Working with defence contractors teaches you life skills
I wasn't military, but I worked with defence contractors, so in modern terms, I would be called "military adjacent" or somesuch.
The most basic skill when dealing with the military (any military) is CYA, or "Cover Your A**".
One of the reasons that the military has a reputation for staggeringly (over)complete documentation is largely due to the culture of CYA that developed, of necessity. In militaries where disobeying orders can get you executed, it's a good idea to have it recorded, repeatedly and in several different documents and locations that you "were just following orders" when you did what you did (sorting by first name, in Steve's case).
I personally had a team lead who was notorious for saying to do X (sort by first name), confirm it, double confirm it, triple confirm it, and then when it hit the fan, would deny to upper management that he had ever said that, and that I (or another member of the team) had done X on our own initiative. If someone refused to do the stupid thing (because it was stupid), he would tattle to senior management that the person was disobeying orders. If they had proof that he'd ordered them to do X, he's say that the person misunderstood his instructions. No matter what, the subordinate was always the one to blame.
As you can imagine, he was not beloved within the team for these reasons (and many others).
So, when he one day decided to order me to do something particularly stupid, I confirmed that he meant it. And doubly confirmed. But I waited until the meeting with the big brass that was scheduled for the next day to triple confirm it. I did the "explain it to me like I'm five years old" approach, and he condescendingly spelled out exactly what he wanted done, step by step, exactly what he wanted me to do. And so I did, exactly in the sequence he'd laid out.
The results were glorious. They resulted not only in invalidating a flight test and missing a ship date, they put the entire project at risk of cancellation. Senior executives got involved. First he tried the "I never told him to do that" approach, except there were several members of the brass who'd been present to see him to just that. They didn't understand the implications of the orders, but they remembered damned well that he'd not only ordered me to do it, he'd done so repeatedly.
Likewise, the "well, he misunderstood" argument went nowhere, because I'd repeatedly asked for clarification, he'd provided it, and it matched letter for letter what I'd done, and what had caused the situation we were in.
But the chef's kiss was his statement that "if I was really telling people to do things that stupid, people would be complaining all the time", apparently unaware that at least six team members (although I was not one of them) had made formal complaints both to management, and in two cases to HR, about being backstabbed exactly like this. When they checked, there were something like 38 such complaints over a period of 3 years.
Unsurprisingly, in the next re-org shuffle about six weeks later, he was moved into the newly-created "Special Projects" group where he would be leading the team (which at the moment was just him) in said special projects, which were yet to be defined. Internally, this was later referred to as the "Ice Floe" group, named after the practice of some Inuit tribes to put their sick and elderly members who were a drain on the tribe onto an ice floe so that they'd float away and die.