Naval Officers
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| Partner: | buecher.de |
| Hersteller: | Forgotten Books (Davenport, Charles Benedict) |
| Stand: | 2015-08-04 03:50:33 |
Produktbeschreibung
Excerpt from Naval Officers: Their Heredity and Development A nation at the beginning of a great war, after prolonged peace, is executing a great increase of its naval and military forces. For these forces officers must be selected in large numbers, as many as 1,000 officers for each division of 20,000 men, or 50,000 officers for 1,000,000 men. So, too, in the naval organization every ship has its commander and lieutenants, and there are captains and admirals of the various grades for the command of groups of officers. Each of these officers holds in his hands, as it were, the lives of from 100 to 100,000 men. Obviously it is a matter of the gravest concern that they should be properly selected. Yet the number is so vast and the personal knowledge about the appointee on the part of those who must appoint is necessarily often so slight that every assistance in the general method of making the selection may well be carefully considered. In time of actual battling, selection for advancement is made on the ground of performance - the inferior officers fail, the successful ones are given the higher commands. Our Civil War showed this clearly. It also showed the melancholy fact that the selections made at the outset were often inadequate, and many a colonel and even general confidently appointed at the outbreak of the war was recalled as a failure. The method of selecting exclusively by trial and error is a sure method, but one that is frightfully wasteful of lives and property. What is the best method of selecting untried men for positions as officers? Diverse methods of selecting untried officers have been employed in the past. In the navy those who have made good records at the Naval Academy have been selected. Admission to the Academy is ordinarily made on the recommendation of a congressman. The applicant undergoes a physical and perhaps a mental examination. No doubt it is true, as Filchett (1903, p. 3) says: "In these days where the foot rule and the stethoscope and the examination paper are the tests by which our embryo Nelsons and Wellingtons are chosen, the future hero of the Nile and of Trafalgar would infallibly have been rejected." A war may be lost by rejection on a physical examination as certainly as by inadequacy in the supply of men or munitions. All too much is made of the physical examination; all too little of temperament and intelligence. The modem psychological and psychiatric examinations of officers and recruits are excellent. I recall one instance in our Civil War when a colonel ordered a futile attack in which a regiment was nearly annihilated. Investigation quickly showed that the commander was insane and had been so for some time. On the other hand, the elimination of the feeble-minded must be made intelligently. There is at least one instance in our Civil War where a feeble-minded sharpshooter did great execution. A feeble-minded man may have fired the musket shot that killed the great Nelson. Fighting leaders must possess insight, judgment, audacity, and pertinacity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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