ABSTRACT
One of the more important subsidiary effects of Prussian successes in the campaigns of 1866 and 1870 was that the German victory drew attention to the contribution made by a high level of professionalism to the creation of an effective and efficient military. The example of the Prussians in forming the first European army of the industrial era was not lost on the rest of the world. In 1878 the French, for example, followed the Prussian lead by opening the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre where, under Lewal the first commandant, a functionally and highly professionally orientated course sought to ‘place officers face to face with the eventualities of war, with the unexpected, in order to form their judgments’.(1) Even in the USA, where military tasks were primarily those of maintaining internal law and order, an intellectual awakening stimulated an inquiry into the needs of a professionalized corps of officers. In 1877, for instance, after a tour of Prussian military establishments, Brigadier-General Emery Upton reported that the existing military academy at West Point did not afford officers, ‘the means of acquiring a theoretical and practical knowledge of the higher duties of their profession’.(2) He accordingly proposed the es-tablishment of infantry and cavalry staff schools, backed by the resources of a war college, to produce a pattern of training and education which would emulate that of Prussia.
