Yet I would argue with you that the most difficult intellectual exercise is staying alive when somebody is shooting at you. Battle is not an exercise. More than ever, in the future, it will demand troops who can think fast on their feet, he said. One is that firepower and maneuver have beaten down the enemy and all that's needed is to sweep the battlefield, he said. Second, the units were taken by surprise and annihilated because of the stupidity of their leaders, he noted.
Statistics show the death rate of members of close-combat units decreases with age.
He doesn't have the maturity, the mental balance and the ability to deal with psychological stress that a more mature individual has. To survive on the empty, lethal battlefields of the future, soldiers will need to know far more than how to use their weapons. They'll need to know medicine, engineering and communications and have the ability to deal with information systems, Scales said. He explained that the most tightly bonded units in World War II were the airborne units that took 3,000 more infantrymen than they needed when they went to war. In today's military structure, the lieutenant colonels and colonels who command battalions and brigades still have direct access to their troops.