>>Harsh and mindless training is one thing. Insults thrown at the soldiers are a part of the philosophy that says the soldier shouldn't have a personality, he/she is just a warm body in uniform. So a large part of the training is not aimed of building soldiers, it's aimed at breaking them first.
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>>Amazingly, though, I have seen that during my own training: a local rugby club used our playground for practice on weekends. Had any officer tried to throw such language at us, as the coach did to his trainees, he'd have a mysterious encounter overnight, with a blanket over his head and a dozen boots trying to guess what's under the blanket.
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>Is it any wonder that Serbian soldiers were so crazy in the war then, if that's the respect an officer can expect.

...in case he calls his soldiers morons, idiots, mindless beasts, and goes far of his way just to fuc* their mothers about once every five minutes. Respect is reciprocated.

Now that was the army I knew in the eighties... what happened later, I wouldn't know. I managed to not be there when I was invited. From what I heard, most of them were drunk (on all sides) whenever possible, and there's an estimate that maybe one in five bought it via friendly fire. And I somehow don't think that in those units (newly formed armies, all of them!) anybody thought much about building a code of conduct.