Since Krulak’s reforms, the Corps’ retention of new recruits and the performance scores of new marines have both increased by more than 20 percent. Surveys indicate that the average recruit’s internal locus of control increases significantly during basic training. Delgado’s experiments were a start to understanding motivation. The Marines complement those insights by helping us understand how to teach drive to people who aren’t practiced in self-determination: If you give people an opportunity to feel a sense of control and let them practice making choices, they can learn to exert willpower.
This paints a very benign picture of self determination in a vocation where one of the main aspects of the training is to learn how to kill other people. Taken two extremes, one wonders what effects this would have going forward. What are the effects in a regular social setting or a regular home life after being discharged? I find it very difficult to celebrate the end goal of military training that has the possibility of training people to be controlling when a personality disorder intersects with it. And because of the high number of ex-military that later become police officers, I would be interested to know what further for reaching effects this kind of training hard.
