men.
Divinity students become pharmacist's mates. School teachers operate
tanks. Writing men turn into navigators. Woodsmen become lecturers.
Longshoremen specialize in tactics. And all goes well.

Then when it is all over, and everyone gets back in his well-worn
groove, the social scientists explain that these miracles occurred
because under the stimulus of great fear and excitement which attends
a period of national emergency, individuals will sublimate their main
drives, and adjust temporarily to what would be otherwise an onerous
personal difficulty. Sheer poppycock! Normal men do not feel pressed
by fear simply because a state of war exists; their chief emotions
change scarcely at all. These transformations occur only because the
man had the potential all along, and with someone backing him up _and
giving him the feeling of success_, his incentives became equal, at
least, to anything he had known in his peacetime occupation.

That is the long-and-short of it. If our average man couldn't become a
jack of many trades, and a master of several, the United States would
never be able to meet a major war emergency.

For these reasons, service concepts of how men should be fitted to
jobs do not develop around the simple notion that it is all a matter
of putting a square peg in a square hole--which is the one best way to
deny the peg any room for expansion. The doctrine is that _men are
many sided, that they learn their own powers and likes through
experiment, that they are entitled to find what is best for them, and
that having found it, their satisfactions will still derive mainly
from intelligent and interested treatment by their superiors_.

Every officer arrives sooner or later at the point where he has a
direct hand in the placement of men. By way of preparation for that
responsibility he should do two things mainly--learn all that he can
from his superiors about its technical aspects, and in his own
thinking, concentrate on principles to the exclusion of detail.

The fundamental purpose of all training today is to develop the
natural faculties and stimulate the brain of the individual rather
than to treat him as a cog which has to be fitted into a great
machine.

The true purpose of _all_ rules covering the conduct of warfare and
all regulations pertaining to the conduct of its individuals is to
bring about order in the fighting machine rather than to strangle the
mind of the man who reads them.

Thus in the