"Officers [are] a reflection of their men, more restrained because their training is more complete, more resourceful because they have more responsibility, but the same fears are a little deeper buried in them, the same longings are more tightly locked in their hearts." p.48. The moon is down

John Steinbeck

"Officers like myself are sustained by the realisation that they cannot show fear. Soldiers have no such incentive and therefore their fear can be the greater in my view. I define courage as the overcoming of fear, not the absence of fear. A man who knows no fear cannot be courageous - he has nothing to be courageous about." p.211.

"An officer who does not understand the value of this period of mourning runs the risk of losing the respect of his soldiers. A soldier imagines his own death when a friend is killed and sees how an officer responds, should he one day be so unlucky. Officers should take care here." p. 214. Broken Lives

Bob Stewart

"Pride is holding your head up when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it." The Power of One p. 150.

Bryce Courtenay

"Camaraderie amongst officers can be misleading. It may be warm and genuine, but it can also serve to camouflage rivalries and antipathies or even become a form of carapace. Evelyn Waugh .. described the camaraderie .. as 'peculiar, impersonal, barely human geniality'." Inside the British Army.

Anthony Beevor

"The mark of intellectual honesty is the solicitation of opposing points of view." Sum of all fears, p. 704.

Tom Clancy

“The ablest brains did not climb to the top of the stairs .. Seniority and Society were the dominant factors in army promotion. Deportment counted a great deal. Brains came a bad fourth.” [of the officer class in WWI.]

Lloyd George

"A piece of paper makes you an officer, a radio makes you a commander."

General Omar Bradley

"He was endowed with a very strong personality which could inspire others. He knew how to handle other individualists, and knew what to concentrate on and what to ignore. He was extremely brave because he was often afraid. When asked how it felt to jump out of an aircraft from which the last two parachutists had been killed [his training programme] he said: "Well, I had to; it was a moral obligation. But I was horribly scared."
[He] believes that leaders are born, not made. He did not enjoy killing; he did so because he had to. This may give the impression that he is an aloof intense personality; on the contrary he is cheerful and modest, has a lively sense of humour, and makes mistakes like anyone else, though perhaps not so many of them . (of David Stirling)"

"Needless to say, [he] was greatly admired by his men, and he, in his turn, spared no effort in looking after them. However he was never familiar. It might be thought that an officer living in such close contact with his men would soon become on familiar terms with them. This easily happens and often enough the officer's authority seems to become shared out among the men, leaving him with the ultimate responsibility for decisions he may not have been alone in making. It did not happen to [him]. Authority never slipped from his grasp, not merely because he was an officer but because he was clearly the best, and the leader." (of Anders Lassen)

"I found Brian [Franks], whom I had known slightly before the war, an excellent commander. In build tall, lean and athletic, he was by nature cheerful, understanding, full of initiative and brave, appreciated the exigencies of the circumstances in which we were operating, and left us to get on with working the wireless without interference."

"He [Lt Col 'Paddy' R.B. Mayne] was highly intelligent and a good organiser. He was also compassionate. These qualities alone would not, of course, have made him the great fighter and leader that he was. Mayne probably owed much of his success to methodical, careful planning. If he had to venture into the unknown he would go without hesitation, but if there was any possibility of preliminary reconnaissance he would carry this out meticulously."

The SAS, Philip Warner

Ian's greatest qualities were
-courage to make decisions that needed to be made
-to delegate authority when required
-to keep up morale in his unit with his wit and humour
-to understand his men's needs
-and to listen - to admit he didn't know it all.
He was able to mix and relax with his men when times were quiet, yet he never became too familiar - he was still the boss. After every operation he was there to thank and congratulate the men involved. p. 153.
Phoenix - Policing the Shadows

Susan Phoenix and Jack Holland

"There are no bad regiments, there are only bad officers."

Field Marshall Lord Slim

"The understanding of service is not the same now in society as it was when I joined. We have to teach about service, we have to teach about self sacrifice, about duty and loyalty. We do that, certainly at Sandhurst, by explaining the real basics. If I may say so, I believe that depends enormously on integrity. From integrity comes the comradeship which gives us our fighting power. We have to have comrades when we go into Sierra Leone or Kosovo or wherever it is. The integrity that the young bring in from society is pretty grey in areas. I suppose that we lay down a rule of thumb which is that behaviour that offends is unacceptable and we take things from there on upwards. "

"All of us want people who are making our service the career of first choice. That is really what we want. We do not want people who have failed to get into here or were disappointed there. We want people who are first choice. Secondly, I believe the diversity you talk about is one of our strengths. I have traveled to a lot of the other academies in the world and, as you heard from the Admiral, most of them are university-length courses. Our organisations are essentially post graduate and they are focusing young people for a year on command and leadership which is a fantastic start to life, not just to military life but to life. I know the Americans say they are training leaders for the nation. I would not be so grandiose as to say we are doing that but I very much hope we are putting young people back into society who have had the huge privilege of studying leadership and nothing else for a whole year."

Defence Select Committee, 15.11.2000 Maj Gen Arthur Denaro, Commandant RMAS

"Your position never gives you the right to command. It only imposes on you the duty of so living your life that others may receive your orders without being humiliated."

Dag Hammarskjöld