And from a military perspective I’ve seen new commanders make incredibly stupid decisions just to make it look like they’re making a difference. I’ve also seen reporting channels get shut down or restricted to prevent inconvenient facts from going up the chain of command. I can’t really talk about specifics for the second one except to say they weren’t war crimes, they were just inconvenient to their next promotion. And at scale is probably why Biden, Trump, and Obama had an inflated sense of the ANA’s readiness.
But the first one, haha let’s go. In the Infantry drinking is a lifestyle, especially in the early-mid 2000’s when it seemed like you were just existing until the random number generator gave up your number. So the headquarters company gets a new CO. Of note, this guy isn’t the Battalion commander. He’s just the guy responsible for running the company that houses communications, scouts, mortars, etc. We’re not under his command, we’re one of the line companies. He decides his big splash is going to be tackling the alcohol problem. Looking back it really was a problem, but good luck telling us that when we knew we were going to be going back to Iraq at some point and for our sins were considered capable of taking on hard missions. No lazy patrols in a peaceful area for us. So yeah, we drank, and we partied, a lot, and we felt we were entitled to it. This living embodiment of the good idea fairy issues an order banning all alcohol from dorm rooms with headquarters company soldiers staying in them. The problem? The scouts and mortars were some of the hardest partiers and they were largely billeted with roommates from other companies. Reader, you can see where this is going right? But in order to see the entire depth of folly possible we need to keep going.
That Friday, their dear leader orders a surprise inspection of their rooms. This is actually against regulations. Health and welfare checks can be a surprise, but they are supposed to be conducted by neutral NCOs, typically Alpha will do Bravo and vice versa. Otherwise you can only do a surprise inspection with a warrant and MPs. (Believe or not there’s a union of enlisted soldiers that got this stuff written into regs.) Even better, this guy does it during the workday. So we’re not in our rooms. We come back from some training that afternoon to find trashcans all over the barracks filled with our alcohol. And of course they also wanted to write guys up for finding “contraband”. (There’s very little that’s actually contraband stateside in the military, it basically has to be illegal.) It turns out this guy was trying to enforce General Order Number 1, which is a deployed rule saying no porn, no sex, and no alcohol. Applying it to our barracks was not only unprecedented and outside his authority, it was seen as a declaration of war by the E4 mafia. To be fair, we didn’t abide by GO1 overseas either, and the idea of an officer who was going to make it his mission to enforce it, instead of using GO1 to go after guys who went too far was intolerable. He had broken the unspoken contract of ignoring small infractions and hammering the big ones.
So the first thing we did was we lodged a complaint, he had destroyed our personal property and invaded our privacy without authority. We were told it was unfortunate but it wouldn’t happen like that again, there would be a one time amnesty for anything illegal or contraband found, and we were to make sure we paid him his due respect still. Also, we should mark our alcohol clearly so that inspectors knew it was the property of someone in a different company, under different authority. Well you can guess how that went. The guys that didn’t share a room with someone from a line company got space in our fridges. The guys that did labeled an entire shelf as the one for beer from another company. Which I want to stress, was not an uncommon amount of beer for one person to keep on hand. On Monday they pulled a health and welfare check. And wouldn’t you know it there was nothing for them to find. The sergeants knew we were covering for them but as long as we told them it was ours and not owned by someone from headquarters there was nothing they could do. At this point only a few days have passed and the commander for headquarters is angry. He knows we’re working around him. He knows the E4 mafia has started making sure he doesn’t get anything done on time, headquarters company is the last to know about anything, the last to arrive to anything, the last to receive anything, and all of that goes doubly for anything he personally needs. They’ve begun making him look like he’s incompetent. So he ups the ante and orders a 100 percent piss test. Most of his barracks guys comes up dirty, they’ve been drinking and they can’t hide it. Now he’s got half of his company for disobeying GO1. This 900 IQ chad orders them all written up for administrative punishment. That means they could lose rank, pay, free time, or all three. Now this next part is a bit murky but one of two things happens. The Battalion Commander notices this shitfest and relieves him of command. That is the official version. The unofficial version is one of the E4’s with not much to lose signed for a courts martial. If you think your administrative punishment is unjust you can sign a line to turn it into a courts martial, where the punishment possibilities jump up to fun things like jail time. However an investigator from up the chain of command is assigned and everything comes out. More than one soldier has saved themselves punishment by signing that line.
So yeah, the moral of the story is the military has a special place in the annals of bad leadership, because of the complete control leadership exercises over their subordinates.