Quote Originally Posted by Ron Humphrey View Post
in my experience many if not most who would accomplish a given task despite a lack of defined tasking were not on the honor roll, generally the opposite.

(for a variety of reasons)
Only too true Ron. A man who has the will and the mental agility to make it in the real world, even if he is a "high-school dropout", is rather likelier to be the kind of man to be able to create order out of chaos, than a man who has "learned" within the comparatively predictable and safe confines of "the system" - selil is right on the money about this. And if any further proof need be required for what the latter path made lead to within the military, I would offer the nearly universal observation of most of us that sending officers to civilian universities for MBA's and MSc's in SA, etc., tends to "ruin" the professional military competence of many of the same said officers.

Wilf made a very good point a week or two ago, when he stated that the Royal Marines have a solid approach to recruiting officers; they take both those who have either a Service Academy background or civilian university background, as well as those who possess only a high school matriculation - a couple "O" levels and half a dozen "A" levels.

As to enlisted man education, high school is great, but considering that many of the best soldiers have had relatively modest formal civilian educations, a high school matriculation is unlikely to be necessary, except for certain technical tasks. As to the argument that at least a high school education is or will be required for present or future technologies, that may or may not be true. But it seems to me that twenty years ago, the GAO went after the Army saying that the average soldier had an IQ that was substantially below that of the minimum deemed necessary to effectively use its high-tech weapons - even while uneducated Mujahideen were knocking Soviet fighter-bombers out of the sky with Stingers.

The point is, don't confuse civilian education with that required for the military; the two are quite different, and necessarily so for the most part.