Morale to the Left, Morale to the Right, and Not a Stop to Think by Fred Reed

Morale to the Left, Morale to the Right, and Not a Stop to Think by Fred Reed " .......But you can’t tell fresh young troops, “You’re maybe a bit above average, but the Afghans are much tougher people, having been raised fighting and living on dried goat-meat, and they know the terrain, whereas you will have no idea where you are and your equipment and tactics are badly suited for the region, so it’s going to be hard slogging.” Not optimal for recruiting. More profoundly, men in combat arms want to feel inexorable, deadly, the best. Whether they actually are doesn’t occur to them until the war starts. A satisfying state of mind is what is wanted. This preference for mood over reality runs through their careers.The career military attracts people who run from the merely abnormal to the frankly weird. .......They are authoritarian by nature, comfortable in a rigid, hierarchical, and conformist society that most of us would find equally unbearable and absurd. Suppose your boss told everyone in the office that they had to wear exactly the same clothes and stand at attention in the morning to that he could determine whether they had dressed themselves correctly. Militaries start with odd material.......Then they inculcate in themselves an exaggerated sense of their own powers, a sort of Terminator complex......."