Diligence and devotion to military education are no longer at the present day sufficient to make our troops superior to the enemy's, for there are men working no less devotedly in the hostile armies. If we wish to gain a start there is only one way to do it: the training must break with all that is antiquated and proceed in the spirit of the war of the future, which will impose fresh requirements on the troops as well as on the officers.
It is unnecessary to go into the details about the training in the use of modern arms and technical contrivances: this follows necessarily from the introduction of these means of war. But if we survey the sphere of training as a whole, two phenomena of modern warfare will strike us as peculiarly important with regard to it: the heightened demands which will be made on individual character and the employment of "masses" to an extent hitherto unknown.
The necessity for increased individualization in the case of infantry and artillery results directly from the character of the modern battle; in the case of cavalry it is due to the nature of their strategical duties and the need of sometimes fighting on foot like infantry; in the case of leaders of every grade, from the immensity of the armies, the vast extent of the spheres of operation and fields of battle, and the difficulty, inseparable from all these conditions, of giving direct orders. Wherever we turn our eyes to the wide sphere of modern warfare, we encounter the necessity of independent action--by the private soldier in the thick of the battle, or the lonely patrol in the midst of the enemy's country, as much as by the leader of an army, who handles huge hosts. In battle, as well as in operations, the requisite uniformity of action can only be attained at the present time by independent co-operation of all in accordance with a fixed general scheme.
The employment of "masses" requires an entirely altered method of moving and feeding the troops. It is one thing to lead 100,000 or perhaps 200,000 men in a rich country seamed with roads, and concentrate them for a battle--it is another to manoeuvre 800,000 men on a scene of war stripped bare by the enemy, where all railroads and bridges have been destroyed by modern explosives. In the first case the military empiric may be equal to the occasion; the second case demands imperatively a scientifically educated General and a staff who have also studied and mastered for themselves the nature of modern warfare. The problems of the future must be solved in advance if a commander wishes to be able to operate in a modern theatre of war with certainty and rapid decision.