In military organizations, "setting-up" and other formation exercises are usually a drag and a bore. Men grumble about them, and even after they are toughened to them, so that they feel no physical distress, they rarely relish them. The typical American male would much rather sit on his pants along the sidelines and watch someone else engage in contact sports. It's almost the national habit. Despite our athletic prowess, about 56 percent of American males grow to manhood without having ever participated in a group game. But no matter how great the inertia against it, there must be unremitting perseverance in the physical conditioning of military forces. For finally, it is killing men with kindness to relax at this point. If life is to be conserved, if men are to be given a fair chance to play their parts effectively, the physical standards during training cannot be less than will give them a maximum fitness for the extraordinary stresses of campaigning in war. When troops lack the coordinated response which comes of long, varied and rigorous exercises, their combat losses will be excessive, they will lack cohesion in their action against the enemy, and they will uselessly expend much of their initial velocity. In the United States service, we are tending to forget, because of the effect of motorization, that the higher value of the discipline of the road march in other days wasn't that it hardened the muscles, but that, short of combat, it was the best method of separating the men from the boys. This is true today, despite all of the new conditions imposed by technological changes. A hard road march is the most satisfactory training test of the moral strength of the individual man. At the same time, to senselessly overload men for road marching hurts them two ways. It weakens their faith in the sense of the command, thereby impairing morale, and it breaks down their muscle and tendon. Enough is known about the average American male to provide a basic logistical figure. He stands about 5 feet 8 inches, and weighs about 153 pounds. The optimum load for a man is about one-third of body weight, the same as for a mule. That means that for a training march, approximately 50 pounds over-all, including uniform, blankets and everything, is the most that a man should be required to carry. If he gets so that he can handle that load easily, over let us say a 10-mile road march, then the thing to do, further to build up his power, is not to increase the weight that he carries, but to lengthen the march. Military men have known that this is the underlying principle for better than half a century. But the principle has not always been observed.