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Maj. L. T. Gerow, Infantry

N the spring of 1922

a memorandum entitled "Minimum Specifications for Infantry Enlisted Personnel" was distributed to Infantry organizations by the Chief of Infantry, with the request that constructive comments and criticisms be submitted on or before March 31, 1923. A thorough study of that memorandum convinces one that the revision of the specifications already prepared, the preparation of specifications for commissioned. officers and organizations, and the working out of the succeeding steps which are necessary for a proper utilization of the specifications, are of great importance to the Infantry and possibly to the entire service.

You decide to build a house. You have a mental picture of the exterior appearance, the number of rooms, etc., but before commencing construction you must prepare definite plans and specifications toward which to work. With regard to training you have the same problem. You know your goal to be proficient personnel and organizations, but what are the detailed specifications for such personnel and organizations? We cannot proceed with training until that important factor is known.

Many of us have observed the haphazard methods used sometimes in training and, perhaps, have been

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guilty of using such methods. How often have we seen schedules prepared and used which were not progressive in any sense but were made out hurriedly and designed primarily to occupy the time allotted. Before schedules can be prepared and training undertaken the objectives of such training must be defined. The more clearly the mission or objective is stated the more uniform, thorough, and rapid will be the instruction.

Specifications for minimum qualifi cations will give us our objectives, and those objectives will be uniform throughout the Infantry. Captain Smith, commanding Company A in the Philippines, will have the same mission as Captain Brown, commanding Company A at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, and the comparative efficiency of the two organizations may be determined with accuracy.

No doubt the question will arise as to why use the minimum instead of the maximum qualifications. The reasons therefor are many. Regardless of how thorough or extended training may be, the man or organization will never attain perfection. We must have some standard which, when reached, will insure that the personnel or organization will function correctly when confronted with normal situations. During peace the time element is not of such vital importance; but thoroughness and uniformity increase in importance, because when national existence is threatened it is from the small peace establishment that the skilled in

structors of our citizen army must

come.

Consider the conditions that will confront us in time of war. Untrained personnel must be trained and organized in the minimum of time. We will not be able to devote time to the nonessentials. Every effort should be exerted to turn out proficient individuals and organizations qualified to take their positions on the firing line. The minimum and not the maximum specifications will be our objectives.

The prescribing of minimum qualifications is not intended to limit training to essential items when time is available for additional instruction. The desirable qualifications are many. For example, it is very desirable to qualify every private in the duties of a corporal and perhaps a sergeant, but it is not essential. Numerous other examples could be cited.

The minimum qualifications suggested by the Chief of Infantry in his memorandum are clearly designed to meet, with a few minor corrections, the conditions of both peace and war. Although intended primarily for Infantry, the qualifications for the personnel listed under the heading of "Basic Specifications, General" might well be used by all the combatant services. For that reason all reference to those qualifications special to the Infantry has been omitted under the subdivision and appear elsewhere.

The mere statement of the minimum qualifications is a long step in the right direction, but we must do more than that. A private in an intelligence platoon is required to demonstrate a working knowledge of scouting and patrolling, but he cannot be made proficient in that subject until it has been

analyzed and divided into its unit operations.

The analyzing of the job into its unit operations is not something new. We have always done it after a fashion in the military service. A second lieutenant with three months' service knows that he cannot teach a squad to execute "squads right" without first instructing the individuals of that squad in how to march, but he does not know how to make a recruit an expert rifleman unless he has thoroughly familiarized himself with the successive steps or operations laid down in "Rifle Marksmanship." Had those steps not been so clearly defined every officer charged with instructing in rifle shooting would have had to analyze the subject for himself. The result would have been a waste of training hours and a lack of uniformity with the consequent lowering of the standard. The specifications will give us our objectives, the analysis into unit operations will define the most direct path. by which we may reach those objectives.

How are we to know when we have attained our objective? Educational institutions determine the progress and proficiency of students by means of daily records and quizzes. We must devise a means of measuring military skill which will accomplish the same result.

In rifle shooting we have an accurate means of measuring proficiency. The man either does or does not hit the target. The preparation of tests covering other subjects is not so simple. Such tests can be devised only after considerable research and study by individual officers, but once properly determined they will be susceptible of

use without special training by all of- companies for experimentation in this

ficers.

Tests should eliminate as far as possible the personality of the instructor. They should be adaptable to all conditions of service. We cannot apply tests requiring elaborate equipment and a great amount of time. Unless our tests always give uniform results we will have no assurance that a man tested in one organization and found proficient will not be found deficient by the examiner in another organization. When the measurement of military attainments is as well known and understood throughout the service as the measurement of commodities is in the commercial world then, and not until then, will we be able to place the individual or organization in the proper place in the military machine and eliminate waste motion and friction.

The full and economical use of available time necessitates a determination of the time required for the personnel or organization to attain proficiency in each minimum qualification. It is evident that some men and organizations will learn more quickly than others, due either to a greater amount of native intelligence or because the instructors have greater ability. Our task is to discover what average personnel under average instructors can plish.

accom

This data may be secured by trial of each qualification in a large number of organizations. Where a number of recruits are received in one regiment they could well be assigned in groups to a particular company or

I

subject. The average of the results attained should give us a time figure which will hold for the majority of recruits.

The time required for training is of vital importance in time of war. To illustrate, let us assume that one month after the outbreak of hostilities 100,000 untrained levies are inducted into the service and that there are available for each ten men one average instructor. How long will it take to turn out 100,000 basic riflemen or 100,000 machine gunners? Some few officers of considerable experience could make a fairly accurate guess, but purely a guess, whereas the bulk of officers in the Regular Army, National Guard, and Organized Reserve could not approximate the time required with any degree of accuracy. The desirability of substituting a known fact for a guess is too obvious for comment.

