Remove ads

What would the actual effects of "Spartan"-like training be?

Sarissa

Sarissa

OwO
Location
Washington, D.C.
We all know it's a cliche, and I know that the very idea of brutal Spartan training is a myth, no need to give me condescending rebuttals, but I am curious about how actually trying to implement the idea brutal military training from childhood would effect the would be soldiers. Specifically, what subtle, longterm negative consequences would come about as a result.
 
Uh you would have a bunch of barely if even that functional killers unable to function in any other enviroment but combat or the equivalent of bootcamp?

Setting them loose for whatever reason would not be an option because if it happened it would probably lead to a 10000% increase of mass shooting in the area and a spike of proffesional killers for hire.
 
A lot of mental illness, and a lot of societal issues. If you thought the Jannisaries were bad...
 
SeptimusMagisto said:
Is it? I was under the impression Spartans actually did train pretty brutally.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Not at all. Spartan training is nowhere near as impressive as its Roman and later medieval counterparts (European chivalry and Islamic furissiya). This reddit post might be of interest to you.

Aqua817 said:
A lot of mental illness, and a lot of societal issues. If you thought the Jannisaries were bad...
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

What exactly kind of mental illness did Janissaries have?
 
Creating an insular group of highly trained killers with no other function or purpose is not a good idea unless you're in a state of constant conflict (and even then, it's not a great idea).
 
The idea of spartan training (as opposed to actual spartan training) is that if you make training tough enough that most of the participants drop out, you get the best people completing the course.

This means it produces lots of drop outs. Probably for medical reasons. These are likely useless to you and wasted resources.
Drop outs due to not meeting standards or psychological reasons may be recycled for other uses, though care may need to be taken for those who dropped out for psychological reasons.

Care must also be taken - self selection will tend towards attracting people who think they're hard enough. Which will drove up medical drop outs from people pushing themselves to far. And if you attract a disproportionate number of hard asses you may not get the expected number of drop outs which makes instructors up the ante to meet the expected number - because otherwise the training obviously ain't 'ard enough. Particularly if your instructors are products of the training, as they may remember it being harder than it was and shape it after their memories.

Generally, it is better to tailor training to raise the people trained to the level you need them to be, rather than try to shave off the people who don't make the cut (as people have bad days and are good at different things). Make a good initial selection and you can train elites with near zero drop outs, making maximum use of available personnel resources.
 
Last edited:
Hykal94 said:
Not at all. Spartan training is nowhere near as impressive as its Roman and later medieval counterparts (European chivalry and Islamic furissiya). This reddit post might be of interest to you.



What exactly kind of mental illness did Janissaries have?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That reddit post doesn't really say the spartan training wasn't brutal. Rather, it confirms that boys were taken at 7 and forced to weather very harsh conditions, training and discipline, just not training centered on personal combat skills. Brutal is still brutal, regardless of how military centric the training was.
 
Hykal94 said:
What exactly kind of mental illness did Janissaries have?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Well, this actually goes into the issue of why "Spartan" training is stupid: Training a reasonably educated child how to fight is far different from just brutally treating a child as a gear or meat shield. The latter gets you the child soldiers who literally know nothing but the fight, while Janissary were actively educated to look beyond the battlefield.
 
For various reasons I would think it suboptimal to teach children to fight - a lot of fighting is based on muscle memory and growth during puberty is going to require them to relearn a whole lot of it anyway.
If you train children from a young age, focus on maintaining basic physical fitness, some discipline, but mostly you want to encourage them to pick up tools for learning, a basic foundation of skills and knowledge to build on and train them in thinking in ways that are of use to you.

Actually seriously training to fight comes later - it is also beneficial to discourage them learning stuff that they may have to unlearn later on - so you don't want them fighting unsupervised, and you want your instructors who are actually skilled at the job focusing on training the recruits that are actually closer to being militarily useful.
 
Eliar said:
Uh you would have a bunch of barely if even that functional killers unable to function in any other enviroment but combat or the equivalent of bootcamp?

