Setting aside the concrete example of Pause AI (haven’t given it enough thought), I totally agree with the statement in the title. Also, if I may: to some extent, you can accomplish things even when your soldiers aren’t as smart, or as ideologically aligned with you, as your scouts; same thing holds for officers. The historical example that comes to mind is the army of the Soviet Union: for some years at least, an important fraction of the officers were former officers of the imperial army; they were called “voenspetsy”, which means “military specialists”.
“In June 1918, Leon Trotsky abolished workers’ control over the Red Army, replacing the election of officers with traditional army hierarchies and criminalizing dissent with the death penalty. Simultaneously, Trotsky carried out a mass recruitment of officers from the old Imperial Russian Army, who were employed as military advisors (voenspetsy).[19][20] The Bolsheviks occasionally enforced the loyalty of such recruits by holding their families as hostages.[21][page needed] As a result of this initiative, in 1918, 75% of the officers were former tsarists.[22] By mid-August 1920 the Red Army’s former tsarist personnel included 48,000 officers, 10,300 administrators, and 214,000 non-commissioned officers.[23] When the civil war ended in 1922, ex-tsarists constituted 83% of the Red Army’s divisional and corps commanders.”
Setting aside the concrete example of Pause AI (haven’t given it enough thought), I totally agree with the statement in the title.
Also, if I may: to some extent, you can accomplish things even when your soldiers aren’t as smart, or as ideologically aligned with you, as your scouts; same thing holds for officers. The historical example that comes to mind is the army of the Soviet Union: for some years at least, an important fraction of the officers were former officers of the imperial army; they were called “voenspetsy”, which means “military specialists”.
From the Wikipedia page on the Red Army:
“In June 1918, Leon Trotsky abolished workers’ control over the Red Army, replacing the election of officers with traditional army hierarchies and criminalizing dissent with the death penalty. Simultaneously, Trotsky carried out a mass recruitment of officers from the old Imperial Russian Army, who were employed as military advisors (voenspetsy).[19][20] The Bolsheviks occasionally enforced the loyalty of such recruits by holding their families as hostages.[21][page needed] As a result of this initiative, in 1918, 75% of the officers were former tsarists.[22] By mid-August 1920 the Red Army’s former tsarist personnel included 48,000 officers, 10,300 administrators, and 214,000 non-commissioned officers.[23] When the civil war ended in 1922, ex-tsarists constituted 83% of the Red Army’s divisional and corps commanders.”