[AnAmericanMother]

That's why I said the quote's never been run down. It might have been said by Moltke Sr. among very intimate friends, but not for attribution as they say.

It's certainly a truism. My family have always been the citizen-soldiers who show up for the wars and gaze in mingled wonder and disgust on the by-the-book peacetime career men. Spike Milligan probably described them best in his sketch of a colonel he called "Leather Suitcase" who "went out in the first Montgomery Purge".

[blueunicorn6]

It was “Industrious/Lazy” and “Competent/Incompetent”.

Lazy and Incompetent......They are cannon fodder.
Industrious and Competent.......Staff Officers
Lazy and Competent......Commanders (they’ll find the easy way)
Industrious and Incompetent....Have them shot.

[robowombat]

The ‘by-the book’ fellows never bothered me. You knew where they came from and what they expected. Unimaginative pluggers with some OCD tendencies to be sure but not that hard to work with. The careerist milicrats who i call ‘pseudo-soldiers’ were the ones I truly loathed. Angle playing wiseguys who practiced (as one colonel stated) ‘tell those below you what you want them to believe and those above you what they want to hear’ then you will go far. Being a commissioned officer is, or should be, almost a sacred calling unlike anything other than the priesthood because in both one deals with existential issues for the real meaning of an army or navy is not all the rock painting regulations and game playing manipulations but the gist of life and death itself and very possibly the life and death of one’s nation and people. Most American military men have only a very limited grasp of that. Oddly two female officer I knew understood this idea perfectly. One, the mother of twin boys, simply told me ‘Any woman who has carried and birthed a child knows instinctively what existential issues are. After the childbirth bed the battlefield can offer few terrors.’