Earlier quoted context omitted.
Academia doesn't drive anyone out of the military. It may dissuade some people from joining. US military culture drives people out. Either by being surrounded by lazy or coasting individuals who think of the military as just a job (discouraging to more ideologically minded people). Or by being hammered by the ugly, jingoistic rhetoric and motivations of some peers and leadership. Or by being too smart and standing to…
Oh that is why ROTC is such a big issue and many elite universities do not have it in their campuses. Intellectualism is absent in military? Some of the best lectures I watched are from Naval War College. TOR comes from that part of the woods. You do not have individualism in any armed forces, this is absolutely lunatic. Its like preaching individualism in Basketball team and telling Allen Iverson he is oh so special…
Re Individualism: You're taking the extreme position of individualism which is not what I intended. I meant those people who generally don't suffer from groupthink.
An example of groupthink, second-hand tale: During the second Iraq War, my father was responsible for a lot of CSAR mission planning for the USAF. He would not send helicopters into bad weather conditions (primarily sandstorms) that he knew (after 20+ years of experience) they couldn't handle. The Army CSAR guys would send in their own birds and crews. The USAF CSAR crews would then have two rescue missions once the weather cleared. There was a pressure to ignore reality and press forward despite the odds and regardless of the cost that put more personnel and materiel at risk than necessary. In some sense it's honorable, in another it's just stupid. A degree of individuality, the ability and willingness to risk saying "no" when everyone else is hell bent on something, is the sort of individualism that's needed.
Sometimes in combat situations like the above, but the majority of the time not. See the drone programs, surveillance programs, acquisitions programs, that are either unethical, ill-conceived, or just wasteful. Groupthink allows them to persist. Generals who let it slide because they know they're getting promoted in 18-24 months and it'll be someone else's problem allow them to persist.
Some degree of individualism is necessary in both the officer and enlisted corps to step in and alter the culture.
A squad of all individuals unable to act as a team, yeah, that'd be fucking stupid. Obviously that's not what I was talking about. If you thought it was, you took the worst possible interpretation of my words and ran with it. Great.
But an officer corps of all yes-men drones is useless, too. They need people that can break out of the mold at every rank, not just the top.
EDIT: And because it's not clear. Sometimes, the willingness to say "yes" when everyone else is saying no is also useful. The story above was about being more risk-averse than the group, and it being the better option. But sometimes the group is too risk-averse and someone willing to step in and risk failure is what's needed - see the example of the generals who let shit stand instead of changing them. The real leaders will step in and risk their career when something is broken but unchanging because of fear or cargo cult behavior or whatever else.