This document explains what military service feels like. I am a senior warrant officer 2 (CW2) in the US Army with 25 years of service. Warrant officers are trained as technology experts equivalent to technology principles in the corporate world, but can jump into the traditional commissioned officer command position if so required. I have never been in a combat firefight, but I have completed 5 Army Reserve deployments to the CENTCOM location comprising about 50 months of time.
In the US military all entry level service members go through some form of basic training. The idea of basic training is to degrade a person's natural reasoning abilities so that they learn to follow orders without distraction and increase their social/environmental awareness. This process greatly increases agreeability and moderately increases conscientiousness. Agreeability is increased more than conscientiousness only because it is more directly influenced by a system of rewards and punishments, but the goal is to increase both personality conditions on all students in an equal way.
Personality modification is stressful. This means personality modification is the result of a continuous high stress environment. In hindsight its similar to training dogs to respond to commands, except the process instead modifies behavior and requires substantially greater dedicated effort.
I remember when I was a young soldier, I entered the Army at age 17, I frequently felt fear. It was mostly a fear of failure or a fear of not knowing what is going on around me. Now that I am old, I cannot remember the last time I felt fear as a cognitive emotion, which is quite numbing, perhaps apathetic.
As a soldier rises in the army expectations change. At no point in a soldier's career are they expected to follow orders blindly. At all points in a soldier's career they are expected to question orders as necessary to, at least, attain clarity and an agreed understanding. That is why high conscientiousness is important. A good soldier is willing to ask challenging questions.
As a leader conscientiousness becomes more important because there are more variables to consider when you must manage people and perform task delegation. Agreeability becomes less important when tough decisions require balancing the substance of an assigned task against the welfare of the people you manage. From this point forward agreeability becomes inversely proportional to the level of responsibilities assigned. A good military leader knows how to follow orders, but they are also comfortable challenging orders which violate their personal risk analysis.
As a military leader there are times when you can find yourself owning a greater amount of responsibility than you are prepared to accept. This could be a result of various different things, such as a shortage of qualified leaders therefore you are tagged to operate a position of leadership well above your pay grade. Another factor can be a lack of qualified subordinate leaders. A third factor could be unqualified expectations from senior leadership, such as misunderstanding the mission to be far more than defined. When these factors all occur there is disaster.
As a leader in an impossible position the stress can be extreme perhaps almost paranormal to reality. Leaders might fail, but they don't quit. The reason for this is that it isn't about what you, as the leader, want. You have the welfare of the people assigned to you to consider first.
In the stress of an impossible position there a few things that can happen:
- Your level of conscientiousness increases to levels you never thought capable.
- You become overwhelmed by negative emotions resulting in mental health disease, which can happen rather quickly with dire consequences.
- You abandon your people in an effort to save yourself.
The second of those options is what occurs to a person with high neuroticism and third option is what occurs when a person's narcissism outweighs their capacity for decision making. The only acceptable option is the first option, which requires a few thought exercises:
- You must known where your people are, which is accountability. This means the ability to instantly recite the position or assignment of each of your people from memory in a highly fluid environment which requires high intelligence.
- You must know all of the tools and capabilities available to you and whom amongst your people and exercise which tools.
- You must form relationships all external parties so that you know from whom to ask for help. High extroversion is helpful, but under the right stress conditions a highly introverted person will become as extroverted as they need to be.
- You must form superior communication skills. Some of the stress you feel as a leader will be passed onto the soldiers you manage and as a leader you must continue to exert influence and motivation while simultaneously requesting assistance from peers and keeping senior leadership informed of current status and confidence levels.
These are all capabilities that can be shaped and formed in an extremely short time provided strong examples, possibly a mentor, a necessary minimum level of intelligence, and the proper stress conditions. This applies even to people who might normally not score highly in conscientiousness. For people who normally score extremely high in conscientiousness this will still present as a high stress situation as they will have to learn to abandon perfectionism in an environment where everything is close to imminent failure.
