Your post from which I extracted these paragraphs was all good but to a civilian these are especially good. They cover human factors that would never have occurred to me but when pointed out, they are actually the little things that would seem to make a big difference between a unit going on effectively or faltering, especially the observation about the importance of everybody having good medical training on the morale of the soldiers who had been around longer.
Churchill observed in The Malakand Field Force that ideally the British at the time would have preferred all their soldiers to be older than 25. I know ideal is impracticable but would you agree or disagree?
I read a book by an Israeli armor general about the '73 war and he had a similar observation about volunteering to stay with the wounded. Until he put a stop to it, 3 tanks would take one wounded man back to aid, the tank he was in and two others to escort that one.
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