Still, it’s a very, very rare occurrence. While the French Foreign Legion indeed does commission officers from the ranks, it would be my (wild) guess that van Hecke, Gottlieb and Tresti were the only men who achieved this (making it to general) in the 20th century.
In some Eastern Bloc armies, on the other hand, this would have almost been the norm. For instance, if you read the biographies of Soviet generals during WWII, you’ll find that many of them started their careers as enlisted men, often in the Tsarist army.
By comparison, in the German army (or in the German armies, to be more precise) until 1918, it was impossible for an enlisted man to become an officer (except in some technical specialties).
In the French army during the revolutionary and Napoleonic era, quite a number of generals had been promoted through the ranks.
In that specific case, it’s probably because most of the pre-revolutionary officer corps had been purged. As had much of the post-revolutionary officer corps.
A nice big war can do amazing things for a military career. Enoch Powell apparently enlisted in 1939 and made it to Brigadier by 1945, which is about half-way between colonel and major-general. So he made it most of the way in a little over 5 years!
I’m sure if he had decided to stay in the military rather than go into politics he would have been a general within a few years. Mind you, when he signed up at age 27 he’d already been a professor for a couple of years, so probably would have stood out of the ranks a bit…
That’s very unlikely. The end of the war put a big halt on promotions.
Matthew Ridgeway’s a good example. He was a respected and successful officer. He was a lieutenant colonel when the United States entered the war. Within four years, he was promoted five times. And then after 1945, he waited six more years for his next promotion.
How so? Most enlisted men only serve 2-4 years anyway. A guy who enlisted and went to OCS after 3 years and goes on to spend another 20 years as an officer still has as much claim to have been an enlisted man as anyone else.
I agree that someone like my good friend who was an Army officer in Iraq during 2008 doesn’t really count- he enlisted, got through basic training, and his first orders were to report to OCS. This is mostly because he was several years out of college, so the only commissioning path to him was through OCS, and you have to be enlisted to go to OCS- you can’t (or couldn’t anyway) directly enroll in OCS.
Honestly, I think that the explanation is way more prosaic than that. Being a great coach and being a great player are mostly independent skills, and there are far more mediocre players than great onces, so pure probability says that you’ll find far more great coaches among the larger pool of people.
A secondary effect may be that mediocre players. who make less money during their career and generally have no ability to make money from endorsements after they retire, probably have a greater need to find a job after they retire, and coaching is a natural thing to try after spending 20-30 years in the sport (including their time playing as a child) when they likely haven’t developed a lot of skills outside of that.
Israel still has mandatory military service, don’t they? Does that kick in before a person would typically go to officer school?
Custers position as last of his class is a complicated matter. It was more to do with his indiscipline than lack of ability or soldiering. Though you could say this 'indiscipline" of Custer lead to his ultimate end, but it also possibly lead to his ultimate successes. His last in class position is further muddied by the fact his class broke up part way through the term. As the Civil War loomed half the cadets skedaddled from West Point to join the Confederacy. What may have been a position of near the bottom then turned into the position of dead last as half the class disappeared.
Even in the modern military, there are still a few high-ranking officers who were never what you would call “ordinary soldiers”, but instead got their position through some form of technical skills. Computer pioneer Grace Hopper, who was a rear admiral, comes to mind.
They do, and they also have an entirely different scheme for selecting and training officers.
In the US, Britain, and probably most Commonwealth countries, the primary way they train officers is to take a young kid with a college degree, train him as an officer and set them loose on the troops. The primary difference being that USMA/USNA/USAFA take high school kids and train them to be officers concurrently with training them to be officers. Sandhurst/RAF College Cranwell/Britannia Royal Naval College Dartmouth are typically a roughly 2 year officer training course given to college graduates to train them as officers. Of course, there are exceptions to both the US and British systems- for example, some enlisted men in the US can go to USMA for college and be commissioned afterward, and the British schools don’t strictly speaking require a degree for entry.
The Israeli system in essence identifies leaders from the enlisted rank and file, and then puts them in progressively more responsible positions. At some point, they put you in officer training and they get commissioned. Not exactly sure how college degrees play into it - maybe **Alessan **can shed more light on it?
Anyway, it’s a more rational system, but might be a little harder to implement in the US- few college-eligible kids are likely to want to enlist in the military for multiple years on the off chance that they might get commissioned and have a career as an officer. Instead, they’ll just go for better civilian opportunities.
I think you meant that the academies (e.g. USMA) train you to be an officer while giving you a college/university education. You graduate with a bachelor’s degree and a 2Lt commission. You can also do ROTC, which is very much like this but happens at a non-Federal school. Marching at 6 AM, math class at 9, lunch, marching from 2-3 PM, English class at 5, shooting drill from 8-9 PM, etc… You go to college and officer school at the same time. Virginia Tech has a very large program for this.
The other major opportunity for commission is Officer Candidate School (OCS) or whatever they call it nowadays. Basically, this applies if you already have a bachelor’s degree from somewhere and you are now interested in doing officer training. During the Vietnam era, they would take you into OCS with pretty much any bachelor’s degree whatsoever - I know a guy who did it with a BA in Elementary Education. Nowadays, I think they’re a little more selective and look for people who have the aptitudes and skills that they want, not just “any bachelor’s degree”.
This is actually more or less the procedure in Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers for officer selection. There’s no joining as an officer. You join as a grunt and work your way up, if you’re worthy enough and manage to survive.
The Secretary of the Navy who shot himself in the heart not so long ago, after a false claim of service was discovered: didn’t he start as an enlisted sailor? Perhaps he wasn’t an admiral, though. Not sure if that’s part of the job description.
I went to Texas A&M (Dad was in the Corps of Cadets, but I wasn’t) so I’m pretty familiar with how it would work at the senior military colleges. Ultimately though, they’re doing officer training and university education concurrently, whether at a service academy or a ROTC program.
I didn’t realize that ROTC commissions nearly 2x the number of officers than the service academies or OCS; I thought the service academies generated the majority of new officers.
I don’t see where we disagree. Powells next promotion would have been to major general, and 6 years is a few in my book. With the Korean War, Malayan Emergency and Mau Mau uprising kicking off around 1950 it’s likely a lot of officers who ended ww2 near a promotion would have got their step up around that timeframe.
Leo – Why isn’t this correct? It both seems plausible and as far as I can see is logically correct, too.
If different properties A and B are uncorrelated in a population, and A is less common than not-A, then (A and B) will be less common than (not-A and B).
So, if being a great player is not correlated with being a great coach, and (almost by definition), being a great player is uncommon, then great coaches who were also great players will be less common than great coaches who were not great players.
Do surgeons get promoted past colonel? Medical corps officers are typically commissioned as captains once they complete school and they typically don’t get much military training.
Also, I understand that there are a lot of Powerpoint Rangers out there. Officers with good organizational/presentation skills who I would argue may not be the best leaders.
Is there a heirarchy among those officers? Do you get a faster career track if you’re an Academy grad over an ROTC over an OCS? Is it easier to be in a more desired track (say, USAF fighter pilot) if your resume says Colorado Springs over Texas A&M?
You can say that of just about all technical or professional specialists, though.
In the case of officers who didn’t particularly shine at their service academies, but went on to achieve renown and flag rank, perhaps their school performance simply wasn’t a good predictor of how they would lead the men in their units in actual operations.