months and completed your self-discipline training. You are no longer subject to orders or punishments when it comes to following basic camp routine and military drill. We can trust you now to do what’s right on your own initiative.”
Nope, it don’t work like that in the army, not from the stories my dad told me, at least. Many soldiers do end up becoming very self-disciplined as a side effect of their military service, but the military isn’t specifically training them to transcend external authority and work without orders and rules. And ISTM that that’s what “teaching self-discipline” would have to involve.
What?
I hope this isn’t some reiteration of the old “there are no poor Jews” myth. There are poor Jews everywhere, including Israel. The thing is, the poorest ones tend to be the most religious - and therefore unlikely to form gangs.
Israel is teeming with mobsters - but that’s a different story from the kind of street thugs that we’re discussing here.
Seems to me that officer training might encourage the traits Kimstu refers to, through the emphasis on leadership skills. But then again, successful officer candidates aren’t the ones we generally think of as gang members. Or even gang leaders.
Well in my own experience many soldiers went to PLDC (Primary Leadership Development Course) and that was just to make E-5. Also in my own experience you sometimes start getting leadership duties as an E-4 (Specialist) They may not be much, and you still have to report to your chain of command, but some details you actually where in charge of. Even in OSUT (basic training, sort of) , they chose squad/platoon leaders, who where in charge of getting things done. That was a rotated duty, and a good portion of my platoon spent a week as one or the other. So they where teaching leadership skills from the start.
Actually, the way I heard it, they were joining and going into Supply and Transportation to learn all of the back-channel ways of making inventory “disappear,” or for helping to set up gang hijackings of arms shipments.
Of particualr desire were heavy machineguns, LAW rockets, M-16s w/M-203 g’nade launchers, and Claymores.
All-in-all, I ascribe it to ML, and expect to see it as the theme of Lethal Weapon 5, or some similar Hollywierd schlock.
Other than that, I’m with you; why force someone to fight that doesn’t want to be there? We all saw how well that went down in Vietnam, and the catastrophic results to the armed forces.
I don’t mean poor, I mean consistently marginalized by society. It’s not money that leads to this, it’s stuff like “driving while black”, the bungled Hurricane Katrina rescue, targetted drug laws, the restriction of who could buy property where that lasted until a generation ago, the fact that we still have threads about why names popular among African-Americans are or are not acceptable things to name your child…stuff like this leads to gang formation.
All of it. Just because you either want it to be true or you just imagine it to be true does not mean it’s true. Thus, my request for proof.
Soldiers do not have to obey unlawful orders. They are thus taught two important things when being taught that very simple fact: (1) military discipline, & (2) self-discipline.
IMHO, silly comments do not belong in GD. BTW, there are numerous times when a member of the military is supposed to do what’s right on his or her own initiative.
Aha! That’s your cite? Your dad’s stories?
Then perhaps you need to develop your perception a tad. The military really does teach certain aspects of self-discipline, apart from just military discipline.
This isn’t very accurate.
In the military you learn to take and follow orders, and you learn how to do whatever job it is you’re going to do in the military (not everyone is an infantryman.)
However, you do learn self-discipline. You learn to keep your things in proper order, you learn to keep yourself properly groomed, you learn to keep your clothes properly stored and you learn to wear them properly, you learn to get up at a given time each day. A lot of people do this kind of stuff normally, but before I joined the Army I sure didn’t. I was a slob, the military made me a more organized man. The more organized you are, the more structured your time. And in the military you also learned to get your daily tasks done, or else. You’d be amazed what kind of transition this can be for someone who is fairly “relaxed” with goals and achieving them.
Unlike most people in the military I learned these things (and a lot more) at the United States Military Academy, but this stuff applies to both enlisteds and officers. Officer training takes things a stup further generally, but both officers and enlisted men learn self-discipline.
On top of just learning to be neat and organized, you also learn to behave. In the military your personal conduct is under greater scrutiny on a day-to-day basis, and if you get out of line you’ll get your balls busted.
Does this create self-disciplined people? Not always, nothing is fool-proof, but there is a lot more to military training than learning to take orders, self-discipline is a big part of it.