Creativity is not necessary to achieve success in the military, but it is extremely helpful. There is a process for everything in the military whether it is strictly administrative, a computer information system, tradition, a standard operating procedure, or a commander's policy. Each of these things exist for a good reason to reduce some form of risk, but these many rules produce an environment that is highly restrictive. Creative people have a superior advantage in that they will find ways to circumvent some of these processes to accomplish the mission and then figure out how to bridge the gap between their creativity and a crime to ensure a viable solution. People lacking creativity will never be able to do this and so are limited to the channels provided.
Athleticism is always important. Most soldiers are not infantry soldiers dodging bullets from day to day. Athleticism is important because it increases intelligence, increases confidence, increases stamina/endurance, and lowers risk of injury. Even for people working in an office typing on a keyboard these factors of health are always important and contribute to job success.
The reserves is a part-time military force. Reservists meet for two planned days per month and an additional two week training period per year. This means leaders have two days to accomplish all the administrative responsibilities their active duty counter-parts have the entire month to accomplish. This means, for leaders, a monthly meeting can feel like a non-stop sprint. In many cases there are additional tasks that must be performed outside the scheduled meeting times. For example this year I attended two conferences, a site survey, and a variety of meeting/planning activities in addition to my administrative/mission requirements that fill my planned meeting days and I have to balance that against the time time requirements of my civilian job.
In psychology the Pareto Principle states that 80% of outcomes result from 20% of participants. This means that provided a pool of software developers 20% of people are contributing 80% of the results. The Pareto Principle explains the so called 10x software developer who achieves 10 times the results of their peers, but its more dramatic than that. Software developers who exemplify the Pareto Principle, the 10x developer, tend to see evidence of this frequently because they can readily identify it apart from the noise. Software developers who don't exemplify the Pareto Principle have trouble identifying this principle at all with many doubting it even exists.
Army Reservists are in an ideal position to identify the Pareto Principle in a variety of careers, and frequently exemplify this phenomenon themselves. One explanation for this is a diversity of experience not shared by other people. An army reservist has two separate careers, often in unrelated industries, that allow for comparisons of success and failure that other people are incapable of seeing.
Another explanation is that a part-time military is itself an example of the Pareto Principle. The military asks for a lot of contribution for what is otherwise a tiny part-time job. I have never had a civilian job, as a software developer, set such high expectations or require an equivalent level of responsibility despite occupying 90% of my employment time and paying considerably more.
I suspect a major factor contributing to the Pareto Principle is candidate selection. In the military candidates are selected for promotion either as a result of an candidate submitting a promotion packet or as a result of the needs of the Army to fill a shortage at the next higher level. The military has a variety of measures and an elaborate education system to determine selection criteria that simply don't exist in the civilian world. Furthermore the military will often promote soldiers into higher levels of responsibility and the soldier is expected to figure it out with proper mentorship. In the civilian world, especially as a software developer, appropriate candidate selection often isn't clearly understood. Regardless of job the military generally has a good idea of what defines a good soldier and a good leader, but software does not appear to have any idea why some software developers out perform other developers by a factor of more than 10 fold.
All of the excellent leaders I have encountered share some personality traits:
- Low agreeability
- Low neuroticism
- High conscientiousness
Of the psychology big 5 personality index I did not mention extroversion or openness, which is creativity. Most senior officers tend to be introverts, which I imagine is helpful in time management towards study and academics, but I have also met several extroverts as colonels and generals. Creativity is helpful and provides an edge over the competition, but isn't a requirement to achieve success in the military as the military is an extremely structured environment.
Low agreeability is required to challenge authority, especially in a high authoritarian culture. The higher a soldier promotes into leadership the most important and pronounced this becomes. I have never seen such explicit low agreeability in the civilian world, except from people who are manipulative narcissists. From my own experience I can honestly say low agreeability is a quality that is crafted from experience as a result of stress conditions amid conflicting priorities. This one factor is what most striking differentiates military service from the depictions of military in the media.
