>>>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.

Sorry, old bean, but I was being silly enough to think of the way in which a British officer would conduct himself. No way you'd hear such language or oaths from him. Maybe one time the non-coms may have spoken like that to the men but, with a non-conscript army, they'd be hard-pressed to hold on to the men. It's said that nowadays the army have to pussy-foot with the recruits in a way never seen before (whereas the screaming British rgt sgt maj is the epitome of discipline from all the old films), not the least reason being that the young men are used to a far higher degree of luxury (and lack of discipline - see other threads) on civvy street then in the past.

Time was, during conscription, if a lance corporal said s**t, a soldier strained. Nowadays the non-coms get no real power until 3 stripes and, if they tried to bully the men as descibed, they'd get a regimental tucking in, as decribed.

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>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.

Trouble with your language: you don't know vich from vich.

>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.