Could a lawyer serve as a company officer on the front lines?

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The answer has multiple aspects. If there is a big, unexpected war coming, the training gets accelerated.

  • In WWII the US talked about 90 day wonders, lieutenants who had three months of officer training before they got a platoon. And obviously a platoon leader is two well-placed bullets (or one mortar bomb) away from inheriting a company.
  • Many forces were more likely to grant officer rank to university graduates. The assumption was that these people are functionally literate, can make long-term plans, know abstract, logical reasoning, and so on. Does that make them better officers? They thought so.

I knew a preacher who got drafted by the Germans in WWII and became the commander of an early warning radar company. Not quite infantry, but it was a mobile unit in the field.

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