I’ve never been an enlisted man or an officer, so I don’t have any experience with what either one entails, but at a sufficient level of abstraction, every job comes down to some combination of deciding and acting. The fact that officers “decide” for a larger number of people doesn’t mean that one effectively learns to make the sort of decisions an officer has to make by learning from the practices of noncommissioned officers and scaling up.
I recommend Absolutely American by David Lipsky, about the West Point experience. It left me with a lot of questions about what is going on in the officer training program.
The graduates seem well-trained, but still, they are ordinary schmoes like you and me, not some sort of stereotypical leadership figure—emotionally and physically strong, determined, foresightful, brave, etc. And why were some of these people sent off to the finance corps? Can’t the army fill the finance corps in another way?
I also wondered why there are both West Point and ROTC—both produce officers, so is one “better” than the other? Or are they thought to produce the same level of quality, but the two programs just offer a choice to the potential officers?
But to bring it back to the point of this post, the concise answer is that officers are trained to be a different class of person from the enlisted—an arbitrary distinction which may correlated with many characteristics but ultimately is a formal classification of soldiers into two types.
I’ve never been an enlisted man or an officer, so I don’t have any experience with what either one entails, but at a sufficient level of abstraction, every job comes down to some combination of deciding and acting. The fact that officers “decide” for a larger number of people doesn’t mean that one effectively learns to make the sort of decisions an officer has to make by learning from the practices of noncommissioned officers and scaling up.
I recommend Absolutely American by David Lipsky, about the West Point experience. It left me with a lot of questions about what is going on in the officer training program.
The graduates seem well-trained, but still, they are ordinary schmoes like you and me, not some sort of stereotypical leadership figure—emotionally and physically strong, determined, foresightful, brave, etc. And why were some of these people sent off to the finance corps? Can’t the army fill the finance corps in another way?
I also wondered why there are both West Point and ROTC—both produce officers, so is one “better” than the other? Or are they thought to produce the same level of quality, but the two programs just offer a choice to the potential officers?
But to bring it back to the point of this post, the concise answer is that officers are trained to be a different class of person from the enlisted—an arbitrary distinction which may correlated with many characteristics but ultimately is a formal classification of soldiers into two types.