Greybeard Stories: The Unwise Update | Hacker News Reader

Greybeard Stories: The Unwise Update

solipsys.co.uk

Is the military really that rigid on not questioning your superiors orders?

Assuming that a higher placed always knows better seems to be a pretty weird position, at some point domain specific knowledge starts to apply and you would expect a more bi-directional flow of information.

You might explain the 'why' of something without being asked and follow up with a 'do you foresee any issues with that?' to avoid mistakes like that one in the story.

I have no first-hand experience, but a surprising amount of second-hand experience, and the answer seems to be yes, the military really is that rigid on not questioning your superiors orders.

It depends a bit on the country, the service, the field and the ranks involved, but the answer basically boils down to yes - don't question your orders.

Some subordinates do get away with more, and some superiors do allow more, and there are ways of asking questions that are more tolerated, but most people with the knowledge to realise that the orders should be questioned don't ahve the ability to ask questions the right way for the context.

Doctrine in all the major Western militaries is to specify orders in terms of the outcome, and push decision making as far down the chain of command as possible - to the "strategic corporal": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Block_War

However there are times when an order really does need to be obeyed immediately without question, because there simply isn't time for anything else. The problem here was the officer didn't know which was which.

Reminds me of:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1969602-1,00....

Seems to indicate that there's often a balance between codification and informality. If your codified practices miss something important that should've been formalized (but of course you can't formalize everything), it's sometimes nice if people give enough informal reasons to each other in even routine communication so that it's possible for someone to notice, "wait, that's why you want this?"

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