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[personal profile] fpb
I've got what I suppose is a very commonplace and obvious theory: that leaders, especially in the military - but also in sports, business, etc. - can be divided between good commanders and good generals. To be precise, they need two separate orders of gifts that are not always, maybe not even often, found with equal abundance in the same person. A good general is someone who not only has a sound grounding in the matter of war - that is to be expected from any professional officer - but who has a clear understanding of all features of fighting and an instinctive insight for what it takes to win. A good commander is, quite simply, a man whose soldiers will follow him into Hell. Both of these are quite instinctive gifts, and education can only, at best, sharpen them.

This does not have to depend on a good cause, although of course when the cause is good it is wonderful to have a commander worthy of it. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the greatest commander in the Civil War, fought not just for the South, but specifically for slavery: he was a former slave trader. Model, a commander equal to Rommel though less well known, was a committed Nazi. When Trotsky took charge of the fledgling Red Army, it was on the verge of annihilation, and he himself had never held a rifle in his life. Within a year, he had reorganized it in the way it needed to withhold enemy attacks, strengthened it enormously, and won several battles. Without him - alas - the monstrous Lenin and his equally murderous party would have been crushed within two years. Likewise, Robert Clive went to Calcutta as a civilian clerk in a trading company; he came back as "Clive of India", founder of an empire - thogh even the scoundrelly British government of the time was ashamed of the methods he had used, and put him through a process of impeachment. Great commanders can be bandits, but if so, they can make other bandits follow them no matter what.

These gifts, as I said, can be unequally given. Some great commanders were but mediocre generals. Eisenhower is personally guilty of making the war last longer than it ought to have; if the western armies had been commanded by Patton, Montgomery, or even Bradley, the war would have been over by October 1944, and the Western Allies would have taken Berlin, Prague and possibly even Vienna, with all that that implies. On the other hand, none of these gentlemen, except perhaps Montgomery, could ever have motivated two million men as Eisenhower managed. Washington himself did not regard himself as a great general, and whenever he disagreed with his professional colleague Rochambeau, he gave way. On the other hand, there has hardly ever been as great a commander; to match for his achievement in holding together for five years an army of thousands of volunteers, in spite of reverses, hunger, feeble political support, and horrendous winters, one would have to trawl through the annals of war and go to places like China.

Conversely, the Italian commander for most of World War One - Field-Marshal Cadorna - is regarded as one of the few really good generals in the war, but had absolutely no gift of leading whatever. His soldiers hated him, and they were right. On the one hand, by October 1917 he was on the verge of complely defeating the Austrians. His strategy of crowding the enemy against the desert plateau called Carso, where an army could not live, had been picked from the word go and carried on through eleven ghastly battles, and was about to pay off; the Austrians informed their German allies that one more Italian push would finish them. On the other hand, when the Germans, reacting to this threatening situation with the brilliant gamble of Caporetto, broke through the Italian lines, it was found that while the Italian troops had been able to obey orders even when they involved carnage, they did not have the inner strength to hold on in a situation of surprise and disorder. Cadorna's reaction to this was typical and disastrous: he called his own soldiers cowards and traitors, in an official communique'. The Austrians had a field day; their planes scattered thousands of copies of the offending document over the retreating Italian columns, with a commentary along the lines of "and you shed your blood and lost your mates for THIS bloke?" Cadorna understood war, but he had no notion of soldiers. Under his successor, the Italian Army not only recovered from the catastrophe, but put an end to the whole war.

The point of this? I have an online friend of whom I am very fond, Kate or [profile] expectare, a very intelligent young woman who suffers from fits of violent depression and who, like many victims of that condition, can be devastatingly, howlingly funny. Kate wants to be an army officer more than anything in the world, and I have always believed that, in spite of the various ways in which she does not fit the stereotype, she'd be good at it. But now it seems that, in addition to dedication and intelligence, she might actually have that tremendous and unquantifiable thing that Washington and Rommel and Garibaldi and Julius Caesar and Joan of Arc had: that she might be a natural commander. Read her post here, http://expectare.livejournal.com/355229.html , and see what happened at the end.

It seems to me as thought the Army might have an asset there. As I already know of another dedicated and intelligent young woman who was turned down for supposed psychological problems, I am terrified that the bureaucracy might deny Kate her heart's desire because of her fits of depression. Well, I hope they don't; if they do, I am more and more convinced that they would have burned down a tremendous asset.

Date: 2010-04-14 12:38 pm (UTC)
ext_1059: (Default)
From: [identity profile] shezan.livejournal.com
It is needless to remind her that Churchill, too, suffered from bouts of depression?

Date: 2010-04-14 12:46 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] fpb.livejournal.com
It's not her. It's the bureaucracy that scares me. It already discarded another young woman I know - [profile] ashesofautumn - to be rejected becaused of supposed psychic problems. I am sure that Kate will let nothing stand between her and her desired career, but it's not her choice, it's the Army's choice.

BTW, I think you would like both girls - if [profile] ashesofautumn ever posts again.

PS: I think I can post about this because both ladies have posted about it in their LJs.

Date: 2010-04-15 12:50 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] panobjecticon.livejournal.com
i believe depression to be a curable condition.

Date: 2010-04-15 07:03 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] fpb.livejournal.com
You might want to discuss the matter with her. I have a relative who has suffered from an extremely serious case of it all her life; she is now about seventy, and has been through the best and most qualified specialists in Rome with no result. When the black dog strikes, it strikes. That is my experience.

Date: 2010-04-16 10:11 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] panobjecticon.livejournal.com
other than general pointers, it wouldn't be appropriate.

Date: 2010-04-17 06:26 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] mentalguy.livejournal.com
I suspect it depends. Cognitive therapies (particularly in conjunction with antidepressants; the combination is more effective than either one alone) have been shown to be able to accomplish remission in many cases, but not all.

Date: 2010-04-17 06:32 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] fpb.livejournal.com
I have a relative who has suffered from it all her life (as I already said) and is now 70. She has had all the time in the world to try anything that was available in Rome, and Rome is not the third world. If nothing worked for her, evidently nothing currently available can. And [profile] expectare's experience is the same. In fact, I suspect that if you approach her with these ideas you will get a lively and highly expressive account of what is wrong with them.

Date: 2010-04-19 06:48 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] mentalguy.livejournal.com
Well, I mean it depends on the person. It's not that depression is either wholly untreatable, or always successfully treatable.

Date: 2010-04-19 06:56 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] mentalguy.livejournal.com
In other words, I was cautioning [livejournal.com profile] panobjecticon that, while we know from clinical studies that depression is (in the broad sense) a curable condition, we also know that it isn't curable in every specific case.

Date: 2010-04-19 08:24 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] fpb.livejournal.com
OK. [profile] expectare finds medicines useful and is an angry opponent of the theory that they don't do much good; my relative seems to be less lucky from that point of view.

Date: 2010-04-20 12:23 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] panobjecticon.livejournal.com
it's been quite some time since i looked at any studies. what are the indicators for poor outcomes?

a few years ago, gp's were prescribing gym membership here for some cases of depression and particularly post natal depression iirc.

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