When the ideal naval officer diverged from operational need

The eighteenth-century Royal Navy gradually developed an expectation that officers would put professional command ahead of political faction. In this interpretation, wartime officers later became models for an idealized social image that did not always fit operational needs. By the late nineteenth century, recruiting for that image could have excluded even Nelson himself. Fisher and other reformers began addressing the mismatch before the First World War, but recruiting ideals matched operational needs more closely after the war.