Private Snuffy
After reading James' posts on intelligence-driven stratification in military and civilian life, a friend of mine who serves in the US Army offered the following thoughts.
In the end I just find Rockford impossible to agree with. Don’t get me wrong — many of the military are smart and capable, even occasionally frighteningly so. It’s just that inasmuch as what we do requires that kind of smarts — say the kind of cultural sensitivity and strategic flexibility that the Economist did a big front-page review on a couple months back — it’s at the command level (and not always then). This idea that mechanical or technical expertise requires that sort of thing, as in the examples Rockford gives — well, that’s flat-out bogus. What the military excels at is figuring out how to write up and SOP things so they’re idiot-proof for Private Snuffy. That doesn’t mean Private Snuffy is an idiot, but the system can allow him to be at least on his bad days.
That shouldn’t be news: everybody bitches about military cookie-cutter standardization and paperwork and repetitiveness. Very, very few military jobs really do call for creativity and innovation and even in bizarre unforseen combat situations I don’t know that selecting for “smart” soldiers — unless they’re some kind of super-geniuses — is gonna help you: instead you drill and drill and drill until the soldier can do certain things “on automatic.” That’s our paradigm. So a lot of your motor pools or medical labs or what-have-you are staffed by — well, the same type of competent-but-not-earthshakingly-so schelp you have running those things in the civilian world. Not surprising since the civilian world has, well, similar tasks out there. For the few exceptionally mentally demanding tasks, well, we got Warrant Officers. It’s hard for a soldier to stand out, for good or bad, in a technical military role (so when one does stand out as exceptionally good, he probably rocks.)
I also don’t get Rockford’s “the military gets the civilians but the civilians don’t get the military” concept — I mean, sure, the latter part is true. But I don’t see how the military guys have a lot of insight into (say)the coastal academic American establishment either — I mean, they have some, because they can watch the same TV and read the same papers and so on and by the “civilians” you mean, well, the great wash of everybody, so, sure. But the military culture is damn incestuous. The cities — Fayetteville, Watertown, Killeen, San Antonio — are pretty militarized themselves and are full of retirees: even the people who haven’t served themselves know a hell of a lot about day-to-day military life (again with the Goth, heavily-pierced teenagers at the malls who can spot your rank and call you “sir” — in my civilian world, they’re support to snicker at “the Man” and call you a fascist). That’s the world the kids of military grow up in, and it’s pretty alien to say the Bay Area or suburban New England or what-have-you.
The average enlistee’s IQ is a little over 100, but there’s not a lot of variation.
As this post points out, the military is very good at getting competence out of average people. It tries hard to avoid people in the bottom quarter of the IQ range, but it’s real good with getting good performance from people who aren’t college graduate material. In contrast, in the public schools, the average IQ is maybe 95, but the kind of repetitious training that the military does with people who average a little higher is unfashionable. Public school education tends to assume the kids are smart enough to be college graduates, so much of it goes right over the heads of half the kids.
— Steve Sailer · Dec 14, 01:35 AM · #
If a military person watches say, Desperate Housewives or Sopranos or Big Love he’ll certainly get the civilian life. Civilian life washes over so many areas of life that it is impossible for even the most inward looking military town to escape it. Many of which btw are closing down — see El Toro Marine Base.
My background is IT. Nearly all functions are being outsourced to India and elsewhere, the remaining ones with H1-B visas and a few highly paid “superstars” etc. From various conversations the same thing is happening in Electrical Engineering, and other technical fields.
Considering what my Navy friends describe as the typical Persian Gulf cruise (sand, sand, and more sand) you’d have to wonder WHY people sign up for these things. Particularly on loud, dangerous, and unpleasant aircraft carriers. And did I mention the heat? SOMETHING is going on, otherwise free-to-choose people would forget serving unless it brought them some benefit.
And consider combat arms. Infantry in the Marines is more white than the Corps itself, or population at large. Something is going on … the people in that unit are choosing to go into battle when they have (in theory at least) alternatives. The combat casualty lists show men from various small and mid-sized towns in the South, Plains States, and West.
Of course James is Army. My late uncle was a Marine (proof right there of superiority :>).
— Jim Rockford · Dec 14, 08:44 AM · #