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Show Lessons from the Modern Military j By HOLMES ALEXANDER Challenge Guest Columnist The military mind is a long way from what it used to be. The caricature of the trigger-happy, slaughter-minded, war-mongering officer i ( should long since have been consigned to the dead files. One of the unsung blessings of the nuclear age is that side by side with the development and deployment of mass destruction weapons has gone the selection and rendous the warheads we pack into our bombays and into our missiles, the more our educative systems must extend themselves them-selves in the search, the defining, the cultivation and the enrichment of all in life that is good and true. As the military recruitment staffs reward re-ward these men with added opportunities of education and with laurels of prestige in positions of trust, there is developing a certain example, a vogue. Other young men will strive to imitate the military model out of a wish to achieve to deserve de-serve the opportunities and laurels that are there. Acting from stern necessity, the Strategic Stra-tegic Air Command of the Air Force has developed a workable doctrine for discovering dis-covering and developing the right sort of man to handle nuclear hardware and the controls which surround it. They are the very sorts of men we would like to have in other walks of life. The Air Force manual for recruitment staffs would serve well as a set of instructions for deans of students, employment administrators, ad-ministrators, parole boards and all others who have something to do with shaping our society. This manuel deals with human reliability. reli-ability. Its objective is "to reduce, so far as possible, the occurrence of acts which could lead to an unauthorized (nuclear) detonation or launch." To understand the broader application, you only have to add: "also the occurrence of acts which could lead to other forms of antisocial anti-social behavior, including crime, civil disobedience dis-obedience and general nuisance." There is no place in the nuclear weapons weap-ons program and no place in well-con- ducted schools, offices, plants a --is holds -for individuals of arroga sistent ill-humor, jealousy, siBPj inflexibility. They should be disco - not pampered. They should . to understand that their chance wanted and accepted lies in ... and is not included in any M The nuclear program needs- every community and nfighWJJ. -persons who apply them work, observe well-established comportment, stick to the. J., tend their churches and obligations. They need not .wv A genius, for the requiem , mality. The punishment r j ance is expulsion from vironment, forfeiture of opP" J rewards. W This military attitude, tra" j our general society, would ca j the strongest incentives ju . behavior -the incenWjJ, acceptance, of opportun V , It would not coddle Je iff cuse the delinquent, k ly go hard on those who J-nervously J-nervously incapable 01 0if . but many of these would bee . charges in-any event. , . The group or PKJ civilian, which makes its a . is on its way toward mands by internal ores ff improvement im-provement of the breed, ' in the Armed Services, can in the population g draws its cadres. Tnesp jh of the military in our recognized as a VlC 8 schooling of military Alexander personnel who intelligently intelli-gently restrain the destructive and impulsive im-pulsive tendancies which exist throughout society. To the extent that the choosing and training of young military men the top officers of the near future are successfully suc-cessfully conducted, the more we alter society for the better. The reporter who travels for a while among modern warriors soon finds an accumulation ac-cumulation of traits and honorable codes which are far less prevalent certainly less stressed in the civilian segment. The military today is the opposite of antisocial. anti-social. It is pro-social in a big way. It is neither trigger-happy nor trigger-shy I would not call it a wild surmise that the more young men we call to the colors especially to the nuclear effort the faster we improve the whole American Amer-ican breed. For the more destructive the weapons which these men handle, the more delicate deli-cate becomes their touch. The more hor- |