The Armed Forces Officer: Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2United States. Department of Defense
History
The Armed Forces Officer: Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2
United States. Department of Defense
United States -- Armed Forces -- Officers' handbooks
Careful missionary work among these "sleepers" is as productive as
spading the ground, and sprinkling a garden patch. When an officer
takes hold in a new unit, his main chance of making it better than it
was comes of looking for the overlooked men. He uses his hand to give
them a firm lift upward, but it will not be available for that purpose
if he spends any of his time tugging at men who are already on their
feet and moving in the right general direction.
In the words of a distinguished armored commander in our forces: "To
the military leader, men are tools. He is successful to the extent
that he can get the men to work for him. Ordinarily, and on their own
initiative, people run on only 35 percent capacity. The success of a
leader comes of tapping the other 65 percent." This is a pretty
seasoned judgment on men in the mass, taking them as they come, the
mobile men, the slow starters, the indifferent and the shiftless.
Almost every man wants to do what is expected of him. When he does not
do so, it is usually because his instructions have been so doubtful as
to befog him or give him a reasonable excuse for noncompliance. This
view of things is the only tenable attitude an officer or enlisted
leader can take toward his subordinates. He will recognize the
exceptions, and if he does not then take appropriate action, it is
only because he is himself shiftless and is compassionate toward
others of his own fraternity.
It is the military habit to "plow deep in broken drums and shoot crap
for old crowns," as the poet, Carl Sandburg, put it. As much as any
other profession, and even possibly a little more, we take pride in
the pat solution, and in proof that long-applied processes amply meet
the test of newly unfolding experience. But despite all the jests
about the Gettysburg Map, we wouldn't know where we're going if we
couldn't be reasonably sure of where we've been.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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