Systems Outlive Their Creators

It started with a conversation about the Kriegsmarine. One thesis stuck: they didn’t just train submarine commanders. They profiled them for psychological compatibility with the crew.

Picture it. A steel coffin, fifty men, months in a single compartment. Under those conditions, skills are secondary. The psyche acts as the primary weapon, or the primary vulnerability. They understood what most still ignore: a leader in a closed system is not the one who gives orders. He is the psychological anchor. His steadiness stabilizes everything. His break kills everyone.

They were looking for those who would endure. Tactical proficiency played no role.

This is not a retrospective legend. After Versailles, Germany was left with a tiny army, and every officer suddenly weighed in gold. It was there, in the tightness of constraints, that applied military psychology was born. From the mid-twenties, the navy ran candidates through a regular scientific selection procedure. A man named Max Simoneit, scientific director of Wehrmacht military psychology, formulated a principle that sounded like heresy at the time: a human being at the limit must be measured whole. Not by tactical grades. Character, will, depth. Through observation by trained officers, in action, where the questionnaire falls silent.

The irony: the methodology outlived the regime that created it. The British read German professional journals and built their own three-day wartime selection boards from these findings. Modern assessment centers grew out of those boards. A scheme from the barracks of the thirties still sorts candidates in glass offices, for positions where no one has heard of submarines. Systems outlive their creators. That is not always good news.

But as I dug deeper, this pearl turned out to be poisoned.

Kapitänleutnant Oskar Kusch. Technically proficient, a successful commander. He had the courage to voice criticism of the regime in the wardroom. January 1944: his first officer, Ulrich Abel, a doctor of law and a convinced National Socialist, had just received a restrained evaluation from Kusch. Inflexible, average abilities. Abel responded with a denunciation: “undermining fighting spirit,” seditious talk. The tribunal cleared Kusch of the cowardice charge: his combat record had no faults. They tried him for words. The prosecutor requested ten years. The court gave the firing squad. May 12, 1944, Kiel. He was twenty-six. Dönitz, the “father” of the submariners, who knew the value of his commanders, did not lift a finger.

Here the system showed its true face. Their profiling was warped by ideology. They selected for conformity, and resilience and moral courage played no part in that selection. They wanted a loyal executor, an obedient figure without a will of his own. The Kusch case lays it bare: the system valued a loyal Nazi above a competent but inconvenient leader.

What exactly broke? Not the psychology. The instrument was honest. What proved corrupt was the standard against which it was calibrated. A selection system measures what is truly valued by whoever holds it in their hands, whatever its methodology says. The Kriegsmarine valued obedience and got obedience, and with it they got silence in the wardrooms where, just yesterday, someone had dared to think aloud.

The idea of profiling itself is a pearl. In their hands, it came out poisoned.

So what is a true core? The one we intuitively seek in leaders?

Modern U.S. military psychologists call it spiritual readiness. Not religiosity. Inner strength derived from a higher purpose. The U.S. Army has embedded it in doctrine alongside physical fitness. Five domains of soldier readiness: body, mind, sleep, nutrition, and spirit. The spiritual domain is deliberately secular: it is about purpose and meaning, not denomination. The formula is simple: purpose leads, strength follows. It is an inner compass. A clear “why.” It provides what no training can: the moral courage to act rightly despite the risk to oneself, one’s career, one’s reputation.

The U.S. Army leadership manual states it dryly, almost dully: moral courage is the willingness to stand firm on one’s values, principles, and convictions. And then two words people pay for with their lives: regardless of consequences. Kusch had that. His judges did not.

There is another dimension. Psychology speaks of the dark side of leadership. Our strengths, under pressure, become poison. Confidence turns into arrogance, caution into paralysis, skepticism into paranoia, and loyalty to superiors into sycophancy: this was the very derailer that wrote the denunciation of Kusch through Abel’s hand. Catalogs like the Hogan HDS list about a dozen such deformations, and not one is visible on a calm day on the parade ground. The same leadership manual honestly acknowledges the craft’s limit: education and coaching polish the external manifestations of character. Changing it is only possible by touching deep values. Maturity is the ability to see these demons in oneself and hold them. Not destroy them. Hold them.

The problem of the future.

The U-Boot experience is an example of direct leadership. Fifty men. The commander nearby. His steadiness transmitted through a look, a decision, a voice. But how do you scale that? A modern army corps comprises two to five divisions plus separate brigades, which means tens of thousands of people whom the commander will never see face to face. Trying to be a father to everyone is an illusion. A tactical trap: a small-unit solution applied to a strategic problem.

Doctrine gave this a name: mission command. Its load-bearing structure sounds mundane: mutual trust, “the shared confidence among commanders, subordinates, and partners that everyone can be relied upon and everyone is competent at their task.” Intent instead of an order for every sneeze. Disciplined initiative instead of permission from above. Trust here functions as an anchor, embedded in the system so deeply that even the replacement of one person cannot tear it out.

The leader of the future cannot be a personal anchor for everyone. He must become an architect of a system that is, in itself, the anchor. Not copy the principle. Evolve it. Transform the intuitive selection of fathers into a cold system for growing architects.

The Americans tried.

In 2019, the U.S. Army launched the most ambitious commander selection system since those same German laboratories: the Command Assessment Program. Fort Knox, four days: psychometrics, physical tests, written and oral communication, a blind interview. The board does not see the candidate, so posture, suntan, and familiar surnames carry no weight. And for the first time in history, a voice from below: anonymous feedback from those this person has already commanded. On paper, it had everything that was missing eighty years ago. Science against patronage. Character against regalia.

On September 2, 2025, the program was shut down. Five years. The Army returned to the old paper lists.

The autopsy is instructive. Not a single blow struck the methodology. All struck the people around it. A four-star general called board members to push through a protégée who had failed the panel; he was relieved in disgrace, but the precedent remained: a system that promised to be stronger than the stars on the shoulders bent at the first call from above. The officer corps responded in its own way: in 2024, more than half of those eligible simply refused to apply. Why spend four days under a microscope, where a single anonymous comment can break a career, if there is no cover from above? Anonymity, conceived as a shield against tyrants, also turned into a weapon against the demanding. And the new leadership decided that “soft” psychological matters were superfluous altogether.

The psychometrics held. The ecosystem did not: a general who considered himself above the system; a corps that did not believe the system would protect it; superiors for whom character proved to be a redundant parameter.

Kusch, Abel, Dönitz. The psychologist, the general, the minister. Eighty years between them, and the triangle is the same: the one who tells the truth; the one who pressures; the one who decides whom to sacrifice. A selection system inherits the maturity of its owners. It has no other way.

The fifth year of war proves it plainly: the absence of structure and chronic incompetence mow people down more effectively than enemy fire. We strive for rigorous selection and ironclad training, but the system of reproduction is paralyzed by stagnation. Digitization and software try to catch up with the deficit, but iron does not fight in an initiative vacuum.

People are an exhaustible resource. They run out. Fatigue accumulates exponentially, while the managerial maturity that should be the foundation of the army moves along some parallel path, divorced from the front.

At this breaking point, there are no illusions: individual heroes and architects sooner or later burn out, break, or die. But a properly constructed, cold system outlives its creators and finishes the task.

Simoneit’s methodology still sorts candidates in glass offices. The denunciations of the Abels still find their recipients. What we build will outlive us and carry forward what we loaded into it. A standard or a poison.

The resilience of a system begins with the maturity of its creator.