66

Within the military as anywhere else, access to the higher ranks is dependent upon educational and cultural resources. But while the military is increasingly relying on academic criteria and mechanisms to organize the internal selection of its own elite, it also promotes the idea that ultimately only military skills matter in the professional promotion of this elite. This survey conducted among officers suggests that educational and military capital should not be understood in strict opposition to each other. A number of mechanisms actually contribute to converting the educational resources of the best and the brightest into military capital, i.e. individualized qualities that bear witness to the deployment of distinctively military skills. The paper analyzes the institutional and social processes that, within the officer corps, enable the conversion of educational entitlements and cultural resources into symbolic capital, which, in the case of the army, means specifically military distinctions and skills.