There was a theory, old enough that nobody remembered who had first articulated it, that wars were the most efficient method humanity had ever developed for producing exceptional people.
The logic was not comfortable but it was sound. Peace produced competence — the steady accumulation of skill in controlled environments, the gradual refinement of ability against predictable resistance, the kind of growth that was real and measurable and would never be enough when the situation stopped being controlled. War produced something different. War produced the specific quality of a person who had been put in a situation that exceeded their preparation and had survived it anyway, and the surviving had changed them at a level that no amount of controlled training could reach. The heroes that emerged from wars were not the heroes that had gone into them. They were made by the process. The process was terrible. The product was, in the accounting of power and capability, exceptional.
