I have kids. Children are pure of emotion. That's not helpful, because they lack nuance. It's also why militaries prefer the youngest they are allowed to recruit. When a young child is angry, they are consumed by it. There is no restraint. When they learn rules, they are binary about them. When they learn to lie, cheat, steal, they go hog wild with it. Yes, your angel will do this, too. This part is hilarious if you're careful to keep it in check.
Military prefer young people, because they are amenable - it is much easier to change their values, habits and opinions. Socializing young people into new military values is easier and quicker then socializing old people who tend to be less flexible.
Physical strength, stamina and agility all also plays huge role.
Military does not want you angry, military wants you to obey and be easy to control. Anger makes people less controllable. They want to you to do what you are told, anger is not important.
The point is the military wants people who are easy to control: people who are controlled by their emotions are easy to be controlled and molded. Being amenable plays into it, but so does having emotions without life experience to judge and harness those emotions
It depends on the military you're talking about. Militias in the Congo? Maybe. Modern militaries? No. They look to break you of your individualism. That little bit of attitude that says, "I matter more than we" is an absolute detriment to small team operations in the military. They spend a significant amount of time, after breaking the individual, teaching recruits collectivism. The military I was in absolutely advocated stoicism and restraint. It's what they call "bearing" and you're continually graded on it. You're also encouraged to read a lot of warrior culture literature that talks about these things in great detail.
Good faith question for you: where did you get the knowledge about the military that you used to make that comment from?
It's also because in an advanced economy, the older folks are busy with production, which funds the war. In less advanced economies, maybe not so much, but those economies also have an earlier transition to general purpose adulthood including employment and parenting.
Also, children are quicker to replace. It takes only 12 years to produce a 12 year old soldier, and war-torn countries tend to have a skewed age distribution.
> It's also why militaries prefer the youngest they are allowed to recruit.
Militaries recruit young adults primarily because they’re at peak physical shape but they haven’t settled into careers yet. It would be hard to build an effective military if we recruited a bunch of middle-aged men out of desk jobs and tried to get them back in young person shape.
> When they learn rules, they are binary about them. When they learn to lie, cheat, steal, they go hog wild with it.
Your post is also quite binary, without nuance. I also have kids and haven’t seen this unilateral sociopathy at a certain age. On the contrary, kids are relatively complex emotionally and are capable of empathy from a young age. That doesn’t mean they never test the limits, but they don’t (generally) turn into lie-cheat-steal machines like you’re suggesting, nor are they completely incapable of controlling their emotional impulses. Give kids a little more credit. You haven’t completely figured them out as an adult (or maybe you forgot how frustrating it was when overconfident adults assumed the worst of you and thought they had it all figured out)
Our (your) military recruits young adults, a term we've decided on, but many poorer militaries recruit as young as 10 years old. Having rules restricting military recruitment is a luxury of our wealth.
As for "lie-cheat-steal machines", I've personally observed it across thousands of children. It mainly happens at 11-13 years of age, middle school in the USA. When I worked for Southland Corporation (7-11), we tried everything to keep a store adjacent to a middle school operating. Finally sold it. Kids go through earlier phases of this when they first discover lying. Each kid differently, of course.
"On the contrary, kids are relatively complex emotionally and are capable of empathy from a young age."
That's not "On the contrary". Kids are, indeed. Emotionally complex and empathetic doesn't preclude naive innocence at all.
That's a biased sample. Children are more likely to lie/cheat/steal when they're from shitty circumstances; if you grow up knowing that adults will not help you when you need help (for instance, asking for food doesn't work, or that telling the truth will result in punishment), then once they're old enough to take care of their own needs/protect themselves, they do. They just have shit judgement because they're kids. Basically, it's what happens if you teach kids that the system/adults/authority only exist to punish and hurt them. (I'd also bet those kids have a decent amount of empathy for EACH OTHER. Just not you.)
Any school is going to have a population of those kids, and those kids are indeed a problem for nearby businesses, but that 10-20% can't be generalized to biological developmental stages.
Any "military" recruiting that young will get chewed up by a serious state. Of course it happens, but in the context of failed states and serious social chaos.
I find it incredibly dubious that you've personally witnessed thousands of children transform into "lie-cheat-steal" machines firsthand. An anecdote with no other context about a 7-11 that had to close because it was next to a middle-school is pretty weak evidence.
That's because it's not offered as evidence. As you said, it's an anecdote. I've observed this pattern so often because schoolkids offer masses of kids. Every store had this same problem. I personally found it fascinating, but then, it wasn't my money.
I observed it from the other end. There was a group of kids who got together and stole from the neighborhood 7-11 and then everyone got punished with regulations like “no more than 2 kids at a time in the store” because the stores just thought in terms of “it’s always the kids stealing” and not “I’m not prepared to handle an influx of customers some of whom suffer bad impulse control”. Such a policy was problematic for us because the 7-11 was a 15-20 minute walk which meant that trip was the bulk of the lunch hour.
> As for "lie-cheat-steal machines", I've personally observed it across thousands of children. It mainly happens at 11-13 years of age, middle school in the USA.
Nonesense. First, you did not personally observed thousands of 11-13 years old.
Second, 11-13 years are pretty empathetic and already have a lot of values in them. They do lie, just like most adults do, but they don't steal and don't cheat all that much. They are already building pretty nuanced value system.
Exactly. There's a big difference between how much sleeping on rocks an 18yo can tolerate before their work performance degrades vs a 26yo who's sleeping on the same rocks.
The other problem with older people is that once you stop spending your workday taking orders from a capricious bureaucracy (school) it's hard to get people to voluntarily go back. Draw whatever trope-ey parallels you want with working for an employer but private industry is very different from school and military in its level of seemingly capricious micromanagement.
A bunch of 20 or 30-somethings who've been exposed to the realities of life and how dirty the world is are probably more likely to be able to deal with the more morally questionable aspects of military service but it's not worth the other tradeoffs of working with those demographics.
> There's a big difference between how much sleeping on rocks an 18yo can tolerate before their work performance degrades vs a 26yo who's sleeping on the same rocks.
Nah, there's a big difference between how much an 18 and a 26 year old will tolerate, not what they can. The reason the military wants 18 year olds is the same as why unhealthy startups want kids fresh out of college. They're too stupid to know when they can get away with asserting themselves.
> A bunch of 20 or 30-somethings who've been exposed to the realities of life and how dirty the world is are probably more likely to be able to deal with the more morally questionable aspects of military service but it's not worth the other tradeoffs of working with those demographics.
To strenuously disagree while agreeing: 20 or 30 year olds are more likely to be able to deal with the morally questionable aspects of military service, and that is an absolutely undesirable characteristic for a military. Militaries want you to deal with morally questionable situations in the way they've told you to deal with morally questionable situations. Using your own moral initiative, even resulting in a good outcome, deserves punishment. If you make a mistake in applying the rules you've been given, even resulting in a horrible outcome, you will get absolutely protected by the military.
That's the contract: try your best to do what you've been told. and we'll move heaven and earth to protect you.
