ln our times, S.L.A. Marshall explains (in The Soldier’s Load and the Mobilty of a Nation), “we have permitted military thinking to become clouded by what social workers, psychiatrists, business counsel, public-relations advisers and morale experts have to say about what is proper in an army organized according to American standards, meaning the standards which are upheld in American institutions of a quite different nature”:
The military leader has become an unhappy worrier, confused and buffeted between rival groups of medicine men, each vending some special magic. He is told that a new order has arisen, that the rising generation is somehow different, that industrial change has revolutionized the military problem, that how he is presented to the public cuts more ice than what he really is and how he thinks, and that modern science and business methodology can rub a lamp and come up with the perfect answer to every age-old military problem.
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From the viewpoint of the businessman, and of his particular friends in political life, the wartime Army is a great business institution, and a shining mark for the sale of any product which can be given even the pale shadow of a legitimate purpose. They press upon command to accept all manner of things which it would not normally consider. Public sentiment — “nothing is too good for the boys” — moves in the same direction. That these pressures are hard to resist is well understood by everyone who was familiar with the World War II atmosphere in Washington. That they are ever likely to become less is a wishful thought hardly sustained by the passage of postwar events.