this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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[–] DaGeek247@fedia.io 27 points 1 day ago (2 children)

So, the tweet isn't entirely true; my experience in the army was that we very much did irregularly do marches together, even after basic training. Every few months or so the battallion or brigade leadership would get an idea about a 'fun run' or whatever, and the start of those is always a march together. It inevitably switched to running together, but there was definitely a quick refresher on walking in step together on a regular basis.

What the tweeter missed is that there's tricks that every leadership command knows to do if they want a formation to look good.

If you wanted to put a military parade on that actually looked good you'd do a couple things prior to running it. You'd tell your various units to have a competition for who does it best, and you'd put up a basic-ass award for the winners and runners up. This ensures that any ladder climbers go out and find all the people who are actually good at this to put together a small super squad of people who actually know what they're doing. You then have them compete, and you pick the units that did the best to lead your parade.

We actually did this in basic training; my drill sgts had a little demonstration where they put the people good at keeping time together and the people bad it together. It was damn impressive how much of a difference just doing that made. One or two bad marchers can ruin a whole formation with their lack of timing.

None of this was done; at best they practiced for pt for a couple weeks before the event, but even that is iffy. They likely didn't bother to filter the parade members who can't march out, and that'd be good enough to turn this into a herd instead of a formation.

This doesn't rule out malicious compliance at all though; again, one or two bad marchees doing their best (or worst) job can completely throw off the timing of everybody behind and next to them. Same way as counting wrongly out loud can throw off someone trying to count up to 50.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

put together a small super squad of people who actually know what they're doing

From what I vaguely remember, you also want all the best marchers on the left most of the time, since you line up with the person on your left most of the time, and the very best at the front left. This was decades ago for me, but I know that there were tricks like that to make it look good.

[–] kossa@feddit.org 1 points 6 hours ago

Huh? Don't you sort your ranks by size? Having good marchers somewhere then requires all the soldiers to be the same size.

[–] yeather@lemmy.ca 1 points 23 hours ago

They could have also done mock patrol movements, uneven spread, looking in different directions, and carrying weapons. A lot harder to mess up when it’s intentionally offstep.