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Zero
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I've just watch the complete series of Horatio Hornblower which, despite its stupid name, was actually a very enjoyable series. Now, based on Star Trek, etc, I never really considered how strict order is/was on a military ship. It seems like the penalty in the British navy at that ime was death for almost any offense. "Hang from the yardarm!"

But I don't see this kind of thing in most sci-fi. Is it a cultural evolution or something?


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Meredith
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I'm not aware of the series, but I read all the books many years ago. The British navy during the Napoleonic War.

Yes, discipline was extremely strict. They didn't hang everyone from the yardarm, though. More often they were given a few lashes with the cat o' nine tails--a very nasty whip.

Yes, I would say most of the difference between that and sci-fi is a change in the culture. At that time, European culture was still very stratified. The sailors were mostly from the bottom rungs of society and treated that way. The officers were "gentlemen" and they were treated accordingly. An officer would probably only be hung for mutiny--the ultimate crime in the navy of that time.


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Kitti
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And part of the reason you don't see this sort of thing in sci-fi seems to be ignorance about the way the armed forces really work. My dad is in the Navy and the only one of the Star Treks that he liked was Next Generation - in his mind, Picard was the only captain who came even close to acting like a captain.

If you haven't ever seen it, there's a great side-by-side comparison of the Navy and Star Trek. "Nine Reasons Why a Starfleet Education Won't Prepare You for the Real Navy." http://ufo.whipnet.org/xdocs/star.trek/navy.vs.startrek.html


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tchernabyelo
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Yep, Star Trek in general was nothing like any "real" armed force. Even BSG, which is a much more militarily-oriented series, has fraternisation occurring across rank boundaries that doesn't/wouldn't happen IRL without a significant change of attitude.

Hornblower may be 200 years ago, but class is still a HUGE factor in the make-up of the British armed forces and to a significant, if lesser, extent the US armed forces. There is a gul between commissioned officers and "other ranks" that CAN be crossed but rarely is. The "Sharpe" books accurately depicted that, while Sharpe was respected (by the more intelligent senior officers) for his abilities, he was for the most part hated (or at least looked down on) for his humble origins and his effrontery in having crossed a divide.

It would be nice to think that, in the future, a more egalitarian and merit-based system might come into play. Arguably the closest is the Air Force, but that's predominantly because it consists of a much higher proportion of "officer class" (pilots are officers), largely for reasons of historical aberration.

Most SF "space forces" are heavily based on a naval model. If yo're dealing with "capital ships" and aircraft carrier or battleship equivalents, that arguably makes sense, but you could as easily see an air force model in place with the "capital ships" based on airfields instead.


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Brad R Torgersen
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I can't speak for the other branches, but it's been my experience that the officer/enlisted system in the modern U.S. Army is not necessarily driven by one's civilian social class of origin. I've met Privates from millionaire families, and Captains from the ghetto. How much a person is worth on the outside doesn't seem to have much effect on how much that person is worth on the inside. Especially since the Army can pretty much pay you to get your degree now, and a degree is required for 2LT and above.

Back during the Civil War and earlier, Army commissions were often purchased, in which case most officers were wealthy, or at least came from wealthy families.

It's been a long time since things ran that way, mostly because it quickly became obvious that many of the Union Generals -- and some of the Confederate Generals too -- were incompetent idiots, who allowed thousands upon thousands of their men to be slaughtered while they bungled their way through the war.

And yes, there is a line between officers and enlisted. That kind of can't be helped. The one exception being Warrant Officers, who in theory are separated from enlisted just as much as regular officers, but who in practice often get to walk in both worlds, enjoying respect and commonality up and down the chain.

I think one of the big reasons they can't or don't do harsh corporal punishment anymore, besides evolving socialization, is the volunteer nature of the service, and the plentiful amount of competing civilian jobs. Back in the British Imperial days, poverty in the lower classes was so awful, and there were so few avenues of escape, the Navy or the Army were among the few choices that seemed to offer a man anything of value.

The modern U.S. society offers teenagers an endless number of well-paying, easy avenues for growth. This is why the military is still largely regarded as a "dead end" career and nobody with high corporate or political aspiration seriously considers the military; unless they're extraordinarily patriotic, which can and does happen.

This means the military has to find ways to appeal to young civilians, and their parents. The Army and Navy still tied young people to posts and whipped them for infractions, I doubt many of us would have signed up. Patriotic or no. There are certain things Americans just won't put up with anymore. Hard corporal punishment being one of them.


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Brad R Torgersen
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BTW, Kitti, thanks for that link. I am spraying rootbeer out my nose as I write this.
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Kitti
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Glad you enjoy it - it's my checksheet for making sure I'm writing believable future navies/fleets in space :-)

Brad's comment about the voluntary nature of the current military reminds me of another reason why harsh corporeal punishment used to be the norm: a lot of the enlisted sailors were impressed, especially during wartime. These guys did not want to be on board ship. So they were essentially kidnapped, locked up in a small space, starved... captains needed SOMETHING to keep them in line!

On a related (but in some senses completely random) note: I worked as a research assistant some summers ago, studying habeas corpus as applied to the impressment of sailors into the British Navy (late 18th c.) Basically, if you got impressed, the fastest way to get OUT of of the navy was to have relatives sent off letters claiming you were the subject of some monarch other than the British one. The law required such sailors to be shipped back to England and appear in court, so the truth of the claim could be judged. Once the letters filtered through all the red tape and got sent out the to captains, the standard procedure was for the captains to dump off the sailors at the nearest port of call and then write back - so sorry, don't have them anymore! Apparently that was cheaper than actually shipping them back...

