Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
It's not about choosing in emergencies, but about following who takes the lead.

Sometime around 1906 (IIRC - memory is tricky) the German army (or Prussian - at that time the institution was divided) decided that their Gefreiter (an experienced enlisted man) had to be proficient enough to take over the job of a NCO.
This did fit well to one of the requirements for Auftragstaktik (or how that was called at that time); you need to be told and able to understand the mission of your superior (and possibly his superior) - and that requires that you are proficient enough for assuming your direct superior's slot.
This served well when leader losses (in part because of leading by example / up front) became quite excessive in WW2.

It's really been done for a century already.
Our initial question was, how in an western army a bottom-up approach for leader selection could work.

The German army used for both, officer selection and for NCO selection, a top-down approach. The quality of the selection process was, when we use discharge due to incompetence in war time as metric, very good.