Setting them loose for whatever reason would not be an option because if it happened it would probably lead to a 10000% increase of mass shooting in the area and a spike of proffesional killers for hire.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

They wouldn't even be that good at killing. Beating people doesn't teach them very well. They'll develop a package of instincts and bad habits that protect them from the brutality, but are tangentially related to actual military purposes. They will not have the actual grounding and learning that an actual education would provide, and they will have a tangled knot of survival instincts actively getting in the way when they ever try to learn it.

They'll be good at surviving privation and harsh conditions in a generic sense, but they'll be a bit shit as soldiers. You can get very well-trained soldiers by training them from youth, but you get them by proper training and a lot of gentleness, not Kratman techniques. (And they're fucked up in different ways. But Kratman techniques just get you dead bodies and psychological disaster zones on adults, let alone children)

You'll get a bunch of finely tuned boot camp survivors. Probably killers in the sense they're more dangerous than the general population (fitness and aggression count for a good bit), but not really compared to actual soldiers.
 
Jonen C said:
For various reasons I would think it suboptimal to teach children to fight - a lot of fighting is based on muscle memory and growth during puberty is going to require them to relearn a whole lot of it anyway.
If you train children from a young age, focus on maintaining basic physical fitness, some discipline, but mostly you want to encourage them to pick up tools for learning, a basic foundation of skills and knowledge to build on and train them in thinking in ways that are of use to you.

Actually seriously training to fight comes later - it is also beneficial to discourage them learning stuff that they may have to unlearn later on - so you don't want them fighting unsupervised, and you want your instructors who are actually skilled at the job focusing on training the recruits that are actually closer to being militarily useful.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Yeah, honestly if you're going to turn children into soldiers the best method anyone's really come across has been a good solid youth organization with a healthy level of political indoctrination. It'll build most of the skills you want, especially discipline and cooperation, and does a decent job of physical conditioning, but doesn't teach things that you don't want and are harder to unlearn. It's worked pretty much everywhere it's been tried (just ask the US DoD how it feels about Eagle Scouts,) and isn't stupid and counterproductive like starving and abusing a child you're trying to turn into a soldier. Like you're not going to give them PTSD or stunt their growth.
 
Last edited:
Yeah, stuff like the Janissary or Mameluke programmes wasn't about pointlessly brutalising their slave-child recruits. You want to mentally and physically condition them to fit a life of the disciplined group dispensation of violence, not create selfish and individualistic psychopaths.
 
Modern special forces training like for U.S. Navy SEALs probably outclasses anything the Spartans dreamed of doing. I know the SEAL training is severe not only physically but mentally and psychologically taxing.
 
Bullmoose said:
That reddit post doesn't really say the spartan training wasn't brutal. Rather, it confirms that boys were taken at 7 and forced to weather very harsh conditions, training and discipline, just not training centered on personal combat skills. Brutal is still brutal, regardless of how military centric the training was.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

And isn't that a problem? Considering when people think "Spartan training" it usually goes to "military training", I think that's a pretty good indication of the misconceptions people have about Spartans in general. Like, what is 'brutal'?

If I had to choose a training program for kids, I'd train them like Mamluks, not Spartans. If they're not fit to be a soldier, they can be a good at administration.
 
Abusive childhood athletics ramped up to 11 without even pretending to care about their wellbeing = orthopedic wrecks that are less effective than guys off the street with basic training.

Training from hell is a bad, incorrect idea when working with adults. The risk of causing permanently degrading / surgical repair required injury is simply too high. Working with people who don't have sealed growth plates and are still developing their brains and who can't really lift heavy shit - it will be worse.
 
Last edited:
NothingNow said:
(just ask the US DoD how it feels about Eagle Scouts,)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Funny there should be an Eagle Scout who nearly joined the Army reading the thread :V

So for connect, I am a 200+cm individual with a good bit of pudge on me when I was looking into this after high school. After getting a "fine gravel" on my placement test (read, I can do anything except office work and missile defense) I started negotiating. Right off the bat, I was told I could get a medical waiver for my weight and eyesight, plus corrective surgery for the later if I didn't wash out of Helicopter Pilot School. I would also go into training a rank over everyone else, no questions asked, and that I would get time in rank starting from in processing of paperwork instead of when I got myself to Basic. That's like a week of time in grade tops, but eh. Furthermore, as someone starting at a higher rank, I'd accumulate said rank related benefits a lot earlier, as well as a permanent "good boy" sticker for later promotions as well as knock on effects of probably being the training platoon leader and helping everyone not get fucked by Basic.

