Makes sense, you don't want "creative" soldiers running around. You want guys that follow orders without thinking. I imagine if they tested soldiers with any hobby that required the slightest bit of creativity, that they would get the same results. Painters, musicians, or gardeners would display similar negative personality traits. And I imagine that people with hobbies of a more violent nature like shooting, boxing, or karate would display positive traits.

Sounds like Micah Wright's complaining again.

As an ex-NCO, that's plain insulting. Creativity is a highly-valued skill in the NCO and officer corps, and in the soldiers as well. Haven't you ever heard 'adapt, improvise, overcome'? Or that soldiers that take the time to understand their mission and then take the personal initiative to accomplish it are rewarded? Yes, the military certainly wants recruits fresh out of basic to jump when ordered to do so as they generally don't have the experience necessary to make appropriate battlefield decisions. That and they still don't have the understanding that, in order to survive battles, they need to function as a team rather than as individuals. Once they get this experience, they get to try their creative ideas (if their NCO's and officers are worth a damn, they do, but, if not, they don't) to see what does and doesn't work.

This system works and works well. There are countless examples of creative military personnel saving the day, winning the war, etc. The Revolutionary War has examples. So does WWI, WWI, Korea, VietNam, and every other single conflict.

That and if you read the whole article, what it says is that IDF recruits who play D&D are given psych evals and 50% of them fail and end up with low level clearances, but that some of them hold highly-classified jobs as well, so there may be other things here that weren't reported on that would completely change the slant of the story.

Who is Micah Wright?

It was intended to be insulting Ron. Fundamentally the goals of war haven't changed much since Sung Tzu wrote them down thousands of years ago. It's merely an exercise in logistics and adaptation to new technologies and terrain. That doesn't require high levels of creativity. The point is that creative people tend focus their energies on whatever their first love is, so if it's D&D, music, art, poetry, or whatever they won't give the same kinds of attention to it. If you happen to be a creative person that loves logistics or tactics, you'll go far in the Military command structure. But everyone below the rank of Sergeant is expected to follow orders without question and creativity isn't encouraged in the interpretation of orders because it puts people's lives in danger.

Innovation and creativity at the NCO and below level is one of the bedrock innovations in the western method of war. Dictators (both Western and non-) often make the mistake of thinking rigid discipline is the ultimate key to the military dominance of places like Greece, Rome, Britain, and America, only to find their legions of automatons out thought and out fought by less rigid foes.

In fact, history has proven time and again that an army is at its most vulnerable when it is forced to adhere to inflexible doctrines dictated from the officer class, and the higher up this ossification goes the more likely disaster becomes. The entire Vietnam war, along with battles like Antitam, Verdun, Trafalgar, Calais, Agincourt, Teutoborg, and Arbela provide abject examples of what can happen when armies (or navies) inculcated with rigid doctrines meet up with foes who are willing to listen to any idea as long at it helps them win.

People like Sun Tzu and von Clausewitz may have articulated the basic strategies of war hundreds or even thousands of years ago, but when everyone knows the basics victory goes to those willing to exploit the details. Only by enabling everyone, including the line-level grunt, will those details be exploited for maximum effect.

This is not to say discipline has no place in the military, far from it. When an army relies on the shock value of heavy units (as the west has since before Marathon) discipline is required. However, it is common to mistake discipline for rigid indoctrination. Such a misunderstanding is merely amusing when it comes from talking heads and pundits. It is deadly when it comes from inside the military itself.

This ability to successfully combine discipline with flexability, and at the unit level, more than anything else is why western armies have dominated nearly every battlefield they've ever walked on for the past thirty-five centuries.

I meant "it wasn't intended to be insulting" and not "was". Sorry. Typo.

Micah Wright was an ex-Marine who became a celebrity among military-haters for telling the "truth" about the Corps ("Ever seen 'Full Metal Jacket?' That's exactly what they're like.") Turned out he wasn't even telling the truth about his own career; the closest he had ever been to military service was learning the lingo from ROTC students in the cafeteria. Strange how all the bitter boot camp rejects always claim the military tries to eliminate creativity, while the graduates say creativity is the best thing for a soldier to have.

And to back it up a bit further, I asked a few of the NCO's that I work with about this - and they all agreed (emphatically even, as did the privates in room as well) that creativity was a prerequisite to being a good NCO, Officer, and a soldier.

As for the following orders that you point to, it tends to go something like this (in successful units, that is): Generals devise battle plans, which then work their way down to the local commanders. These commanders break the orders down into specific objectives based on their intel (both from HQ and field), input from their staff (both commissioned and non-comm), and their personal experience. These objectives are then passed down in a general manner (i.e., because Sgt Smith's squad is taking fire, I need you to eliminate that emplacement). The local NCO is then tasked with coming up with the best way to accomplish this. It requires an incredible amount of creativity, especially given that if he manages to screw things up by the numbers, his troops, himself, and likely many others will die.

As Scott points out above, NCO's and troops who are flexible (read creative) accomplish their objectives and live to fight another day. This makes them a much more valuable unit going forward, and it is absolutely imperative to our military's success that it continues this way.