As to the argument that the military increases violence in a culture, in some cultures I see that is definitely true. In the United States, not very likely. Most people don’t even join the military in this country or have any experience with military desensitation to violence. And, some of the countries that have compulsory military service have extremely non-violent societies, look at Sweden for example.
And in fact teaching self-discipline is one of the cornerstones of modern armies.
In many historical armies officers more or less ruled over bands of men who were just as disruly as any group of thugs you’d pull out of a modern day prison. The officers kept them in line with corporal punishment and the threat of death if they disobeyed or deserted.
The more successful militaries have always been those with a high degree of self-discipline and training. When the officers are essentially taskmasters and babysitters, the army in question is less effective as a fighting force.
AFAICT, this isn’t directly related to the point I was making. Sure, you personally became self-disciplined about your habits in the military, because you learned from the routine that was enforced on you. But the military did not specifically teach you to be self-disciplined in this fashion, or rely on your own improved self-discipline to keep you following the routine. They still maintained the rules and the punishments of the external discipline. You weren’t officially exempted from any of those.
ISTM that if the point was to teach you self-discipline, at some point they would have to remove the external discipline and trust you to operate without rules or punishments. And that doesn’t happen. Not for the average enlisted person.
So you’re saying that unless we have a system where we don’t punish enlisted men for various infractions, we aren’t teaching self-discipline? That’s highly disingenuous.
I’m not fluent enough in internet-acronymese so I have no idea what ISTM means but the idea that sans punishment is the only way to treat self-discipline is not a correct one.
In fact, I’m not really sure what type of point, if any, could possibly be made under that framework. You’re basically holding that self-discipline doesn’t exist, because no one whether they are in the military or private citizens operates without rules or punishments for breaking those rules.
Let’s look at one dictionary definition of self-discipline:
“Training and control of oneself and one’s conduct, usually for personal improvement.”
The key here is motivation, and intent. If the only reason a U.S. soldier follows the rules and routines is to avoid chastisement, then he is not practicing self-discipline. But both through routinization and subtle education the military also acitvely seeks to move men to the next level, to make them self-disciplined.
And a great many people that serve in the military get past the simple “avoidance” stage and actively move to the point where they look at their lives and their conduct and attempt to control and regulate it.
Furthermore the military knows that there will never be a way to track all soldiers, but it streses that you need to behave in a certain way no matter who is watching when you’re in the service of the United States. And to a great degree many of the soldiers do just that. Are they technically under the umbrella of rules and punishments? Yes, but that umbrella is porous and many men can get by with many things, to a large degree the behavior of the men is based on them TAKING the lessons they’ve learned and implementing them of their own free will. I don’t know what this is if it is not self-discipline.
Think of it like a parent-child relationship. One goal of any good parent is to raise a child that does what is right whether or not the parent is there to watch them. Children are expected their indiscretions, but most good parents also expect their kids not to cross certain lines because they hope that their children have become self-disciplined enough by a certain age to stay within a certain accepted level of behavior even when they are away from mom and dad’s watchful eyes.
Umm…what about the Ethiopean Jews? Who often complain about discrimination.
Or the ongoing (and seldom discussed) struggle between European Jews & Middle Eastern Jews? (“Teach us Yiddish, Golda!”) :dubious:
Israel has it’s problems, born of the diversity the Diaspora created among its far-flung children.
OK, I’m not Israeli, I’m not Jewish, and I have no idea what I’m talking about. Maybe they do have situations like white flight where whole demographics are abandon to areas where everything- from schools to the produce department of the local grocery- is worse. Maybe there are groups where things like the death sentence are disproportionately applied. Maybe they do have situations like Rodney King and that guy who was shot for holding his wallet. Maybe there are people who cabs won’t pick up. People who expect to get pulled over for no reason when driving in unexpected areas. Maybe the Israeli equivalent of “would you live in a black neighborhood” and “why do black people name their kids like that” would devolve into the same heads haking “why do those people act that way…” comments that they do here.
I don’t think anyone has talked about the effect of having a large number of gang members in the military. Imagine the Enterprise has rival gangs of its own, like any other population center of its size. These have to be kept separate, and closely monitored in order to keep violence from breaking out.