Staff college

They used counterinsurgency successfully in, in Malayan Emergency back in the, I think 1948.

And that is something that you study at the Staff College, Command and Staff College.

And that was the basis for this, uh, is the intellectual ancestor of the built-in and hardwired into that Field Manual 3 TAC 24.

But that is saying that, I mean, the, the complete situation in the Malayan Emergency was totally different than it was in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is the imperial capital, dense with palaces and embassies, home to the sultan's court and to the diplomatic representatives of every major European power, a city where the currents of Ottoman politics run at their most concentrated and most consequential.

At the War College, Mustafa Kemal continues to distinguish himself academically, graduating in 1902 as a lieutenant and proceeding immediately into the Ottoman Staff College, the Erkan-i Harbiye Mektebi, an even more selective institution reserved for the most promising young officers, those being groomed for command responsibilities and strategic planning roles rather than mere line service.

Staff college training exposes him to advanced military theory, much of it drawn from Prussian and French sources, reflecting the Ottoman military's ongoing decades-long project of importing European martial expertise in the hope of closing the gap between Ottoman and European fighting capability.

He studies tactics, logistics, the history of great campaigns, the mathematics of artillery and fortification, subjects that sharpen not only his professional competence but his broader habit of analytical, systematic thinking, the very cognitive disposition that had first drawn him away from the rote memorization of the Mekteb all those years before.

But it is in Istanbul, away from his mother's household, surrounded by fellow officers in training who share his restless intellectual appetite, that Mustafa Kemal's political engagement deepens from private unease into something closer to organized activity.

He continues his studies.

But the episode leaves its mark, both as a warning about the very real dangers of open dissent within an autocratic system and as a confirmation for the young officer himself that his political convictions are not merely abstract intellectual preferences, but something he is willing to risk his career and his safety to express.

Consider for a moment the full portrait that has emerged by the time Mustafa Kemal approaches his graduation from staff college in 1905.

It was the late General Sebastian Roberts who spoke really highly of you and CEOs need leaders who think differently.

Now he thought differently when he was at Staff College he was almost sort of told off.

But when he had to write an operation order about a really complex, big thing, and most people were handing in sort of 40 to 80 pages of handwritten notes about what they were going to do, he handed in a single sheet.

And it was a... a diagram, pictorial operation order, which then became the way we did things.

And I never knew about it.

Happily sold it.

on I probably would have left the army then because okay fine I'll leave then as a young captain I stayed on another 10 years couldn't quite understand why after staff college it wasn't kind of going and of course it's not just one comment you'll probably find and I got all my reports back and I could see that they were generally very nice but there was this one comment which went wow no one ever made me aware of this what was the moment that happened I don't remember it but anyway That was the way it worked.

It was the system.