NTA--your idea that supposedly war commanders are mindless, amoral machines is completely and totally inaccurate.
No, my depiction is that the BEST ones are simple-minded amoral professional killers. That's not to say that a so-so commander can't also perform exceptionally well in a combat situation; not all officers are Seal Team leaders.
Put another way: Jean luc Picard is far from a military commander--he is too thoughtful, too contemplative, FAR too introspective and wishy-washy--yet he is fully capable winning a fight or two once he knows it's time to throw down. This makes him a very versatile commander with ample uses in peace time, but all things being equal he's likely to get out-fought by, say, Martok or Dukat or even Worf who don't have as many civic hangups to temper their judgement.
Basically, I'm describing the difference between a Shark and a Dolphin. The shark's first instinct is to try and kill you, and it is exceptionally good at it. The Dolphin, on the other hand, will probably do a million things before it ever harms you, yet it could
easily kill you if it wanted to.
A Navy captain is of equivalent rank to someone who would be commanding a group of this size in other services. Again--this is no small feat, despite how insignificant you seem to think it is.
You seem to be projecting here (not sure why that is, but whatever). The simple fact of the matter is, even in the Navy, a commander who hesitates in battle is more likely to end up dead than a commander who makes a snap decision without contemplating, without internalizing, without philosophizing, without turning to quasi-psychic therapist to ask for advice. Often enough, these snap decisions DO result in tragedy and loss of life;
because quick thinking is a desirable trait of navy commanders and officers are rarely (or never) chastised in such cases and are, in fact,
usually rewarded.
Mainly this is because combat--like many fast-paced occupations--is not a place for people who think too much to act too little. The commander who sits and wonders if the target he's about to shoot down really IS hostile or not runs a greater risk of getting his entire crew killed.
In this case, really, the key difference between an Admiral and a Captain is that Admirals
rarely come under fire from enemy weapons; they have more time to think, so they put it to better use.
But if you think any soldier who is capable of wartime decisions is nothing but a mindless thug
On the contrary, if he wants to make sure he lives THROUGH wartime he'd better be nothing less than a rifle-toting ninja with eyes in the back of his head. He'll get to drop mindless thugs by the truckload, IF he doesn't think too hard about whether or not the people he's shooting at really are mindless thugs, whether he has a right to kill them or not, whether his presence here precipitated the battle or not, whether those people have a right to defend themselves or not, whether it's possible to incapacitate them without killing them, whether it might be better to target their weapons and talk things out than immediately go for the head shot and neutralize them all.
Because if you have time to think about ANY of those things, you're probably not in combat. And soldiers are trained NOT to think about these things--or anything, for that matter--other than getting the job done.
Now maybe this is where your experience differs from mine, but in MY experience, the most elite soldiers in the world--particularly fighter pilots and some of the Marine Recon guys--are the ones who find civilian life the most frustrating. Not only is this understandable, it's a phenomenon so widely known that Star Trek actually did a
theme episode on it.
Requires a thread of its own. Brilliant.
