This was the essential difficulty of the task at hand: The higher-ups in the U.S. Army needed to know about the enemy in this unexplored province, so in order to learn as much as they could, they were going to stick a small group of troops in its midst.
We know very little about them except a few biographical details which all of a sudden seem ideally suited to the papacy. (This is totally opposite the case of U.S. Presidents, whom we know far too much about thanks to exhaustive, psyche-exposing multiyear campaigns).
Two old hats who know a few tricks about stocks--Warren Buffett and John Bogle--say the U.S. equity markets are headed for a long period of underperformance.