American military mystery

[chickenfeet]

This is a question for any reader who has knowledge/experience of the US military. What do commissioned officers do?

I ask this because not one officer, even a junior lieutenant, has been charged in relation to the prisoner abuse scandal. I know the US military has lots of officers but it would appear they neither direct troops nor take responsibility for the actions of those under their command.

This seems odd to me. I have little direct knowledge of the US military but I have spent a fair amount of time over the years hanging out with British, Canadian and Australian officers and I'm pretty sure that even though they spend a fair amount of time in staff and training postings they see their primary purpose as "command" which would include the training, welfare and discipline of the troops entrusted to them. They also take that "trust" extremely seriously and would tend not to evade responsibility for what they definitely see as "their" men. Now my sample is biased to officers from the combat arms and I guess I might get a different picture if my knowledge base was the support corps.

So just what is going on with their US equivalents?

Comments

[bonobo-theory.livejournal.com]

If you ask any NCO, he'll tell you, "Goddamn nothing." I was in the U.S. Army (albeit for only a year), and I never figured it out. As far as I can tell, they just walk around and get saluted.