He had some memorable moments. At one point he says to Highway that “Me and the major are buildin a e-light company of fightin’ men”. I still like to pronounce the word elite that way from time to time.

Highway responds that the only thing Webster could build is a good case of hemorrhoids.

You just don’t get this kind of writing anymore.

Yes, in the movie Highway and Chuzu had been in the army in Korea and their change of service is just blown past with a one liner in which Chuzu explains to Jones that he and Highway had joined the Corps later.

The only reference to women in the USMC is the scene in which the main antagonist the major [I think he's originally identified as the battalion S3 or 2IC rather than a company commander, but recall not 100%] is standing with a female marine officer as various platoons march past. One of Highway’s men gives a memorable cadence that begins with “Model A Ford and a tank full of gas…” The female officer appears to smirk a bit but also look away. Don’t know whether that’s realistic either.

But seriously, damn, my recall of movies from high school is clearly not what it used to be. A research program will be constructed forthwith on some weekend.

On a related note, I recall this great Simpsons moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky6o60LcPv8

It’s even funnier that all the better quality copies of this clip have the Spanish dub.

The interesting thing about that movie, though–The main character was supposed to be Army, but the Army didn’t like the script, soooo… It went to the Marines, who didn’t like it either, but they were willing to hold their noses and go for it. They kept the Heartbreak Ridge thing because that was an Army battle, and just had the protagonist join the Marines after Korea for some damn reason. He was originally supposed to have been Airborne, I think.

Here’s what the Wikipedia says about the deal, there:

“However, the Army read the script and refused to participate, due to Highway being portrayed as a hard drinker, divorced from his wife, and using unapproved motivational methods to his troops, an image the Army did not want. The Army called the character a “stereotype” of World War II and Korean War attitudes that did not exist in the modern army and also did not like the obscene dialogue and lack of reference to women in the army.”

The commissioned side of the house is a little twee, sometimes…

Obviously, can’t speak for its realism. But it definitely kept officers at a certain distance except as villain or part time comedy. I suppose it could be viewed as a coming of age story for Lt Ring, but only aas the tertiary story.

Even when I saw it, I wondered how a Marine Recon platoon could have deteriorated that much under one disinterested platoon sergeant, before Eastwood arrived. I mean, they weren’t exactly a bunch of new draftees.

Also, the movie that, AFAIK, coined the term “Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah”. As in Mario van Peebles’ character, Stitch Jones. Also Earl of Funk and Duke of Cool.

Reality? They’re really nothing more than a thin veneer of managerial talent overlain on the actuality of things, which is based more on factors going back generations. You very rarely have a case where an army or other military formation is stood up de novo with just the commissioned officers setting up everything and running with it. We tried that route with the Continental Army, and found that we had to graft von Steuben in on top of the cluster-fark that the officers and militia made of things when it came to setting up and running an actual professional army.

Don’t get me wrong–Officers are important. The point I’m trying to make is that they’re not the only component of a well-run and successful military. There’s an entire other world of things that go into such things, and the annoying thing about much of our literature and culture is that we ignore all that, and just concentrate on the officers. It’s like there’s nothing else, just the commissioned types. Every novel, every movie–Officers as the ultimate protagonist. You never see someone saying “Hey, how about a Sergeant America character?”, it’s always “Captain X” or “Colonel Y”, never the guys actually doing things. And, they always mischaracterize what the jobs actually are–A realistic portrayal of what a commissioned officer does on the daily would likely just be one long shot of some poor schmuck in an office somewhere, endlessly typing or stamping papers, depending on the era.

It’s a cultural blind spot, and one that I think contributes to the dysfunction of the institutions. When people ideate the military, all that they seem to think important is the officer corps, and that’s eventually reflected in the men who make up that corps, who go on to discount everything but their little world of managerial nuttiness–Which leads to the tail wagging the dog, in terms of things like institutional memory and corporate identity.

Part of the US Army’s problem is that it was essentially founded to serve as the professional cadre for a mass national army consisting of a bunch of poorly-trained militia. The mentality is that of an elite leading the unwashed masses, which has set up a certain set of cultural foibles leading to things that are entirely inappropriate to today’s reality.

I propose that all staff description of force deployment be conducted in terms of size, speed, mass, cost, strength (explosive), logistics, attrition, and so on. It will be necessary to know what a joule is, how that joule relates to mass, distance, and time, how to calculate a cross product, how to programmatically find the sum of all multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000[1], and so on.

In other words, I propose that the officer be obliged to speak in the language of the engineer. I know, this is a big ask, probably necessitating years of remedial education. It’s okay, though; in two or four or ten years — as long as it takes! — the military will still be there, when the entire officer corps returns to their posts en masse.

Godspeed, and don’t forget to make that quarter bounce.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9SGYBHY0qs

Our military called it Network Enabled Operations (NEO). I suspect but will likely never be able to confirm that this was only because “operations” sounds less warlike than “warfare”. Or maybe it was a Matrix joke, since that move was then relatively recent.

If it was done to tone down the language, I can’t decide if that was the CAF doing that for its own sake, or to make it sellable to the Canadian civilian audience. Could be the latter, since CAF for a time really embraced the “Warrior” tone otherwise.

Either way, and inevitably, we started seeing documents and presentations that aimed to clarify by using the combined NEO/NCW term, or other variants.

I may have had to resist the temptation to stick up a hand and ask how the neo NCW differed from the paleo NCW.