I want to see Sylvan address the "service academy grads are the worst" comment

I was Army ROTC, I didn't despise the USMA guys, but a lot of them did have massively-inflated egos from 4 years of being told "you're the greatest officers!!"  My FAOBC in the early 90s was 1/2 ROTC grads, 1/2 USMA grads.  The USMA grads acted like the ROTC guys were undisciplined losers.  But once they learned from us that college could be fun, with parties and getting laid, they were sad pandas. Seeing them think  "OMG.... you mean I could have gone to regular college and.... had fun?"  and reflect upon their life choices was always entertaining.

I was on an NROTC scholarship 86-90, and during my sophomore year I slept in my car or snuck into the gym to sleep in the Drill Team room when I couldn't crash on a friend's couch.
Everything worked out in the end.

Can I help you LT?

My compass seems to be broken Sgt.

Yes sir. Let's take the map and compass off of the deuce and a half's fender and check it over here.

A not shit for real conversation once overheard in a desert.

Interesting.  As a civilian, I always assumed the service academy types were...I don't know, like the top dogs of the military?  Instantly put in charge of things, stuff like that.

So much truth to the highlighted.

It's not a matter of officers being smarter than enlisted.  That notion has been beat to death.  It's the officers who think they are smarter because they are officers.  In reality the joke is on them.  We usually figured these people out pretty quick and we'd let them sink if they stayed on their high horse.  I loved some little 0-1 prick telling me about my job when I was doing it when he was in junior high.

The "smart" officers were the ones who came in humble, tried to learn and supported their men.  The rest were jerk offs who we only had to deal with for a little while before they got sent Korea or the missile fields.

I will say it's nice to hide behind the line that exists between the O's and E's.   That way I get left the fuck alone.  I don't hate officers,  I just hate dealing with some of them.

I am creeping up on my 25th class reunion from USAFA.

I get a quarterly alumni magazine  called Checkpoints.

Inside Checkpoints there is a section broken out by class news.  So the first thing I always look at is class of '94 news.  And then the obits.

Of the '94 class news and pics that get posted...of the people I recognize that are Lt. Cols., full birds, and some one stars...

Those guys and a few gals were the biggest shitbags as cadets.

That's just the ones I know....so maybe 50-60 out of 1,024 members of the class of 94ers.

There are plenty of my classmates I don't know or don't recognize.

And who knows...maybe the ones I don't know, the ones who stayed in 20 plus years and made it to full bird or got their first stars, were really excellent cadets.

And were really excellent officers.

But...to put an even finer point to it, sometimes I open Checkpoints and my reaction is like:



And I am like "HOLY SHIT!  THEY GOT 20 YEARS IN AND MADE IT TO FULL BIRD???!!"

Can you give an example?

Should the question be, "Who is smartest between EMs and Os?" or...

"Which service is the best at purging the smart ones from their ranks and promoting abject morons?"

That would be a tough competition to judge...

How so?  Entitlement?  Or?

Well millions of liberals have higher education and some are billionaires. What does that mean?  It means this topic is fuck fuck games

Judging by the ones I know IRL, I’m gonna go with yes.

There are obviously exceptions though.

This must be my ex wife’s account

I feel much safer with all of that diversity in charge.  I'm sure they got there by being the smartest of the smart, and it had nothing to do with affirmative action quotas.

I had a 2nd Lt Platoon Leader who didn't know the difference between Platoon Attack and Deliberate Attack (they are entirely different things, should be impossible to mix up).  These are "book smart" things an Infantry Lieutenant should know like the back of his hand after IOBC (now called IBOLC=IBOLOd).

Prior to this, he had been caught cheating on the EIB Range Estimation test with the distances to the TGTs written on his arm under his BDU sleeve.

Our criminally incompetent Battalion Commander let him slide and actually favored him for some reason after the incident, sending him to our Company to take a Platoon.

That Lieutenant later cut off a chunk of C4 out at Udairi one night, lit it on fire with his lighter, and threw it into a pit inside of the field ASP (Ammunition Supply Point) we had set up out there, complete with cases of C4, AT4s, 60mm, 81mm, M67 frags, and pallets of ammo.

One of our attached and very respected Engineer Sergeants (E-6) tore into him like there was no tomorrow for almost killing everyone within the blast radius of the cumulative ordnance contained therein.  I think they reprimanded the Engineer, while Lieutenant Thomas skated once again.

That Battalion Commander that failed to relieve him and GOLAR his punk behavior is now US Army FORSCOM Commander, one of the most incompetent officers I ever knew.

I saw quite a few really good officers never make it past Captain or Major because they weren't bungsuckers to these types of morons above them that were ultimately empowered to rate their OERs.

