I didn't base any of the Sharpe books on today's army! I suspect that humankind doesn't change much, and the incidence of fools is probably the same today as it was yesterday, though I fervently hope that the sheer incompetence of some Napoleonic period officers isn't being repeated! I'm thinking, particularly, of Lt Col Peacock who ran away at Tlavera at the first shot (Simmerson is based on him) and of General Erskine who was almost blind and mostly mad (he was an MP as well, but does that surprise us?) When Wellington heard that Erskine was being sent to him, he complained, and received the famous letter from the Horse Guards which said 'No doubt he is sometimes a little mad, but in his lucid intervals he is an uncommonly clever fellow, and I trust he will have no fit during the campaign, though he looked a little wild as he embarked.' Wellington got rid of him, as he mostly got rid of other utter incompetents. There were, to be fair, some terrific officers. Rifleman Harris believed his battalion's officers were 'the best in the world', and in the new book (coming this autumn), LSharpe's Fury. there's a portrait of Gen Sir Thomas Graham, who is a paragon. I suspect that most officers at the sharp end were OK, and still are - I've just finished Richard Holmes's book, Dusty Warriors, about the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment in Iraq, and the officers (and the men) come out very well - though of course the book is almost wholly about men in action and doesn't much deal with the REMF's!