Quote Originally Posted by Shek View Post
Wilf,

You're going to have to school me on some of the historical examples, but in looking at your comment, one Army that currently comes to mind as a model of this is the IDF. However, that is a very imprecise analogy because their mandatory service keeps the pool of potential OCS candidates almost as large as the population.
I would not presume to school you!

Sure the IDF is one and the German Army is the other. Sweden has a similar system but I am not sure of the detail.

The IDF uses Kaba system (כבא) to assess a candidates suitability, and also has a psychology branch who's opinions are taken very seriously. Point is, given anyone you can use modern psychology to assess their potential and then track that against performance.

To me the biggest advantage of the IDF system is that men generally respect officers far more than in the US or UK army, because they KNOW that the officers are the best of their intake. It could very easily be applied to other armies.