Low neuroticism applies to all soldiers in leadership at all levels of leadership. I imagine this quality is essential for staying cool to make calm decisions in combat. There is an infantry saying that explains it this way: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. That means be deliberate in what you do and always remain rational even when the world has flipped upside down, because you will complete the task earlier if you make fewer mistakes.
Where I have seen low neuroticism having the largest influence during the course of my career is from commanders and persons running operations. There is a misconception, even among the active duty, that you need somebody with the personality of an aggressive nightmare hammer to run operations because operations are the staff that issues unit level orders and these people must not be intimidated. In my observations this line of thinking always ends in failure, because nobody trusts that kind of personality. Instead the most effective operations people are those people with an inhumane level of calm that knowns how to reduce friction and only pulls out their hammer as a last possible approach.
That is interesting because in the civilian world women tend to score higher in neuroticism than men, but in the military some of the most calm and collected leaders I have ever observed where women. I suspect that is due to some combination of women who were naturally low in neuroticism, who brought it down even lower than natural due to their leadership development, and who had developed powerful communication skills that further elaborated the appearance of their calm.
High conscientiousness is absolutely required for all military leaders at all levels. It does not matter if this is outside your normal personality. If you join the military young the stress conditions that will shape your perception of the world will allow you to expand your conscientiousness. For example I suspect I would score moderately low in conscientiousness, but under the right conditions I have found I can really kick this into extreme overdrive like a senior executive. I have also found that I can go a few months operating in an unnatural extremely high mode of hyper conscientiousness, but with too long a time duration it becomes a point of mental exhaustion as its not natural to my personality.
The military is extremely appealing to persons with high risk personalities, such as persons that score highly in openness to new experiences. It takes an unusual person to want to jump out of airplanes with a full combat load or repel out of helicopters. These are high risk activities.
High risk personalities are also the people most open to abuse drugs and alcohol as well as engage in high risk sexual behavior. Most sex crimes in the military tend to occur among young people and tend to involve alcohol. Sex crimes are reported in the military at a substantially higher volume than in the civilian culture outside the military. A small part of that distribution is reflective of a superior reporting process for sexual offenses in the military than in the civilian world, but that does not account for the significance of the disparity. The largest explanation for the disparity is a willingness for both the victim and perpetrator to put themselves into a high risk social situation that is resultant of high risk personalities and low maturing engaging in social contexts they would not as likely engage in outside the miliary. To be clear the victim of a sex crime can be a male or a female and though the perpetrator is most typically male females are statistically significant sexual aggressors in the military.
The military also scores substantially higher in suicides comparative to the civilian world outside the military. There is a collection of factors that account for this as well:
- Low adversity prior to joining the military
- Depression
- A loss of fear of death
- Social isolation
Social isolation appears to be a product somewhat unique to American social culture in general and may explain why Americans are at greater risk of suicide than citizens of many other nations. People more involved in rich social relationships are at a lower risk of suicide whether those relationships are family, community oriented, or social.
Mental health illness, especially depression, is perhaps the most significant contributing factor towards suicide. Combat medics, for example, are 3 times more likely to develop post traumatic stress disorder than the infantry personnel they perform with. As a result combat medics are more likely to attempt suicide than their infantry peers. Military personnel diagnose with PTSD substantially more frequently than the civilian world at large, which puts the military population at greater risk of suicide.
In order to fulfill, but not necessarily to attempt, suicide the victim must overcome a fear of death. This is the one single factor that most differentiates military from the civilian world and simultaneously aligns the military suicide rates to those of law enforcement. In order to enter combat, or an equivalent high risk situation, you must overcome a fear of death. The ability to turn off that fear allows soldiers to be more effective at their jobs, but it also removes the most significant inhibition preventing suicide.
The single factor that most specifically explains high risk populations within younger members of the military is the degree of adversity they have experienced before joining the military. The highest risk statical population are white males from middle income households who grew up in the suburbs. Conversely, the lowest risk statical population for suicide within the military are black females irrespective of additional identifiers.