All Infantry officers can be of assistance to the Chief of Infantry in this work he has undertaken. A single group of officers cannot solve the problem. The best minds of the Infantry must cooperate in arriving at a solution. The problem and the first step, specifications for the minimum qualifications of Infantry enlisted personnel, is in your hands. Give it some thought and send in to the Chief the results of your study so that the many difficulties in regard to training now confronting you and your brother officers of the Infantry may be decreased.

1st Lieut. Herbert B. Mayer, 16th Infantry

T

HE ancients were
wrong-Fate is a
chemist.

Of course,
as they said, she does
use the old shears to
cut the tangled
threads of existence
to the required
lengths but this is
only part of her
of her

work her great labboratory tells the rest of the story. Wonderful people-chemists! Give them the basic materials and they produce the ultimate results. Zip! In goes a yellow, ill-smelling mixture! Zow! An almost colorless compound follows in due order. The pestle stirs the mass slowly and quite suddenly from the unprepossessing elements arise the odors of the completed product-a perfume as from Araby. Wonderful people-chemists! It is well worth while to watch some goggleeyed specimen of the breed playing about with his mysterious implements, mixing a pinch of green this with some purple that until the mixture goes off in a lovely pink explosion which proves beyond peradventure of a doubt that the ultimate has been found.

To the uninitiated their work seems almost godlike in its sheer mystery and so what wonder that Fate-the ever mysterious has turned to chemistry to accomplish her own ends?

It is not difficult to picture her laboratory up above and something off to the right of the great North Star, where Fate-wearing working togs like some brilliant young co-ed

moves about her mixtures and the elementary compositions with which she works.

There on one shelf, for example, are neat little rows of vials of tears, and near them rest the bright bottles which contain smiles-Fate can make wonderful mixtures with these two elements, but these are not her only basic materials, for on other shelves rest vast carboys of acid like hate, of jealousy, of envy, of passion, lust and wrong and fraud. And tucked away in the safe is the golden vial of love-a precious thing of which so little has been mined from the hard quartz of life.

And so here, amid her retorts and stills, Fate, clever chemist lady, works out her problems. Sometimes the results are none too beautiful-but Lord knows she has but little to work on quite often. And yet handicapped though she may be by the mundane nature of her materials, every once in awhile Fate manages to work out a problem whose ultimate x is a bright glow of beauty which illumines her dull laboratory like a fairy gleam and for the nonce her tired, old, but ever young, eyes reflect the warmth of the flames of happiness which her hands. have brought into being.

One Christmas Eve, for instance, Fate, having labored all day over weighty matters determined to have a little fun. It had been a hard day and Fate was very weary. In the morning when she came to work she had looked at China to see what could be done there, and as she looked, she saw two Mongolian armies clash, with

[graphic]

great noises and as the conflict moved on from hill to hill, Fate, busy as might be, played with the vials of Life and Death until the conflict was decided. Russia had given her trouble, too, and Fate's eyes were clouded with tears as maddened Reds set villages in flames while little children, with gaunt ribs showing through their skin, wept piteously in the cold.

Hard had been her labor. Fate felt in the mood for relaxation-she felt she needed some difficult little experiment to complete the day-nothing coarse, nothing huge-just some little accomplishment, most difficult of making and which, however, when completed would form a very jewel of achievement for her own Christmas day. With a lead pencil stuck between her teeth and her hands idly moving through her long hair Fate pondered as to the x of this Christmas jewel.

And then she just happened to see Capt. Henry Allingsby Johnson burn the tip of his fingers with a cigarette he had held too long as he walked across the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street. It was an inspiration and Fate-all smiles

reached for her vials and went to work to achieve her x-her jewel of happiness for Christmas Day.

The cigarette which had scorched the Captain's fingers had awakened him from the fog of old memories in which he had dodged the six taxicabs which had charged upon him as his tall figure bore across the street, but when he reached the sidewalk and safety he found himself again thinking of another burning pain he had known four years before when his whole side for a moment had seemed to be on fire before the merciful darkness had closed

upon him through waves of sound. He shuddered at the memory as he reached for his handkerchief to wipe his finger tips free of the cigarette ash and as he pulled the kerchief from his pocket a little red memorandum book was drawn out with it and fell to the pavement, and Fate, watching him with busy eyes smiled as the book opened as it landed on the pavement.

The Captain picked up the battered thing quickly and for a moment stood looking at it as he held it in his hand, his eyes caught in the fog of memory, as there amid the lights and laughter and the garishness of Broadway, he moved back to France on the wings of memory. Girls passed by nudging each other and laughing as the figure in uniform stood poised, the little book in his hand-but Captain Johnson did not hear them-he was There-in France -four years before almost-not in December, but in October-Ugh! he bit his lips.

God, what a night! They had advanced all the night before, stumbling through the mud. They had attacked at dawn. He could see his men-tired, unshaven, torn out at the seats of their trousers and out at elbows-like tramps. The day had passed in discomfort and under fire, but no matter

-a further advance had been ordered. He had taken Slim-his orderly and runner with him on the preliminary reconnaissance.

They had walked to the Edge of Things and then stepped over, moving cautiously as the star lights gleamed and flares lit up the sky. And then It had struck-the flame and the noise and the darkness in which he had had a sensation of being dragged, dragged, dragged over an eternal weary

way...

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