Military Review English Edition March-April 2014 | Page 35

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Is Experience the Missing Link
in Junior Officer Development?
Maj. Adam Wojack, U.S. Army

I

N 1808, AFTER humiliating defeats inflicted by Napoleon and France, the Prussian
government placed much of the blame for its misfortunes on poor military leadership and subsequently redrafted national criteria for officer development. Gone was the
discriminator that officers be selected exclusively from the nation’s aristocracy. “The only
title to an officer’s commission,” read the directive, “shall be in time of peace, education
and professional knowledge; in time of war, distinguished valor and perception . . . All
previously existing class preference in the military establishment is abolished.”1
The Prussian government also added a requirement that all officer candidates serve six
months in the enlisted ranks—to ensure a head start toward technical proficiency—and
attend nine months of professional schooling before commissioning. These reforms, commonly recognized as the beginning of the modern military officer profession, were intended
to secure future victory by growing the type of leader who would thrive and succeed in the
increasingly complex operating environment of Napoleonic combined arms warfare. The
reforms, arriving at the beginning of a period of dominance experienced by the Prussian
military, and later the German military, revolutionized the way armies thought, performed,
and developed leaders well into the 20th century.2

Maj. Adam Wojack, U.S. Army, is a Training With Industry Program fellow at FleishmanHillard, an international communications firm, in New York City. He holds an MMAS degree from the U.S. Army Command and
General Staff College.
ART: Napoleon is shown on the battlefield at Eylau (in Prussia) during one of the Napoleonic Wars (the War of the Third Coalition, 1807)
in this oil painting by Antoine-Jean Gros.

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March-April 2014

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