The training manuals’ robotic ideal never matched real soldiers’ behavior

Evidence

As tightly as the authorities wanted to control the activities of the soldiers, reality spoke differently. The training manual might have portrayed the soldier as a robot with every gesture, every glance meticulously controlled and vigilantly manipulated. Judging from the accounts of the battles, however, it appears that soldiers were full of the all-too-human emotions of love, hate, jealousy, pride and fear of death. And reading the accounts of their daily lives on the camps, it does appear that the authorities failed in capturing their bodies, let alone in imprinting on their minds that this was indeed their army. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1183

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

Related

• Mehmed Ali’s army failed to command its soldiers’ inner loyalties (similarity 0.85)
• Training manuals reduced soldiers to interchangeable standardized cogs (similarity 0.81)
• Conscripts experienced military discipline’s physical intrusion more than its conceptual control (similarity 0.81)
• Egypt’s military regulations diverged systematically from their actual daily implementation. (similarity 0.79)
• Egyptian conscripts remained emotionally autonomous despite drill (similarity 0.79)
• Years of training failed to transform peasant soldiers’ civilian loyalties. (similarity 0.78)
• Illiterate conscripted soldiers left no written accounts of their own experiences. (similarity 0.78)
• Training manuals reduced the Egyptian soldier to a machinelike interchangeable component. (similarity 0.78)