zed himself with the modern Navy from first-hand experience.
Those who lead sea-going forces can enlarge their own capacities by
knowing more, rather than less, about the nature of the air and ground
establishments. The submariner can always learn something useful to
his own work by mingling with airmen; the airman becomes a better
officer as he grows in qualified knowledge of ground and sea fighting.

But the fact remains that the services are not alike, that no wit of
man can make them alike, and that the retention by each of its
separate character, customs and confidence is essential to the
conserving of our national military power. Unification has not altered
this basic proposition. The first requirement of a unified
establishment is moral soundness in each of the integral parts,
without which there can be no soundness at all. And on the question of
fundamental loyalty, the officer who loves every other service just as
much as his own will have just as much active virtue as the man who
loves other women as much as his own wife.

CHAPTER TWO

FORMING MILITARY IDEALS

Any stranger making a survey of what Americans are and how they get
that way would probably see it as a paradox that within the armed
establishment the inculcation of ideals is considered the most vital
of all teaching, while in our gentler and less rigid institutions,
there is steadily less emphasis on this subject.

He would be entitled to the explanation that it is not so done because
this has always been the way of Armies, Navies, and other fighting
forces, or because it is universal in the military establishments of
the twentieth century, but because nothing else would better suffice
the American military system under present conditions.

There are two main reasons why.

The first is that we are an altogether unregimented people, with a
strong belief in the virtues of rugged individualism and in the right
of the average man to go along about as he pleases, so long as he does
not do actual injury to society. Voluntary group cooperation rather
than absolute group loyalty, developing from a strong spiritual bond,
is the basic technic of Americans in their average rounds. It is
enough to satisfy the social, political and economic needs of a
democracy, but in its military parts, it would be fatally weak. There
would be no possibility of achieving an all-compelling unity under
conditions of utmost pressure if no man felt any higher call to