I know a number of people in the military, and there's a lot to be said for asserting command presence. Where it doesn't matter what the orders are, just that someone is there giving clear orders.

I've rarely seen that in managers. The issue I was talking about above was that managers really can think of themselves as "better" or having "secret knowledge" that enables them to lord it over the peasant engineers.

I have ethical issues with such an attitude. People are people, no matter how small.