The high performance of the extremly well educated German society that fought the two World Wars, and the rather poor performance of the Italians, Japanese, Russian, and other nations that had not completed tha transition to industrial societies and still possessed large numbers of illiterate or scarcely literate peasants would seem to corroborate this.

Similarly, the tactical effectiveness of the relatively literate, educated samurai armies that campaigned in Korea in Japan's feudal era, versus the largly uneducated paeasant armies that the Koreans and Chines fielded would correspond as well.

According to Robert Edgerton's Like Lions They Fought, British soldiers in the Zulu War were more effective than the Zulus even when fighting with bayonets, swords and rifle butts, according to the testimony of Zulu veterans and examination of battlefield wounds (that is, a large number of Zulu dead, generally exceeding overall British losses, were found to have been killed by wounds inflicted with close combat weapons, not bullets.) Also, they Zulus are actually said to have been well equipped with modern rifles, just poorly skilled in their use. The last major group British soldiers to die at Isandlwana, some 60 soldiers of C Company, 24th Foot, were actually killed by Zulu rifle fire, when they charged the ring of surrounding Zulus, who apparently had no great interest in leeting the British get into close quarters with them.

Also, I have seen a statistic somewhere asserting that Isreal had the second largest number of Doctorates and Masters Degrees per capita. I cannot remember where I read it. In would be curious to know, in light of this hypothosis, does anyone know if that is accurate, and, in light of CEV data for the Isrealis versus the Iraqis in 1973, and battle data for the US in 1991 and recently, does there seem to be a noticable difference in CEV between Isreal and the US?

I tried to construct some kind of model, using literacy rates, and rates of secondary, undergraduate amnd post-graduate education in the population as the basis of "cultural advancement", but have not yet found any good sources of data for such.

I thought perhaps modifiers could then be applied, reflecting thing like:

Prestige of the military, and the officer corps in particular, as a career choice (very high in early 20th century Germany, as well as 19th Century France, Germany and Britain)

Social Mobility in the Officer Corps (from hereditary military castes to a hypothetical totally meritocratic selection/promotion system)

Length of Training/Force Composition, (from untrained feudal levies all the way to their opposites, feudal aristocracy trained since childhood to be warriors.)

Relative Command Centralization (from Soviet style total centralization to German Auftragstaktik).

Each of these could modify the original cultural value in much the way that the QJM uses modifiers for posture, terrain, etc.

I have two reasons for posting this:

First, I would like to hear what some of the more learned fellows that frequent this forum have to say about the merit of the idea:

Does anyone have any historical examples that show it to be unreasonable, or does it seem like a sensible propostion?

What important modifiers have I ignored, and which that I mentioned are irrelevant?

Does anyone know of good data sources, or have a better idea of how to quantify "cultural advancement?"

Secondly, if the idea does have merit, it seems like it might have value for TDI's work. If you could establish a working, consistent model, you could make predictions about the effects of social change on military effectivess, and also, more easily assess CEVs for nations for which thre is little or no data on their military capability.