But how does this affect my career long term? Well, I might not have gone Air Force, but among my Friends through Scouting who did, only one of the men to walk on the Moon wasn't a Boy Scout at some point, and the American astronaut corps was 2/3 former Scouts in total and 1/10 Eagles. A good paramilitary youth program can and will show you amazing results down the line if you're willing to wait. Dumbass training gets you a disaster tomorrow, however.
 
The Spartan terror training was mostly about making the Spartan youth desensitised to regularly purging the Helot caste to make sure they didn't get any ideas above their station; not creating supermen. Never forget that the Spartans got absolutely crushed by the Thebans at Leuktra despite outnumbering them nearly two to one because the Thebans just deployed their formation in an unorthodox way through extreme concentration of force; including an elite band of gay lovers; all on one flank to implode half the Spartan line of battle ASAP and then rout the entire army. Thebes crushed Sparta so badly that Sparta never really recovered as a military power after that point.
 
Honestly likely that had less to do with Thebe's defeat of Sparta itself and more to do with the Spartan inheritance system which created a extremely tiny ultra rich faction that blocked all reform and lead to a decline in the number of people eligible to be Spartan citizens which with coupled with a extremely rigid conservative political system that discouraged change in the first place.

if anything I suspect the decline had already started during the long war with Athens.
 
Last edited:
Alane1 said:
Honestly likely that had less to do with Thebe's defeat of Sparta itself and more to do with the Spartan inheritance system which created a extremely tiny ultra rich faction that blocked all reform and lead to a decline in the number of people eligible to be Spartan citizens which with coupled with a extremely rigid conservative political system that discouraged change in the first place.

if anything I suspect the decline had already started during the long war with Athens.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

And also being super worried about slave rebellions. Don't forget that.
 
Really, one would think that they would stop using slaves. Or at least treat them less badly.
 
Dr Roel Konijnendijk , aka Iphikrates on the Askhistorians reddit has done quite a few very informative essays on the Spartans. You can find them here: profiles/iphikrates - AskHistorians

So Spartan military dominance, with the caveat that the Spartan military and the Agoge changed a lot depending on what period of Spartan history you're looking at, can be attributed to these factors.

1. Numbers. The Spartans, at their height, could muster around ten thousand adult, male, propertied citizens between the ages of 20 and 60-something. That was quite large compared to their neighbors and the only city-state that could compete with those numbers in the Classical period was Athens. This let them basically dominate the Peloponnese and let them basically make their entire citizenry a leisure class.

2. Propaganda. Hoplite warfare was in many senses a giant game of chicken, and if you, for whatever reason, think the other guy isn't going to blink first, then you're probably going to want to blink. The Spartans built a reputation for fighting to the death from Thermopylae, and that helped them to win a the psychological battle with other Greeks before the physical battle ever began. Other things also unnerved other Greeks, like pipe music and marching, rather than charging into battle, and that's connected to what's below.

3. They were the only Greek city-state to have any sort of organized military training. They would have mostly trained in speed and stamina while learning to endure the deprivation of a campaign, so they'd be lean, rather than the steroid giants depicted in 300. Younger Spartans were known to be able to chase down light infantry while in hoplite panoply. They also did basic formation drill, and had more levels of officer- the Athenians didn't have any level of command less than a few hundred men. Thus, the Spartans could actually execute basic battlefield maneuvers more complicated than 'get in a big mass, and charge'. The pipes were to help keep marching rhythm and relay orders, though other Greeks thought the music was there to creep them out.

All of these advantages gradually disappeared in the period between the end of the Pelopenessian War and Philip II. The number of Spartans declined. Their reputation took hit after hit. Other Greek city-states instituted training, and there were mercenary bands that had years of experience fighting together.
 
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top