Models of education in general fascinate me, and modern militaries in general, particularly the american (since that is the only one I have any vague knowledge of), seem to be extremely good at taking lots of people and making them proficient in lots of complicated stuff in a small amount of time.
Now my understanding is, and please correct me if I am wrong, that the angry drill-sergeant traumatize-the-crud-out-of-the-young-uns approach to basic military training seems to have been adopted by a number of large militaries around the world. As such, I have two questions:
Where did this model originate, and when did it become widespread?
What is the point of this model? E.g., what, in the eyes of the administration, makes it preferable to alternative, less traumatic formats of presenting information?
What got me wondering, though, is that I was under the impression that basic training in WWI-WWII, for the US anyway, was much more informal than it is today. I guess that’s incorrect though…
Roman children had military drills daily (except for holidays). Spartans, even on holidays; heck, on holidays they got the usual ration plus exhibitions (I’m half-joking here and no cite). During the Hundred Years War, English bowmen were clearly superior to French ones because, among other things, the English were required to train archery with the men of their village (i.e., with the men of their unit) when not drafted.
Historic movies rarely show you how young many of those soldiers were; people were whinning about Angelina Jolie playing Olympia to an actor that’s one year away from her age-wise… but nobody complained about Alexander not been played by a 17-yo. You can’t be an effective lieutenant at 14 or a general at 17 if your training has been half-assed.
In Gwynne Dyer’s companion book to his documentary Anybody’s Son Will Do, he cites a writing from ancient Egypt of how recruits are locked up in their barracks and beaten until they’re turned into soldiers.
Oh, it was different in that up to the World Wars the US Army used an old-style Regimental model by which “Basic” was not provided at specific centralized locations by professional Drill Sergeants attached to Training Command, but rather by NCOs taken from the regiment/division cadre. They would still seek to “shape up” the raw recruits by putting the Fear of God and Greater Fear of Sarge into them. There WAS a standardized manual and procedure, but some would be more strict to it than others.
IIRCl the “modern” style recruit-training NCO role derives from the Prussian Army. Its widespread adoption responds to the fact that a systematic, uniform, *intensive * entry training that weeds out the physically or mentally unfit works to make acceptable soldiers out of blokes off the street in a reasonable time; though you do have wide variations in application and interpretation, from near-inhuman hazings (like the Russian military is notorious for) to more of a “I gotta know I can trust you to cover my back so I can cover yours” thing in other countries.
Oh, I see!! I guess I should’ve asked “How has training changed,” since it appears as if the regimental, “recruit mill” style that we see in the modern US has been adapted in other locations for far longer.
On a related note, I always find it interesting how you look at photos of modern active-duty soldiers and they’re almost always in good physical shape, whereas you look at WWII-era stuff and they always appear a bit… dumpy. (take a look at any photo ever taken of macarthur and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. )
I read somewhere that the WW II military in the USA had serious problems with recruits and inductees that couldn’t pass the entrance medical exam. I’m guessing that the great depression had seriously affected the health of that generation.
Jean Martinet is also credited with having introduced the modern system of training that allowed raw recruits to be rapidly turned into reliable soldiers.
Also, don’t confuse or conflate the various phases of training.
A new US Army recruit goes to basic training & gets yelled at & worked night & day for a couple months. At the end of that he/she is in great shape, thinks a lot like a soldier, & can shoot a rifle & throw a grenade.
If his/her job specialty is going to be helicopter mechanic, then a totally different process begins: tech school. It’s like super-duper college. No yelling, no 0400 marching. Just 8 hours a day in class, no cutting, no weekday partying, lots of studying each night.
The material has been very carefully designed to teach just what’s needed at an appropriate level of complexity for the user. Trcuk mechanics learn how to fix trucks, not how to engineer new ones. Very little theory, all practice. Daily quizzes, hands-on practice as appropriate.
Same story for cooks, artillerymen, radar operators, missile launchers, etc. More complex jobs have longer schools.
It is utterly different from the civilian job model where you’re hired expecting you already know how to do your job and will pick up any localisms by osmosis in the first couple weeks.
FWIW, a friend of my FIL, who retired from the Navy as a Master Chief, and spent plenty of time on ships, and quite a long time as a recruiter and bearer of bad news during the Vietnam era, never attended any type of boot camp.
He enlisted in the Korean war era, and got put right onto a ship. I thought this was odd, but after questioning him a bit further, he said it was “Sink or Swim training.” As he retired honorably after 30 or so years, I’d say he swum pretty well. All of his initial training was on his first ship, and according to his reports, he made plenty of mistakes that were quickly corrected by HIS Master Chief.
I’m sure that this was the exception though, rather than the rule, even during times of rapid induction of soldiers/sailors.
I would think the main motivation is to create soliders that will obey orders that can lead to death. Normal people don’t do that. For an army to function, soliders must do it.
Yes, and, it seems the OP was in part looking at the concept of “Basic Training” as “Boot Camp”, the intensive, relatively brief, systematic course that takes an assortment of variously apt or fit individuals off the street in one end, and at the other end spits out a group of people that can then be sent to the various commands prepared to be put to duty or further specialized. This “factory” model, whereby EVERY enlistee goes to Basic at a fixed set of stations that do nothing but, only became universal by the mid-20th Century.
But the concept of a basic training, whether it’s a boot camp or mentoring under an elder warrior, that takes motley recruits and gets them to a certain standard before assigning them to the frontline, had been going on for a while, because generals noticed that when:
Army A is a mob of X many random peasants whom you grab off the fields, give weapons and tell “when I say so, walk forward and kill those other guys before they kill you”; and
Army B is a group of equally X many people who have some standard of training they meet as to how to handle weapons, learned to work together with others in the group and which are the ones who can give the orders, have been whipped up into enthusiastic support of your cause, and have been advised that if they run or defect, there’s hell to pay;
…Army B tended to perform better
The disposition to follow orders and form a primary-group association with your comrades so you stand fast in the face of death need not only be achieved through a fixed-time training course – it can be something natural to you… but it’s unwise to rely on that you’ll produce a crop of spontaneous heroes larger than that of the guy next door. And this does not have to be a brief, intensive program: it may also be achieved though a longer-term “life conditioning” track where your very upbringing is preparation for it, such as, taken to its utter extreme expression, the Spartans.
)