At the Royal Military College in Canada last month we were discussing the relationship of training to practical results (see earlier column). Can you train people to be resistant to sleep deprivation? Can you train them to resist torture? Should we try either? Studies suggest that intensive training works in specialty schools (SEALs, Rangers, etc.) for a small group of highly-motivated people for a short intensive period of time. But is there any evidence that a version of this training is necessary or even desirable with the rank and file over a much longer period? At USNA, I know that some training techniques cancel out or render impossible some of our stated goals. And it's more than just possible that some so-called training is nothing but an exercise in power: I had it done to me, so I'm doing it to you.

Some will say this misses the real point of such evolutions, whether or not they achieve their stated objectives. It's been suggested, in fact, that their real objective is none of the above -- not, that is, what those running the programs say it is. At the RMC, a Canadian lieutenant commander jumped in and asserted that the purpose, and the effect, of all onerous training, of whatever sort and wherever it is, had nothing to do with achieving skills. It was instead meant to produce primarily the effect of camaraderie among those people subjected to the training. Thus we're looking in the wrong place if we demand that there be a reason for each particular evolution -- say, forcing plebes at the Naval Academy to jog (chop) down the halls of Bancroft Hall and “square corners.” It could be counting jellybeans in a jar, or anything with dubious fleet applicability. In fact, we can conclude, the more senseless the things trainees have to do, the less connected with any battle- or fleet-related skills, the more intense the camaraderie that can be produced as a result of the inevitable complaining.

This offers an answer to questions I've raised before. I've proposed that what we do needs to be subjected to scrutiny to winnow out the truly useful from the merely silly and/or counter-productive, and from those things we do simply because each group of upper-class want the chance to make others miserable as they were made miserable before. It proposes that the effect of these training evolutions doesn't have to be established on a one-to-one basis, training to fleet skill. It produces camaraderie, itself a valuable, some would say necessary, commodity. Indeed this way of looking at things also gives a reason for the physical hazing of earlier decades, or the mental hazing (as my students put it) of the current day: the more painful the experience, the more intense the bond with others in the same predicament, cemented through hatred of those inflicting the training.

So haze away, we might say. Pile on the senseless Mickey Mouse stuff, give them sadistic drill instructors and upperclass: it's all good, because it bonds them tighter together.

It's an interesting point, and one that is echoed in my current literary favorite, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. The cannon-fodder volunteers caught in the living hell of trench warfare complain about the petty, sadistic Drill Instructor, named Himmelstoss -- in civilian life a postman. At the same time they too conclude that the effect of all this nonsense is to bond them together.

The men (for they are men, seasoned veterans at age 20) speculate that part of his sadism comes from his being short and feeling inadequate in civilian life. One of them notes: “A non-com can torment a private, a lieutenant a non-com, a captain a lieutenant, until he goes mad. And because they know they can, they all soon acquire the habit.” He then gives an example of a senseless disciplinary action -- exhausted men who are ordered to sing don't sing with enough energy, and so must go back and do it all again. Here the beatings are clearly going to continue until morale improves. And he comments: “The company commander's head has been turned by having so much power. And nobody blames him. On the contrary, he is praised for being strict.”

One of the men notes that: “They say . . . there must be discipline.”

The older member of the company agrees. “They always do,” he “growls.” But then he notes: “Still, it oughtn't become an abuse.”

Yet the men suggest that all this has its effect. The narrator, a soldier named Paul, tells us: “We were put through every conceivable refinement of parade-ground soldiering [senseless repetition and focus on insignificant details] till we often howled with rage.” One of their number actually dies as a result. Still, as the narrator tells us: “We became hard, suspicious, pitiless, vicious, tough -- and that was good . . . Had we gone into the trenches without this period of training most of us would certainly have gone mad. Only thus were we prepared for what awaited us.” And he sums up: “By far the most important result was that it awakened in us esprit de corps, which . . . developed into . . . comradeship.”

So there's the argument in a nutshell. It's the same argument I hear from my students: if you can put up with the BS here, you can succeed in the fleet.

The problem is, I'm apparently part of the BS on the way to their BS. (All our students receive a Bachelor of Science on graduation, regardless of their major.) And it goes on for four years. And it's supposed to teach them to think. Not to mention give them a college education.

I'd say that the camaraderie produced by trials by BS is at best the silver lining: It can't be the best effect we can aim at. That's not even what we aim at in intensive specialty schools: the men aren't supposed to bond in hatred of the training, but in overcoming its challenges. Even if hardship produces mad-dog killers, our aim is to produce officers. And that means, people who understand what we're trying to get them to do, and be -- not people united in frustration and hatred against the system.

If “camaraderie” is the best we can do, I'd say we're not doing enough.