I have a whole essay planned about this, but I may never get to write it, so here we go: It's not tradition, and it's not education. The officer/enlisted divide is a critical, perhaps the critical, component of a healthy civ-mil relationship. https://twitter.com/rachelkaras/status/1252322158216384512

But to understand that, like we so many things, we have to go back. Back to the time when modern military institutions were just forming.

Officers played a lot of different roles in pre-modern militaries as they transitioned to modern ones, from provisioning, organizing, subcontracting, commanding. You name it. The common thread is that they did this on behalf of a sovereign. It's kinda feudalism, kinda not.

A story about Francis Drake from this period illustrates the transition. On a voyage in 1578, Francis Drake gets sick and tired of one of his subordinate officers (Thomas Doughty) and straight up executes him for treason.

Everyone else is like, "WTF man? You just executed him!? And what was all that stuff about witchcraft maybe we should execute YOU." So Drake whips out his commission from Queen Elizabeth I and reveals he was wielding her authority, not his own.

This establishes a few things: 1) A ship captain's authority on his ship is absolute and 2) the precedence that an officer's role is to wield the authority of the sovereign. They are the sovereign's representative on the battlefield/ship.

This has not changed in the intervening centuries and even for non-monarchical systems. Every U.S. officer is commissioned by Congress, as the representatives of the people (who are theoretically sovereign in our system). Officers represent and wield their authority.

Enlisted servicemembers do not. Officers are the link bridging the gap between the military and the people. Yes, we don't take this role seriously enough anymore. We've forgotten about it. But we should. It's vital.

This is also why an officer CANNOT, I say again CANNOT, be solely a tactician and ignore strategy. Strategy is political, the officer has a commission from a political entity to wield organized violence on behalf of the polity, responsibly (and therefore strategically).

Officers should be the link between strategy and tactics, they should be there to guide the tactics executed by the enlisted servicemembers, they should know that they do so on behalf of the American people (or whomever in other countries).

We don't do a good job of preparing them for this, or even explaining this aspect of their profession. But we need to start or no, there won't be any point to officers. At which point the link between the authority of the people and the trigger-pullers will be broken.

In which case, just farm it out to whatever Blackwater is called now and count me out.