The army’s mamluk officers were loyal but poorly trained, weakening battlefield performance.

Evidence

As peculiar as this aspect of the army may appear it allowed the Pasha to create a nucleus of officers which by the very nature of things were closely tied to him and stood to rise or fall with him. … Although a staff college was established as early as 1825 for these mamluk cadets to be trained and although it was reputed to be one of the best of the Pasha’s educational institutions, it shared the same problems as the other schools, namely, students were recruited to it before they had finished their courses in the preparatory schools and were discharged from it before they had properly finished their study there. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 926

Categorization

• XREF: The recruitment-before-graduation problem echoes similar training failures in other modernizing armies the reader has covered.