America's Army As a High School Education Platform?

GamePolitics reports on a recent press release from the US Army which says they will be partnering with various military, education, and non-profit organizations to bring an education curriculum to high school students via America's Army. Quoting the press release: "The partnership ... will incorporate Army technology, gaming and simulation resources to enhance student achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The platform for the new curriculum is the America's Army PC game, a free online game that provides civilians with a virtual role in the US Army by introducing them to Army technologies, Rules of Engagement, training and missions. Used as a communications tool, the game has also been adapted for use within the military to produce effective and engaging virtual environments that enhance Soldier training in a number of areas including force protection, convoy survivability and nuclear, chemical and biological detection."

Comments

Re:Just what every American high-school student ne

[LWATCDR]

Actually I took ROTC in high school. They covered illegal orders and UCMJ. They would go as far as to give you simple "illegal" order like calling at ease from a parade rest. The correct response was not to do it without question but to respond with "As you where sir!"
This was just High School ROTC and we covered things like war crimes and how saying "I was just following orders" is not an excuse.

Re:Just what every American high-school student ne

[wasmoke]

I'm currently doing ROTC in college, and it really sickens me when people give the old argument that military personnel are trained to obey orders without question.
My experience is much the same as yours in JROTC; that is, we are being taught as future officers to question those orders which seem unreasonable or dangerous.
The main problem is that most people who have not had any exposure to the military do not know anything except what the media says. Nobody bothers to actually speak to a Marine, for example, because it's so much easier to just watch CNN for the REAL news. Ah well, I'm involved in what I am to protect the public's right to protest what I'm involved in, so I guess I shouldn't complain.

Re:Just what every American high-school student ne

[bravobulldog6]

My name is MAJ Paul Stanton and I am a former infantryman and current computer scientist in the US Army. The views that I present here are entirely my own and do not represent an âoeofficial statementâ for the government or military. In your comment, you insinuate that Army Soldiers obey without question and are members of a non-thinking organization. Please allow me to explain a little about the current operational environment that our Soldiers are fighting in and the educational preparation they receive prior to deploying overseas. We are fighting a complex, asymmetric, thinking enemy who constantly creates ambiguous situations that our Soldiers face daily. Our Soldiers must think and be creative to defeat this enemy â" and they do. You may not hear about it, because our media chooses to tell the isolated story of a mistake instead of the countless examples of Soldiers doing the right thing, but I have much experience in Iraq and Afghanistan that supports our thinking Soldiers. How do Soldiers prepare for the challenges that theyll face? There are many formal educational venues â" ROTC, West Point, and officer schooling for officers and Basic, Advanced Individual Training, and unit training for Soldiers. At each opportunity, Soldiers learn about ethical decision making and have the opportunity to practice via scenario based training (the same time of scenario based training that Americas Army supports). The result is an intelligent and capable Soldier who thinks on the battlefield. Yes, you probably have a mental picture of a negative instance â" one that the media discussed at length. . . .has it happened? Yes. But is it the extreme exception? Yes. Soldiers face âoeshoot / no-shootâ scenarios in real time, with real bullets, on a daily basis. They make the right decisions â" they are not automatons, but rather smart, competent, ethically-minded people who want nothing more than to do the right thing. Please take the time to think about the challenges Soldiers face, and then consider how they can operate without thinking. I believe that you will find that it would be impossible.

Re:Just what every American high-school student ne

[hey!]

Well, let's get out of the realm of the abstract for a moment. Anybody who is reasonably educated knows that an order to do something illegal, say to murder a prisoner, is not valid. So you don't have to feel so injured by misunderstanding. There's always going to be a few or course.

On the other hand, the principle that soldiers should not obey an illegal order is really only good as the ability of a soldier to distinguish between legal and illegal. There isn't always a clear line, say between legal, aggressive interrogation techniques and illegal torture. One of the benefits of ROTC is, hopefully, and officer corps with greater critical thinking skills. Still, by in large troops and the officers who lead them are not lawyers, they have to use their ethical common sense to get them through dilemmas.

The real danger when you give a man a lethal weapon and put him under orders is not particular to the military. It is group think. And don't say that isn't a problem. Every military person I have talked to has plenty of stories of bureaucratic pigheadedness on a massive scale.

I have known many military people over the years, and one thing that I think is fair to say is that good soldiers, marines, airmen and sailors have a can do attitude. That contributes to the both the dynamism and dysfunction of the military. Survival may trump that, but the first response to an order to take a fortified position is to view it as a solvable problem. This takes an implicit trust in the competence and judgment of your superiors, and that habit means going along with things you know are damnably stupid -- so long as they aren't illegal or immediately fatal.

Trust and a willingness to go along with anything short of illegality are good things in a soldier, but bad things in a citizen and especially a civilian leader. A good citizen has to question the competence and judgment of the leadership. When political mistakes reach the military, it's too late to question. One military saying I've heard is that shit rolls downhill, and it's the military's job to deal with the politicians' shit. A politician's ought to avoid handing the shit down to the military by being skeptical.

Skepticism is not a military virtue, which is not to say anything negative about military service. No profession is the beginning and end of all virtues. One of the problems I see of certain political viewpoints is that they like to promote the military as the entire repository of American virtue because obedience or rather willingness to get behind the mission, is so useful to them.

Look at Colin Powell, a great soldier, a top notch military leader, and a bad Secretary of State. He brought his military values of duty and loyalty into the job, and ended up being a catspaw. It wasn't that he accepted an order to lie; he accepted the mission he was given and took ownership of it, the way good soldiers do. It made him both useful and an object of scorn within the administration. By giving his superiors more than they deserved, he gave his true masters less.