[The Path of Empire by Carl Russell Fish]@TWC D-Link bookThe Path of Empire CHAPTER X 6/14
There had been no preliminary sifting of ability in the army, and it was only as experience gave the test that the capable and informed were called into positions of importance.
In fact, the training of the regular officers was inferior to that of the naval officers.
West Point and Annapolis were both excellent in the quality of their instruction, but what they offered amounted only to a college course, and in the army there was no provision for systematic graduate study corresponding to the Naval War College at Newport. These difficulties and deficiencies, however, cannot fully explain the woeful inferiority of the army to the navy in preparedness. Fundamentally the defect was at the top.
Russell A.Alger, the Secretary of War, was a veteran of the Civil War and a silver-voiced orator, but his book on the "Spanish-American War," which was intended as a vindication of his record, proves that even eighteen months of as grueling denunciation as any American official has ever received could not enlighten him as to what were the functions of his office.
Nor did he correct or supplement his own incompetence by seeking professional advice.
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