Why Eisenhower?

Read this and understand what is so wrong about the Russian officer corps.  Having been shot at is certainly important if you are going to tour the fighting front.  Different talent needed if you are dealing with Montgomery or Patten or McArthur whose talent was dealing with battlefield emotions.

My take home is that the army set out to locate him and  advance his career.  I never grasped that a prewar army tends to become a garrison mindset.  That worked out wonderfully for both sides in the first world war.

Then it took an almost untrained Arthur Curries to forge the Canada Corp into a war winning force that then won a series of battles in 1918 essentially giving the German Army the bums rush wherever they chose and the Germans knew it.

Also explains why the American army was ready to do something different.  Millions of men got shot at in WWI.  One man got it right and yes his methods were imitated after by German Stormtroopers.  

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Why did President Franklin Delano Roosevelt entrust the command of American troops during WWII on the European Front to Dwight Eisenhower when he had no frontline experience like George Patton for example?

Jim Langcuster ·
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Read and blogged significantly about the Second World WarUpdated Tue

Quora.com

T repeat: Because he was among a paltry handful of U.S. Army personnel in his era who were regarded essentially as army intellectuals

That is not to denigrate other officers in the U.S. Army, only to underscore that the Army at the time functioned within an entirely different ecosystem. The United States Army up to the outbreak of World War II still functioned significantly as the heir of a garrison force, having inherited the infrastructure and much of the mindset from the era of Western expansionism and settlement. The United States’ modest Pacific empire largely served to reinforce this mindset, and the geostrategic implications of this primarily were a naval concern.

Even so, a handful of farsighted men - Generals Fox Connor and George C. Marshall among them - perceived how the the Industrial Age and the technological changes growing out of them would require men capable of developing visionary thinking, of cultivating the requisite mindset and skills to perceive the elements of the emerging picture and to anticipate the challenges that would follow.

One of their jobs, as they saw it, was to identify and essentially to rescue from the ranks of obscurity promising officers who evinced these traits - not only to rescue them but also to ensure that they received the requisite Command and General Staff College and War College training required to serve in the highest levels of Army leadership.

Before his rapid rise to the front ranks, Ike had served in several significant roles, notably as MacArthur's assistant in the War Department and later during the General's assignment as Military Advisor to the Commonwealth of the Philippines.

Ike disinguished himself as a first-rate manager and writer. Moreover, the time spent as an Army liaison with Congress also afforded him unique insight into public policy work.

However, his greatest test leading up to his European appointment was being placed in the pressure cooker of the War Planning Board in Washington, helping Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall flesh out the initial American commitments to the European and Pacific theaters.

People deride Eisenhower as a mere “military-statesman” rather than some grand strategist such as Napoleon, but that was precisely the point. Eisenhower was chosen as one who could operate across multiple political and military command structures, who possessed an ability to assess large amounts of information across widely disparate fields, all the while crafting a message and exuding the requisite confidence to inspire those in the highest ranks of leadership as well as those on the enlisted ranks.