Sorry John. Absolutely disagree.

How can a SysAdmin successfully perform an upgrade to a piece of infrastructure if he doesn't know what he's changing? What that piece of infrastructure is related to/dependant upon? How that change will affect the continuity/availability of the IT service that infrastructure is supporting?

Having at least a basic "Foundations-level" knowledge so that you understand your manager's intent is critical.

Let's take your warfare analogy about soldiers in trenches. It's been long understood (and proven), that soldiers a) have a higher chance of achieving their objectives, b) doing so with fewer costs/losses along the way, c) will achieve them faster if they are told *why* they're doing what they're doing.

If a front line tech understands their manager's intent, because they use the same terms, understand the same concepts and have the same visibility into the wider picture, their frontline IT work becomes more efficient, more repeatable, more measurable, and (from the tech's point of view) easier to do in the long term.

For example, if your Change Manager has designed their Change Management process in a way that's too cumbersome to use, that individual Change Manager has implemented their process poorly... it doesn't mean that the idea of Change Management is a bad one.