David Weber - The Short Victorious War

The education levels of the two sides also differed markedly. The progressive "democratization" of the PRH's educational system had emasculated it, while Manticore boasted one of the toughest merit-based systems, especially for university and post-graduate programs, in human space (two facts which largely explain the RMN's pronounced technological superiority). It was sad but true that the best educated enlisted personnel of the PN were conscripts from conquered planets who had largely completed their schooling before the PRH's centralized education policies blighted their teaching establishments.

There was, however, one major offsetting imponderable which neither navy was able to quantify prior to the actual outbreak of war. While the Peoples Navy might rely on ill-educated (comparatively speaking) conscripts for the bulk of its personnel, it had also been almost continuously at war for over half a Terran century. Admittedly, none of its opponents had been large enough to offer a long or protracted resistance, but the operational experience amassed by the PN was without equal. Inevitably, its crews must have acquired a certain degree of "on the job training" to offset their initial inferiority, and its officers, on the whole, believed in their tradition of victory. It remained to be seen whether these factors overmatched the intensive training and motivation of the RMN's personnel, and only the test of battle could reveal the truth.