> This is common among military-mindset types who scope out the problem they can't process and then claim to have solved it. They are rightly trained to ignore what is "above their pay grade."
I'm sorry, but you could not be more wrong. Even in the "conventional" Marine Corps infantry, we were not trained to ignore any problem. We were constantly being taught to take over the job of our superiors at a moment's notice. All downtime was filled with adhoc classes to train the lowest grunt to operate at several levels above his pay grade.
If you think SOF or even Marines defer silently to officers, you only know what you have seen on TV. You are just completely off base here.
Look at what he's saying, it's not a deep insight but there is a credible amount of truth to it.
At the bottom entry level units do defer. Boots stick around for morning formation after weekend leave still buzzed drunk because they're just told what to do and face consequences otherwise.
But then in the Corps the TIG promotions tend to weed those types out so that the motivated and qualified ones go upward the chain as NCOs. Then TIS promotions tend to be push those more qualified into SNCO roles.
To say that every single boot, or that every single service member is immediately capable of stepping up to be field officers because the one charge that was saluted all the time got sniped off is a ridiculous assertion.
But it is heavily incorporated, and more specifically in the Corps, for lateral movement up, or even down, a few ranks.
That's setup to optimize for the resiliency of the organization whereas in a corporation that's fragile because people working there are merely linked by bank account and therefore inspire no loyalty.
Similarly, not every company can hire and pick and choose from a bunch of highly motivated individuals like Google could. Skills are easy to find, but finding people to have any enthusiasm for large corporations' work is incredibly hard and the military tends to use peer pressure basically to get people to conform to certain standards, but I can't do that as a lead in a behemoth corporation people only stay awake for because of a paycheck. If I fired everyone that wasn't engaged, I wouldn't exactly have a team.
Hence, I think it's massively important to realize that hiring for elite anything is really nothing like hiring for random warm bodies-at-problem techniques oftentimes used by mediocre performing companies that have a lack of leadership capabilities.
Okay motivator, I get what you're saying and if the entirety of the operators community is all we needed for every situation and conflict we got going on in this world then so be it.
But there's still plenty of work for everyone else. Turning a 17 year old high school dropout into a team player with good attitude and good work ethic and good mind set is what this thread deviated to.
I'm sorry, but you could not be more wrong. Even in the "conventional" Marine Corps infantry, we were not trained to ignore any problem. We were constantly being taught to take over the job of our superiors at a moment's notice. All downtime was filled with adhoc classes to train the lowest grunt to operate at several levels above his pay grade.
If you think SOF or even Marines defer silently to officers, you only know what you have seen on TV. You are just completely off base here.