The military has a strange way of favoring turds who float to the top of the punchbowl.  I've seen the same complaints leveled from people in the USAF and USMC.

Read the bios of command officers sometime. Fucking cringeworthy. Once in awhile you come across one with a stellar educational background but I’ve seen quite a few Howard University, Spelman University and degrees in basketweaving or French literature

I can't say what the Service Academies are like now, but back in the early 1990's, being a freshman and getting hazed by the upperclassman was a normal and accepted practice.

If one of your fellow freshman was getting flamed, you were expected to go help him or her out.  Kind of a strength in numbers thing.

There was on '94er I was a freshman with who turned 21 during basic cadet training.  Some of the senior and junior cadets had a house off base.  So this '94er became their designated driver on the weekends.  In turn, he felt he didn't need to help out his fellow classmates.  There were times when another freshman was getting his ass chewed out in the hallway and this dude would just hang out in his room.

Soooo....he was a self-absorbed asshole even as a freshman at USAFA.

which would kinda explain why he became a careerist in the Real Air Force.

I think, in my experience, the average intelligence is not higher with among those with rank.

There are an abundance of dumb fuck E8 and E9 types who rode the DI/DS haircut and PT career bus because anything else was too hard.

Plenty of senior officers whose main skill is politicking, not thinking.

Fascinating.

Some of us don’t want to play your stupid games.

"farm strong"

Historically, definitely.

An all volunteer force really tosses that out.

If you take junior enlisted out of the equation, I would call it a tie.

I'm sure he's talking about Guard or Reserve where you get dabblers.

On the Marine side you would need to differentiate between 1stSgt/SgtMaj and MSgt/MGuns

Officers are often better educated (though not always - most of the officers I worked for had no more than a high school education, and some of them not a very good one, I have an MS).  Enlisted tend to have better technical knowledge and less book education by the numbers. Obviously the e1-e3 engineering and supply Mafia skews the curve down quite a bit also, but I’ve known at least a few JOs who were college frat kids and dumb as a fence post too.

The one thing an old Master Chief once told me he told his O5 - I made it to the top 1% of my field, where are you?  Conversely an Admiral I used to work for told his new Chiefs every year that taking it by the numbers it was actually harder to make Chief than to make Admiral.

Many of the Senior Os I worked for were phenomenally well educated - Harvard degrees and such, and a number of them were absolutely brilliant. I can’t say that for any of the Command Master Chiefs I ever worked for, they were generally fucktards who thought the senior enlisted academy was the pinnacle of educational achievement.  They were generally very good politicians though.

I’ll raise you LTCs around a BG or MG. It’s like watching ducks. I did commo in the 82nd Abn Div.

I also did commo for the 18th Abn Corp Commander a few times. Try eating in a tent as the only junior enlisted and almost everyone else is O-4 to O-9

I did CIED {I was assigned to the dismounted squad with 4 soldiers under me but the remainder of the company was ‘motorized’ in Buffalos, Huskies, etc.} with the 235th Engineer company. We didn’t do it like that

I wasn't active duty.

And it was avionics, so probably not the best cross section of enlisted people, in retrospect.

That said, there are a whole lot of young Army and Marines, and who came in to get education, that didn't have it before hand and tend to not get it during.

Sounds like she played dirty pool. My comment should have had this with it .

I’d never give someone shit for improving upon themselves and continuing to serve in the same capacity.

Thanks for the detailed explanation but I still have no idea if you think officers are smarter than enlisted men.

As with every other group, this.

I’m pretty sure Josh is saying he is smarter than anyone he has ever worked with.

That’s because it’s a stupid question.

He was an officer in training.  But he got booted after that pic went viral...  So neither

Air Force, it isnt even close.

He was enlisted for at least an entire tour before that though. Mind boggling how he got as far as he did.

This is a dumb question for sure but these are always entertaining.

The one thing I realized about myself {little late in life} was although I’m smarter than average I’m not brilliant and more importantly I’m not wise. Wisdom is more important in my book and I honestly do t have it

That is not for you to say.

This....

She likes $, power and fame. But when we first met I was just out of college and hadn’t figured her out. Or she changed and I didn’t realize it.

Anyway, the only time she half way perked up during my military service was when I attended OCS

Coupla thoughts from someone who did 25 years enlisted and whose GT/QT scores on the ASVAB were usually higher than most of the officers in the units I served in.

One, whatever the hell we're measuring with the IQ test, it doesn't do a very good job of selecting people for a quality we don't define, but I'd call "wisdom". I have seen some really, really stupid sh*t come out of people whose tested intelligence would lead you to think that they weren't going to do anything that dumb, but... They did it. And, that goes for officers and enlisted. Test scores do not necessarily make much difference in real life--There's an entire range of qualities that go into whether or not someone is going to perform intelligently vs. just test that way. Your score on any given test means only one thing--How well you can do on it. And, that's it.