Anyway, I think there's a lot of potential for someone to take actual historical military procedures (or even modern ones) and put them out into space in a sci-fi setting. Certainly it would make a change from what we currently read about - and I would think it would have a lot of appeal for people who served in the military (and/or know people who did).


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Kitti
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PS - If you've never heard of Naomi Novik, she's worth looking into. It's the Napoleanic Wars with dragons as an air force... nuff said.
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TaleSpinner
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Gene Roddenberry flew B17s in WWII and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal, so he can't have been ignorant of military procedure. Also, after the war he served as a policeman with the LAPD for seven years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Roddenberry

I remember reading somewhere that while it's nuts for senior officers to beam down to the alien planet and fight the bad guys, if they followed military procedure the story would drag. We'd see scenes of officers discussing the situation and radioing orders and taking reports, fiddling with maps, scratching their heads and looking worried, while the enlisted men rushed around, fought aliens, waited for orders and exchanged dialogue like, "WTF?" Realistic but boring.

By taking dramatic license with procedure, ST's writers can write a tighter story, because the people who know what's going on -- the officers -- are also involved in the action.

This is not to say that basing SF stories on more realistic military procedure wouldn't work, just that I think Star Trek knowingly simplified the ship's quasi-military organization for dramatic effect.

[This message has been edited by TaleSpinner (edited April 08, 2009).]


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extrinsic
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The Star Trek franchise missions weren't so much military as survey missions. Parallels with historic explorers in the Age of Discovery are more illustrative of the nature of Star Trek's missions. Columbus, Vespucci, Cabot, De Gama, Hudson, Magellan, Cook, Darwin, more modern, Shackleton, Byrd, all government funded and military supported exploration surveys. Senior officers, if not commanding officers, were on the ground and in close contact with the natives wherever they went.

Flogging was a more common punishment in all navies than hanging. Herman Melville's semi-autobiographical novel White-Jacket directly led to the abolishment of flogging in the U.S. Navy.

The practices of navy flogging as recorded by history are horrific. Flogging around the fleet was a capital punishment in the British Navy. A stout man could survive up to 40 lashes of the cat (cat-o-nine-tails) well laid on. Ideally, the crew was so numerous that when ordered on deck to witness punishment there wasn't room to swing the cat. The term quarter meaning mercy orginated with flogging. A chaplain or medical officer could request a quartering of the number of lashes.

Then there's keelhauling, kissing the gunner's daughter, and the starter or teaser. Keelhauling is too grisly to describe here. One punishment carried out while kissing the gunner's daughter, bent (tied face down) upon a cannon, was beating a man's feet until he was crippled. The starter was a knotted cord used by noncoms to beat sailors, sometimes a monkey's fist knot tied around a lead core. "Start that man, Mr. Pritchard." Running the gantlet (gauntlet) was a punishment for stealing from shipmates. Messmates were assembled in rows and beat the miscreant with knotted cords as he walked slowly from end to end and back again three times. Then there's towing, towed behind an underway ship for days until hypothermia and exhaustion overwhelmed the poor wretch. And all this commonplace in the Age of Reason.

[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited April 08, 2009).]


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skadder
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I think there is something to be said for the conditions. A naval ship was pretty small when you consider the number of men on board. There were no modern gadgets to keep people occupied or help make life easier. The road to Dissatisfaction (and those nearest Dissatisfaction were the crew, because not everyone could have a captain's cabin or food etc.) was short and quickly reached.

The officer's would have felt (and it was the prevailing idea of the time) that discipline needed to be maintained and rigourously enforced--the crew had to be kept on a short leash.

Capt. Bligh (of The Bounty) had a record of flogging fewer crewman than than was usual for a captain of the day. It was later distortion that he was a brutal captain--not my facts, but from what I gather.


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dee_boncci
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I think you would find the modern navy is far different from Hornblowers' navy. Executions and floggings are not part of day-to-day disciplinary procedures, so the natural extrapolation to the future wouldn't necessarily contain such methods because we've already evolved away from them.

Doesn't mean you couldn't do it. One of the things that caught my attention in the Serenity series/movie was the allusions to the old naval mannerisms in the futuristic renegade ship. It helped make what was in many ways an stock sci-fi situation interesting.


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KayTi
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Interesting, Zero, we just watched the first of the Horatio Hornblower videos. Liked it, it was a well-done piece.
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MartinV
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Death penalty was used more for threats because killing your crew/army reduces the forces the general/captain can use. By killing his men the leader is basically punishing himself.

Fortunately for the leader, people fear mutilation as much as death so non-lethal ways are similarly effective.


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TaleSpinner
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"By killing his men the leader is basically punishing himself."

Yes. Flogging was more common.

Herein also is the origin of the phrase, "running the gauntlet", which I had not known before.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/life_at_sea_02.shtml

But, leaders are not always sensible. If a careless Captain hung too many, he could always send out a press gang at the next port o' call ...


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Zero
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Thanks everyone,

KayTi - the very best (in my opinion) is a two-parter set of episodes called "Mutiny" and "Retribution" which I loved thoroughly. It even had the guy who voiced Jon Irenicus as a pivotal character.


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Robert Nowall
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I read a book a few years ago, Sea of Glory by Nathaniel Philbrick, which'll tell you what really goes on on board a ship on a long exploratory expedition. In general, what happens is that when they get back, everybody presses charges against everybody else, and there are a lot of courts-martial to be held.
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skadder
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I loved the Hornblower series when it was on TV. I also enjoyed 'Master and Commander--The Far Side of the World'.

[This message has been edited by skadder (edited April 09, 2009).]


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