Removing the military enlistment ban on Asperger's syndrome

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You are told: "Guard this foxhole, and kill anyone who does not give the secret password". Then a drunk solider stumbles toward your foxhole and does not give the password. Do you kill the solider ? What would an AS person do (especially, considering these are likely to be AS people 18-22 years old with little life experiences)?

Later on, at the AS solider's court martial hearing, let's assume he killed the drunk solider, the judge says, "Why didn't you fire a warning shot, or yell out, or keep challenging the solider for the password, or do X, Y and Z other things? It is just common sense".

See the instructions were 100% clear. The instructions never said, "If a drunk solider approaches, then fire a warning shot". It would take months to cover all the possible circumstantial and contextual detail information, so there is no way the military could train AS people to such a degree.

It is not about "clear instructions"; it is that NT people expect you to act with "NT common sense". The instructions say "DO X", however,circumstantially you are expected not to do X - disregard the instructions - because you use your common sense to understand that such an instruction should not be followed.

If you search on google, "Asperger lack common sense", then you will see many articles about it.

It doesn't sound like your unit was being helpful, or taking the thing seriously. I think an nt would have had trouble with those circumstances too, someone moving towards a guard at night without identifying themselves is likely to get shot in any army. You may have been in before they introduced the eof guidelines, but now they're pretty clear about firing a warning shot first.

This is not about me. That was a hypothetical situation.

It sounds like you are making stuff up when you generalize to the entire military based on your single experience, " ...but now they're pretty clear about firing a warning shot first". Generally, you don't want to fire a warning shot - you wont to protect your foxhole, so I don't know why they would train that.

NT people do not train "NT common sense". They accuse you later of not having any after you fail something, yet they do not train you in advance for it. The reason is that they expect you to have it already.

That is why all these AS people are complaining of living a fail-and-learn life.

I'm generalizing? You're pushing a foxhole example using an outdated sop. Ask anyone how many foxholes there were overseas, and the guard posts / checkpoints were not secret locations, just safety and control measures.

You've given one example of how instructions can be inadequate and I've told you three times what they actually instruct troops to do, and this isn't something you'll only hear from me, if you ask anyone who's been overseas about the eof and the 5s, they'll tell you it's shout, show, shove, shoot (warning shot), shoot to kill. Literally everyone who gets stationed in a place like Iraq or Afghanistan gets trained on this before they get there and again first thing when they get there.

I have repeatedly stated that instructions have nothing to do with it. This has to do with AS and what they don't train you on. They don't train people on expected "NT common sense". They won't spend the months it would take to cover every contextual and circumstantial event.

Do you have AS ? Do you understand when AS people talk about lacking common sense - what that means ?

I don't want to get into further details about military training.

However, when you apply your experience to the entire military then that is a generalization.

Hey, people ... your argument is getting a little out of hand. Why not back off from this thread for a day or so, get your thoughts together, and come back when things have cooled down?

To you, it's generalizing, to me, it's using a real world example to clarify something. And yes I have aspergers, I was diagnosed at 18.
I'm not saying the military is a cakewalk or that people there are easy to get along with, just that they disambiguate and repeat their instructions frequently because their demographic of young adults tends to fail at anything not spelled out.

It's true that instructions don't have anything to do with it. But what they don't train you on, you're supposed to learn and you're supposed to get with it. If you can't do well in any of those skills, picking things up and learning how to do well with them, then you're obviously not fit for military service.

A lot has changed since you were in the military, LoveNotHate, due to the fact that we're actually a lot more competent, focused, concentrated, can do our job and know what we're doing as equal as someone as who doesn't have any physical or mental conditions.

Uhh, FYI, LoveNotHate, we have as much common sense as someone who doesn't have any mental or physical conditions, including Asperger's

Oh, well ... I tried ...

You deny some or possibly all AS people lack "NT common sense" ? You deny the personal stories of AS people on google ?

All the AS people like myself that can tell you how our lives evolved with people making jokes about us that are dumb cause we do stuff in a way that NT people later say lacks common sense, and as I mentioned in my first post being labeled, "lost in the sauce" in the military - we are all making it up ?

I believe "lacking NT common sense" is a fundamental component structure to the AS brain, so does my autism doctor. Who asked me if I thought I was intelligent based on how my brain is a memorization/retrieval system. NT people are not as good at memorization/retrieval, however, somehow they make "NT common sense" connection relationships. [SPECULATION] It seems like our brains store information distinctly, and we store information relationships separately, so if we have not memorized the relationship, then we don't understand how the information is related, whereas, NT people need only the information, and they can dynamically relate information. So, we get better memorization/retrieval skills, and they get better dynamic information relational skills.

Why would you participate on an ASD/AS website and deny AS traits ?

All I know is, I could not function in the military, and apparently poor social skills and problems with attention had something to do with it.

Here is an AS person who identifies with "lacking NT common sense"
http://aspectsofaspergers.wordpress.com ... mon-sense/

This person describes "lacking common sense" as "lack of ability to automatically understand which events qualify as exceptions to a rule, so that the AS person can act on the event in such a way as to supersede the rule".

According to that understanding, an NT person would somehow automatically know when a rule should be superseded if another event occurs. The NT person would automatically know that when the drunk solider wanders towards the foxhole, then the rule of killing anyone who comes near the foxhole, and cannot answer the password challenge question is superseded, because the rule probably did not mean to kill a friendly solider. An AS person with few life experiences, so no learning of "exceptions to the rule", not trained otherwise, and withstanding any moral issue of killing people, should likely kill the soldier and follow the rule. (This is not derogatory towards AS people - as the link says- this shows the AS mind as clear of preconceptions).

The fundamental problem happening here is that NT people won't tell the solider all the exceptions to the rule - of when a rule should be disregarded - so the AS soldier won't know that. The AS soldier will be "operating blindly" with regards to what the NT people really expect. They will expect the solider to use "NT common sense" to know when and when not to break the rule.

"I was just following orders ..." might be OK a lot of the time. Though, the solider might get identified as a dunce, and not liked by superiors because that is equivalent to saying, "Hey, it is not my fault. My superior did not tell me to do anything differently if event X occurs".

The soldier may face critical situations where the not-understanding-which events-qualify-as-exceptions-to-the-rule will apply, such as the guarding the foxhole scenario. These critical situations if not decided right may result in tragedy. The military cannot and will not train the solider in all the conceivable occurrences that are exceptions to the rule.

So the question here is whether such a soldier can be trusted to be in the military ?

Last edited by LoveNotHate on 21 Dec 2013, 12:28 am, edited 4 times in total.

I will leave this thread now and let others answer the above question.

I'm from Poland, in 2004 when i was called to military medical draft commission(conscription in Poland was abolished in 2009) i was rejected due my other than asperger health problem.


As for ban of service in some armed force of "diagnosed aspies" i think it's little gray area I think physician is bounded to maintain medical confidentiality about the health of the patient, besides, you can always to lie, to say that about something forgotten to mention it.

Besides it seems to me that if the army, whether Polish, British or American, already to adopt someone with Asperger's and trained (which is expensive) but rather that it not be expelled from the service because it would be a waste of money, from what I know so does Poland the army, the man got to at most an official reprimand, which could be some hindrance, further promotion.

anyone who is Dumb enough to want to be in the military should be allowed.

I think Napoleon was Aspie