A navy does not merely train an individual sailor; it sustains the people who train that sailor and the successive levels of experienced command. Senior NCOs and officers can represent two or three decades of accumulated development, in addition to the earlier generation that trained them. Equipment can be rebuilt more quickly than this human chain of expertise. At its best, military tradition preserves institutional memory, although tradition can be hijacked as readily as anything else.
Notable Point · 4:04-6:03
Why trained personnel cannot be replaced like equipment
The case for expending equipment rather than people rests on the decades needed to develop trainers, senior NCOs, officers, and institutional memory.