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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/TechnicallyCant5083 on 2025-03-19 15:24:56+00:00.
I saw this post and decided to share my own military malicious compliance story. This story isn't about the US military but I will use US army terms.
Some background: I spent most of my military service in a 'communications command and control center'(CC for short), which isn't as glorious as it sounds, it was mostly emails and Excel. Our CC was relatively high in the command chain, we were more 'big picture' managing the operability of communication systems across the whole military. The ones actually doing the work in the CC are enlisted soldiers but because the work was relatively important, the commander of the CC was always an officer.
At the time of this story I was an E3 (enlisted soldier, 3rd rank), I had a lot of time and experience on the job. One day we got a new commander, an O1 fresh out of officer school. She had a really shitty 'I'm an officer you must respect me' attitude. I was more time than her in the army, I was also older, and my work involved interacting with officers with much higher ranks than her, so I couldn't give a shit, but I tried playing nice.
Our work at the CC had a pretty normal procedure, we'd get some report, say "maintenance A starting", something like that would usually be filed away immediately because we knew about it ahead and they usually didn't affect anything. A report like "someone dug through a fiber optic cable and a whole post lost internet connection" would usually lead to us making some phone calls trying to understand if there are backups, who could fix it and when, and lastly when we had all of the relevant info we would notify our commander.
She didn't care about that procedure, she wanted to be involved and assert her control. One day she saw a report on one of our computers that we didn't notify her about yet, so she got really angry and said "from now on you are to notify me about every report!" big mistake. The CC worked 24/7 but there was only one commander, so if something really important came up we would wake her up in the middle of the night, but most stuff was kept to the morning.
Well que malicious compliance. That night the night shift woke her up about 10 times, and they were being nice. The day after she was visibly sleep deprived. I was on the next night shift and called her for EVERY report, sometimes we'd get multiple a minute, she was basically doing the night shift with me. At around 5AM she said "fine you don't have to report everything, you know what's important and what's not".
So for conclusion I'm gonna steal u/CaptMaxius 's line- "outrank doesn't mean out-know". Let your subordinates do their fucking job.