I’ll try some Navy examples.

Post-training, did anyone get a captains mast for something they legitimately did badly/screwed up?

I haven’t met a sailor yet who didn’t have some crazy stories, but maybe the folks you knew were more disciplined.

Also, any of those happen with the following?

1) go to off limits establishment on shore leave and get drunk and cause trouble, resulting in the local authorities having to drag them into their superiors?

Despite that being explicitly against orders, and generally dumb. And that after and having about 30 bazillion slide decks about how stupid it is, and it being objectively stupid and destructive?

2) had any of them get pregnant to avoid deployment (and explicitly say so to friends), despite that being a pretty bad trade overall, and even more ridiculous to mention to others?

3) had officers commit adultery or other obvious-to-everyone-around-them-is-against-conduct-becoming-an-officer’ problems? Because I could point to plenty of ones that made the press anyway.

4) gotten themselves in deep trouble with sudden ill advised marriages, going into massive debt with illadvised car or house purchases, etc.

Each one of those is someone failing to ‘do the smart thing’ even when sometimes the smart thing is explicitly specified or strongly implied with other agreements, and it highlights the bigger issue, and why it’s important that orders exist and people follow them in combat situations (unless they are clearly so bad they are illegal).

If you have a plan that requires folks to be consistent, do the ‘smart thing’, and do the same thing at the same time, that is not natural and it doesn’t scale well.

It requires heavy training, constant reinforcement, and diligence. And it still gets screwed up. Make everyone exhausted, stressed out, and generally in the shittiest situation they’ve ever been in? It gets harder/worse.

And it still won’t happen everywhere perfectly, regardless of how smart everyone thinks they are, or the degree of training, because humans and reality don’t work that way.

‘Orders’ is a way of distilling the hopefully valuable parts of what needs to happen in a way that specifies the thing that needs to happen unambiguously and without over-specification.

Ideally they can be evaluated if someone (or groups of someones) did actually do them, and traceable back to who issued them in a way that conflicting orders can be untangled, authority of the one issuing them can be verified, and accountability for bad orders can be traced back (even if they aren’t very often).

That may mean there is an order to reposition your ship to specific co-ordinates with no explanation. Or fire on something without understanding why. Or take a shot that personally makes you feel terrible or you don’t agree with.

The safety and cohesiveness of the group is more important, explicitly, in the military as that is also what protects the individuals in those situations.

Depending on the circumstances depends on how plausible it is those orders are legitimate, and I tried to call out that blind obedience is bad. No one should be doing something clearly wrong because an order said so.

But the requirement for obedience to an order is much, much higher because there are many legitimate combat (and some non combat) situations where it is impossible to get everyone to agree on, let alone follow, a single course of action in time, and if the single course of action is not followed, terrible consequences for the people involved are assured.

And with a sufficiently large group of people, you could never get consensus on a right course of action. So without enforced discipline, the military would be ineffective.

And during peacetime, the foundation for the military that would be fighting the next war is being set.