Second, there is a clear differentiation between officer and enlisted roles. You can be a super-smart enlisted guy, but when you try sticking your nose over into officer business, you're gonna do rather poorly. Same-same with officers sticking their noses into enlisted business. It's not a matter of intelligence, it's a matter of knowing what your lane is, and sticking to it. You can be right as it is humanly possible with something as an enlisted guy, but because it's coming from you, it's going to be ineffective. Likewise, with the officers--They have a role, and they need to stick to it. Lots of unhappy officers and enlisted folk would be a lot happier if they swapped jobs, particularly on the commissioned side. You want to be a soldier, and do soldier things? Well, the sad fact is, the commissioned path ain't going to make you happy. You're only going to play soldier for about a third, or less of your career--The rest of the time is shuffling paper on staff and politics. The military would do well to seriously weed out those useless staff positions and fill them with people other than frustrated soldiers who'd really rather be out running troops and doing things. But, we keep them because we still think we need a huge cadre of extra officers to rapidly expand the Army. And, maybe we do... But, it's frustrating to be that staff guy for most of your career, and you want to be out with the troops.

Third, education does not equal intelligence. It can, but it can also take a mediocre intelligence and educate it far past its level, leaving you with a frustrated dolt who really doesn't understand nine-tenths of what's going on around them, and who can only apply rote learning to an issue in their narrow field. Got a lot of folks like that wearing stripes and who were given commissions.

Fourth, the service academies do not, in my experience, produce mediocrities. They're either the absolute worst officers I ever worked around, or they were the best. Nothing in between. Same with the guys that the Marines and Navy call "mustangs", the ones who were enlisted that became officers. OCS and ROTC produced all the mediocre, middle-of-the-road officers, and a lot of the really good and really bad ones. Somehow, though, the service academy guys were always worse than the worst from those sources, or better than even the excellent ROTC and OCS guys. Your mileage may vary, and I may be guilty of looking back through distorted lenses, but the officers I really loved working for the most were service academy types, and the ones I'd have taken early retirement rather than work for again were from the same source. I don't know why, but that's the way my memory has it.

Fifth, the respective intelligence levels of the officer and enlisted corps, whatever the hell that measurement actually is telling us, aren't really the critical thing. What's important is whether or not the two halves of the whole know their roles and work them properly, and that's where we have a lot of our problems today.

Sixth, I think there's a widespread problem that goes across the whole of society, not just the military. I'd term it the "over-academization" of life in general, because there's this increasing dichotomy between practical experience and credentials. You've got all these organizations that are highlighting and working off of credentials, while the credentialed are actually functional dolts. Meanwhile, because they lack the credentials that really don't mean anything, the guys out there with the practical knowledge and experience are not getting a chance to put any input into the organization. This syndrome is why businesses hire consultants for millions of dollars to tell them things they could have found out simply by going out and talking to the folks out on the factory floor, or wherever.

That sixth thing is a large part of the problem in the military, between the officer and enlisted sides. The officers have gone off following this madcap idea that everything that needs to be known resides strictly within their narrowly educated framework, and they fail to comprehend that there's this entire universe of tribal knowledge that they should be paying heed to. I can't think of a single bad idea that went seriously south where there wasn't someone out in the ranks going "This will never work...". But, the problem was that the guy saying that could not articulate their objections in terms that the officer ranks could wrap their heads around, and they went ahead with the unworkable plan, anyway.

On the one side, it's an issue of not having the tacit sort of finger-tip feel for things in the ranks, or that stem from having done a particular job a few thousand times. On the other, it's an issue where they lack the ability to explain and articulate things in terms that the commissioned side of the house understands and can wrap their heads around.

There were dozens of times that I can remember where it was me and a couple of other NCOs trying to explain to an officer why a given course of action was ill-advised, and we simply could not get our point across. Some of that was because we really couldn't articulate the reasons clearly, ourselves, but there was a lot of it that stemmed from an inability for most of us to couch things in terms that were accessible to a college-trained mind.

It depends upon your goal.  "If" I had gone into the navy as an officer, an option with my education, I would not have had the same training and hands on experience that made me the superior computer/network technician I am today.  I would not be a Director of IT for a Southeastern Corporation.  Choosing to be enlisted is more like making the sacrifice to get an education than pursuing a career.

Awesome insight.  Appreciated!

The Air Guard has 2.2% of enlisted with advanced degrees and 41.7% of officers with the same.

Is there a unicorn out there that really wants to swap black boxes on a weekend?  Stranger things have happened.  But is it an indicator of the force overall?  Let's ask the 65.6% of ANG enlisted that don't even have an associate's.