this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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I think a crucial part of it is also that you, as a simple soldier on the ground, don't really have a good way of figuring out the big picture.
If your sergeant tells you to "prevent anyone from entering or leaving the parliament building", you're very likely to assume that something bad is happening and that the army has been called in to secure the building. You basically have to trust your commanders to see the bigger picture, so that when they tell you that "the guys over there are the baddies", you can engage them without walking over to check for yourself. If those guys are in police uniforms, that probably means the baddies got a hold of uniforms to try to sneak past you.
Yea, that's the whole "conditioned to follow orders without questions" but with more words.
Not really, it's more nuanced than that. It's about an inevitable division of responsibilities. In an effective fighting force, every individual cannot be equally responsible for all levels of strategy/tactics. At the same time, in an effective fighting force, every individual must have a rather high degree of trust in their nearest commander and brothers in arms.
The consequence of this is that an effective fighting force inevitably becomes susceptible to misuse by higher-ups. If you're able to highjack enough of the command chain, it becomes very difficult for the remaining parts to figure out what's going on and do the right thing. It's more than just "soldiers are brainwashed".
That's what the "with more words" was about. They weren't giving a nuanced analysis. They were simply stating something in plain language that easily explains the situation for polite conversation.
We get that it's systemic but it is still true that a symptom of those systemic forces is soldiers are preconditioned to follow orders of their command without questions due to an ingrained sense of implicit trust which is fundamental to the function of Imperialist military structure.
Now there are the many different flavors of Imperialist philosophy in favor of centralized systems that assert it is an unfortunate necessity to maintain the interests of the state and there is also the philosophy of anarchism which asserts that a decentralized, federated military is possible which avoids the trappings of centralized authority overreach but that is a much deeper discussion about a completely different topic that I'm a bit rusty in my reading on.