Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXVIII

[AdAstra]

I don't think anyone is questioning the need for leaders and a chain of command. I think the question is the officer/enlisted divide.

A new 21 year old 2nd Lieutenant outranks a veteran sergeant when they may have less practical experience than even a junior enlisted like an E 3 with a year of service.

There's no good reason you couldn't have everyone enlist as a private and rise through the ranks from rifleman to platoon leader without the artificial line of "guys with shiny stuff on their collars" vs "guys with stripes."

Oh certainly. Though to my knowledge, there indeed have been issues with officers that ascend through the enlisted ranks, so there potentially is a good reason for the divide. The issue, from what little I know, is that while “mustangs” are usually very competent and understand things that can’t really be taught, they frequently have disciplinary issues, Not necessarily in terms of being insubordinate, but in that they can frequently get too close with enlisted troops (having been one and all) and fail to act like a proper commander, which kinda requires some degree of professional distance. Not to mention that being good at managing a small unit does not necessarily make you that much better at managing a larger one.

There’s also the issue that rising dramatically in rank tends to require actually distinguishing yourself, which rarely happens outside of wartime. So if all your officers are selected from your pool of enlisted men, you’re either going to have to select a few to be officers, which is hard to do without a lot of data on performance and can breed resentment, or have way too many officers if you’re promoting people based on time served. And when it is wartime, you usually need to raise a lot of military units fast, and that’s typically going to require training officers from scratch, unless you want to just force all your prewar professional core into positions which they may not be suitable for.