...“ THE BENEFITS OF NOT OBEYING ORDERS”
At first glance the title and the purpose of this paper is to explain the benefits of not obeying orders given to you from your superiors in the United States Army. But as you can imagine and I hope it is easy for you to realize common sense would tell you that of course there are no benefits to not obeying a lawful order given to you by a superior in the army. If you do not obey lawful orders given to you, you will be held accountable threw the UCMJ or Uniform Code of Military Justice, and possibly could receive time in jail. But there are benefits to not obeying unlawful orders, but at the soldiers own peril it is not their decision if the order is unlawful or not it is up to the commanding general tom determine if the order given is unlawful or not. If the solider dose not follow the order given and it is determined that the order was indeed lawful that soldier will be prosecuted under UCMJ actions. And in researching for this paper I am reminded of two movies “ A Few Good Men “ and “ The Lottery “. I will site specific examples from these movies as well as some articles I have found on the internet about the reasons why we as people find it easy to follow these unlawful orders given to us as soldiers.
We as soldiers were not always soldiers, we as people were brought from birth to obey our superiors whether it be our parents to our techers. It is inherent in our behavior to obey with out question but more recently in our culture especially in the army I have noticed that more soldiers do not blindly obey, they question their orders given to them. Now I know it is frustrating to the people giving these orders but maybe, some times this is a good thing. There are many reasons for this change in the army and civilian culture and they are linked together I will site some army and some civilian examples of why people blindly follow orders and I think with education will come answers to why we follow orders...