In American media, Drill Sergeants are often portrayed as mean and shouty. Yelling at recruits / treating them like garbage.
The only thing I could think of is that they’re going for a “military service is hard so I’m going to make this as unpleasant for you as possible because life is hard” kind of thing, but couldn’t discipline be instilled in soldiers without the yelling and humiliation? Why is this the only way?
​
In: Other
I have an even deeper psychological question: why is personal emotional abuse effective in building someone up for the chaos of battle, fighting other soldiers or handling shock and gore? You’d think simulations and exercises in following orders under duress would be better, especially enforcing that your platoon and leader or whatever has actually got your back . I wouldn’t think so if this dude was fucking abusing me. Hell I might be less prone to following their orders, maybe this is why I’m not cut out for that shit lol
USAF basic training ~2015. They were just coming off a pretty huge sexual assault scandal, so there were a lot of rules about the drill sergeants not being allowed to be alone in a room with just one other person (we had “wingmen” we were required to bring everywhere). I’m also fairly certain they’d been told to cut back on cursing because it didn’t happen often and when it did my drill sergeant would always have this “oh fuck, oops” look. That said, I had one that was just like in the movies and once shouted at us that we were all disappointments to our families and worthless in life, and a second drill sergeant who very much took on the “disappointed father” role.
The way it was explained to me was that it was meant to train you to follow orders. If you’re scared of your drill sergeant, you’ll do what they tell you without question. Later on you kinda learn “oh, okay, I follow these orders to maintain discipline”…or whatever.
Not a DS nor ever been in the military. But I have a friend who was a DS who explained it like this:
Imagine a high school PE teacher giving a machine gun to everyone in the class and you’ll understand why drill sergeants yell and maintain strict discipline.
Went through USMC boot camp in 2009 and the movies are tame compared to reality. Full Metal Jacket is the closest, but take R Lee Emery and multiply him by four other DIs screaming at you with your only salvation the Senior telling them to stop. They aren’t technically allowed to hit you, but it happened in private occasionally when the squad bay doors were closed. None of the movies really portray the amount of fuck fuck games you do.
The point? When you’re pinned down in a ditch, your friend just got shot in the face next to you and the enemy is trying to maneuver on you, what are you going to do? Curl up in a ball and die because you can’t handle it?
The point is to be able to perform under pressure. If you can function while 4 grown men scream at you with knife hands flying, you’re dog shit tired because you’ve been smoked on the quarter deck twice today and now you have to reassemble the squad bag after your DIs just trashed it, you can probably function in most scenarios life throws at you.
Air Force vet here.
Basic training has evolved over time and has a different purpose for each branch. One of the biggest reasons for the yelling and ordering around is to essentially stress test the recruits. Almost every recruit class has at least 1 or 2 people that freak out when under extreme stress like getting yelled at. And if getting yelled at by someone that means you no harm while in a safe location causes you to freak out/have major panic attacks/shut down then you likely will have a hard time if you get deployed and put in a stressful situation at a hostile location and encountering people that want to kill you. So those people usually fail boot camp and are separated by the military who simply sends them home.
It’s often said that it’s also to “break people down and build them back up” but I don’t agree with that. I never felt broken down and rebuilt, and I don’t see that in anyone that left basic training. It’s more like to teach people to work as a team and that selfishness will bring down the whole team. Group punishment is used often, where if one person screws something up, everyone pays for it. It’s to teach members that when you’re out in the field in a hostile location, your actions can get your whole team killed. So basic training enforces this idea at a foundational level.
One of the main theories of military training is that you’re trying to develop ingrained responses. You are training a person to act a certain way when presented with a certain stimulus without needing to consciously react to it.
MBT (Military Basic Training) is designed to get you to act in this basic manner when under stress. This also serves as a gage for how you react under stress, and if you react poorly, you’re let go. At AIT (Advanced Infantry Training) or specialist schools this is either ramped up or down depending on what you’re intended to be doing.
You want the person to react immediately to incoming fire, so you practice that by simulated (or not so simulated) fire. You want them to react immediately to an NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) warning, so you lead them several times through the exercise under stress then test them by doing it again and sending them through the gas chamber (CS tear gas, if you were wondering)
It’s usually never ramped all the way down and members of the military tend to be kept at a low simmer of stress, but it usually doesn’t get quite as bad as those previous examples except on military drills.
This does backfire. The military has a significant problem with every vice and crime you can imagine, as keeping someone consistently stressed leads to them seeking escape. There’s also some really well known horror stories in the military about how people react, especially after coming back from a tour of duty.
It’s also why you get people reacting immediately to stressful situations by firing their weapons. Basic crowd control is not a part of basic training, but firing during stressful situations is.
Depends when I went through army infantry training it was bat shit crazy back in 08 ish but they changed. They started doing these poor baby stress cards where if you got too stressed you get to take a break by showing a card.
The idea isn’t to be mean, its to break the weakness out of you so that you’re effective in your duties.
In the modern (US) military, they’re usually not allowed to do this anymore because ‘muh feelings’, leading to a decline in the performance of our military.
Army basic 1986, Tank Hill, Ft Jackson, SC. We had reserve drills on rotations. Every 2 weeks we’re proving to the new drills that we weren’t day 1 recruits.
Lots of yelling and even more PT. It was different for every rotation on their preference, but dying cockroach was common.
Closest they came to touching us was brim of their hat on our forehead. Screaming. And PT. Repeat.
I’ve rarely thought twice about them since. My OCS TAC officers on the other hand, screw you CPT Chamberlain!
People have written lots about training recruits to handle stress and be disciplined, but I think a part no one’s mentioned is training recruits to follow orders without hesitation or backtalk. An army does not want privates who question orders, or hesitate, or think “this is bullshit, I’m not doing that”. An army *does* want privates who obey their superiors automatically, on reflex. A Drill Sargeant who treats you worse than you “deserve” to be treated, right off the bat, is hammering home the fact that you obey, no matter what.
Latest Answers