Excerpt from "Psychology in the War Years"

In the tense interwar years between EWI and EWII, the profiling of militia members took a revolutionary overhaul under the direction of a brilliant young psychologist, Karl Sigmund. An student of psychology at Randgriz University, he served as a Militia psychologist, accompanying troops into some of the bloodiest battlefields to further his thesis on troop morale. Despite being captured twice (all the while taking notes on the Imperial soldiers) and being wounded several times (for which he was rewarded the Splintered Horn), he survived to publish his thesis and propose his theory of potentials.

In his thesis, he devised a set of variables that determined a soldier's key strengths and weaknesses in personality, combat, and social situations, calling them "potentials." Given the right situations, he noted, these potentials would activate, so much so that a commander could purposely place them in that situation to activate the potential. Each potential was cited thoroughly from interviews and his own observations on fellow militiamen. Although his original list consisted of 50 or so potentials, from Camaraderie to Metal Head, he later added many more in subsequent addenda.

He also dealt with the sticky issue of having friends and family members in the same unit. Although the death of friends and family was a definite possibility and psychologically harmful for some individuals, the combat and morale boost that they provided, he argued, was greater than if they were separated. He pointed to lower casualty and PTSD rates, as well as increased recovery rates and optimism in units with many friends and family members together.

Although he originally suggested these changes to the Army, it was rejected and picked up by the Militia instead, although it was implemented inconsistently depending on the squad officer. Lieutenant Welkin Gunther of the famed Squad 7, for instance, was a heavy user of the Potential system, and also closely followed Sigmund's strategy of placing friends together in detachments. Perhaps because of his success, the Potential system was put to wider use in the Gallian military, although the Army did not formally employ it until General Allen Hynman's reforms in 1940.

Sigmund's final work was devising a method of categorizing different personality types. However, his untimely death from pneumonia meant that this work was unfinished. It was later finished and refined by his close friend and colleague, Myer Briggs.