When the enemy is in range, so are you.

They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist—

With the rising tide of bureaucratism over the 19th century putting paid to the practice practically everywhere by the turn of the 20th, the ostensible justification was that this would result in more ‘professional’ fighting forces, with ‘less chance of incompetence’, and all that.

A funny thing happened though. The sort of funny things that for some reason always seem to happen every time you see something that takes the form of ‘let us have a grand central soviet of [thing] that will thus allow us to get even more gooder and more numerous [thing] than ever before’.

Instead of ‘like what we have now, but even better’, valour, personal dedication, and care for troops, disappear in the span of a generation. Or pretty much overnight in historical terms. The armies that conquered Imperivm Brittorvm and the armies that were made to live like pigs in unimproved trenches for months despite complete lack of movement (because ‘merely temporary measures for the glorious offensive’ was official doctrine) could not be any more different in spiritual terms.

A big chunk of the reason is obvious really when you stop to apply some critical thinking to it for 5 seconds; what kind of person would shell out *their own* money to put themselves in harms way at war? Unless they were really interested in war.

Comparatively, a contemporary officer corps in the occident is stuffed to the gills with glorified desk clerks looking to draw their pay checks with the least amount of trouble possible.