You Earn Your Pay When Things Go Wrong

Dan Moore’s 2018 post, When do you earn your pay?, reminded me of something I told one of my friends a few years ago. Both senior ROTC cadets at the time, he had just finished complaining about how our instructors always blamed him when other people did the wrong thing. “You’re not here for things to go right,” I told him, “the only reason our job exists is to fix things when they go wrong.” This leads into a larger point about the role of Officers in the Army, but I need to spend more time thinking about that before I start writing about it; for now, this will have to suffice.