Why is there such a pronounced difference in how the military treats officers vs enlisted people? This even extends to how they are treated when a POW, as seen in Bridge Over River Kwai.

Question

I *completely* understand that there needs to be a hierarchy, but there seems to be a big discontinuity between these different classifications. When I was in the Navy, I noticed this extended to eating accommodations, and even how ships were built (different hallways for enlisted and officers to walk down). This may have made sense “back in the day”, but why does this separation continue to exist today?

In: 222

Answer 1

In the US Army this separation is mostly gone, but it still exists because various reasons that I will oversimplify as ‘professionalism’.

Officers are encouraged to keep a social circle that isn’t the people in their command. This sounds bad, but Officers have a large degree of control over the careers of enlisted. You can imagine that even the perception of nepotism is bad.

My detachment joined another for a deployment, and the leadership of this other organization did not keep this separation, and the nepotism was so blatant that everyone referred to it as ‘the club’. If you were in the club (aka it’s members liked you), you had all the opportunities. If you were not, you only had opportunities until you competed with someone in the club. And as far as I could tell, ‘membership’ required respecting the nepotism. So even if they liked you, if they didn’t think you’d perpetuate the will of ‘the club’, you were out. I would not recommend this style of running things, it caused many problems.