Who was the worst military general in history?

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>>1774402

>"Austro-Hungarians? A trifle. It was simply a matter of outsmarting them. You see, Austro-Hungarians had only so much ammunition. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they ran out of munitions and retreated. Petain, show them the medal I won."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Cadorna

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> leave Israel to me

>>1774412
Not to mention you had to be a special kind of moron to lose to Austro-Hungarians in WW1 when they were having so much political and ethnic unrest with armies that spoke 5 different languages and overall had outdated tactics and equipment aside from their mortars.

>>1774402
Hitler

>>1774402
You've probably never heard of him because he probably died very early in his tenure.

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Whoever is currently leading the Arab-coalition in Yemen with the latest US hardware money can buy against a bunch of sandal-wearing tribals high on khat.

>>1774402
L???i C?????a

>>1774514
>dat incat supply ship that was just sumk

>>1774402
Douglas MacArthur

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>>1774531
https://youtu.be/XaMSb_7_3cM

Never underestimate khat.

>>1774402
Montegomery

>>1774539
shut up commie scum, you were just mad god sent him on his mission to destroy china!

>>1774402

Pemberton gets my vote for first impressions, as you have to be pretty awful to lose at Vicksburg to a force you outnumber, is starving, from a strong fortified position.


I'm sure there were worse people in the history of command.

>>1774402
Labienus

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Winston Churchill worst admiral

>mfw operation menace

>>1774452
The unrest came later. The real sad thing is how straight up BAD the Austrian army was in WWI.

This is an army that got BTFO by Russia and fucking Serbia.

JUST

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>tfw you surrender 80,000 soldiers with great defensive potential to 30,000 poorly organized starving gooks in less than a week of fighting

>>1774412
WWI in general (da dum chhhh) was full of incredibly incompetent leaders on all sides.

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Checking in for duty!

>>1776317
no

>>1776236
malaya was rotten to the core desu

>>1774514
>134 soldiers killed and 292 wounded(Friendly fire)

>>1776573
Saudi airforce bombing their own soldiers while also getting lost way off the grid so they bomb random friendly villages.

It's such a big clusterfuck that the BW mercs pulled out their units on the ground cause of the the incompetence in the leadership and the casualties they suffered.

>>1776583
Didn't the rebels manage to fire some missile onto the coalation forces out of nowhere?

>>1776588
Yes a toshka missile into a saudi base killing around 70 UAE soldiers and 10+ BW mercs way into saudi territory somehow undetected.

It's like a fucking military comedy show.

>>1776595
>Real life feudal nepotism in action

The Saudi military is such a fucking train wreck. The grunts are treated like animals, the officers are all someone's son playing army, and the NCO's are locked in "only i know how to do this" politics to stay invaluable to the officers so nobody passes on what they know. That's why they're getting rekt by Houthis.

Erwin Rommel

Is it Darius? The guy who lost to Alexander the Great every single time. He even failed a run like a coward

>1774402
>20 M1A2S lost
Did they just roll away or are they really that incompetent?

>>1776734
>>1774514
Oh, I fucked up bad.

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>>1776734
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU7YJZaa3DI

>>1776622
Darius must have been one of the most cucked men in existence. Mother thinks he's a piece of shit coward and loves Alexander, who marries several of his daughters

>>1776762
I laugh at this and it make me feel bad.

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Publius Quinctilius Varus.

Could there really be any other answer?

>>1776772
His own men stabbed him and left him to die as an offering to Alexander.

>>1776876
Muh legions

>>1776325
wasnt his fault

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>"Hell yeah I just took Rome bitches... What do you mean the entire German Tenth Army just just escaped unmolested to safety. Whatever. Not my problem. I conquered an open city WOOOO!"

>>1776114
Technically Austrians BTFO'd the serbs by dying in droves in their lands and the corpses spreading thyphus fever.

>>1776876
>Publius Quinctilius Varus
Eh. Plenty of generals got fucked over by traitors leading them into ambushes. It says more about his political abilities (he couldn't get a grip of the actual situation of his province) than his military sense.

>>1776883
Under what critical levels of failure do your own men stab you and leave you to die?!

>>1776923
>being so in love with the army you built you don't want to actually risk it fighting a war

McClellan needed to be the guy in charge of raising the Union's army, but never allowed anywhere near a field command.

>>1774402
Which ever dude lost cannae

>>1776343
It was though
I think you can count the good leaders with your hands

>>1774543
What is this?

>>1776734
The Saudis are just that incompetent. The other nations in the region are starting to notice this; expect Jordan to attempt to retake rightful Hashemite Clay within the next 30 or so years. They still have a British-style professional military.

Supposedly, the Jordanians held a wargames exercise in the recent past where they quickly enveloped and overran a defensive position with their mechanized forces; the Saudis observers were freaked out at how quickly they were able to do it because that defensive position was set up along the lines the Royal Saudi Army uses.

>>1774543
>>1774514
Jesus Christ, why are arabs so shit at war?

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>>1776990
These people sinking this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSV-2_Swift

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>>1777026

No tactical sense.

>"We have offered them (the Arabs) a sensible way for so many years. But no, they wanted to fight. Fine! We gave them technology, the latest, the kind even Vietnam didn’t have. They had double superiority in tanks and aircraft, triple in artillery, and in air defense and anti-tank weapons they had absolute supremacy. And what? Once again they were beaten. Once again they scrammed. Once again they screamed for us to come save them. Sadat woke me up in the middle of the night twice over the phone! "Save me!" He demanded to send Soviet troops, and immediately! No! We are not going to fight for them!" -Leonid Brezhnev on the Yom Kippur war

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>>1777026
They are both Arabs though, so the real question is

>Why are sunnis so shit at war?

>>1777026

An explaination from Reddit:

Conventional Arab militaries, for whatever the reason, do not train to initiative at the lower levels. Essentially all of the Arab militaries react poorly to anything that doesn't go according to plan, and will pass the buck all the way to the top before reacting.

During the 6-Day war the IDF bombed the hell out of Egyptian Air Force on the ground. At one such base the IDF managed to not destroy any aircraft, and the Soviet advisor ran over and told the pilots "look, you need to get these planes in the air. They're gonna fly over to do BDA and you can hit them then." Pilots said they were waiting on instructions from Cairo. IDF plane flies over doing BDA. "Look," said the Soviet, no doubt thinking of the fate of all these planes the USSR gifted "at the very least fly to a airfield further West, so they aren't destroyed if you aren't going to use them." Again, they said no, and sure enough more IDF planes flew over and blew them up on the ground. The Soviet military mission wrote back to Moscow talking about how the Egyptians totally lack all initiative and are pretty much the most shit robotic soldiers on the planet. Keep in mind the reputation the Soviets have about initiative.

The Jordanians always performed the best against the Israelis, and by what is no doubt a amazing coincidence, the Jordanian army(Arab Legion) was riddled with British advisors from the late 40s to the mid 60s.

>>1774514
>1 Australian mercenary killed
lad must not have brought his best bants that day

>>1777067

No, A rather resourceful ISIS commander deployed an Emu unit.

>>1777026

http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/09/01/politics/why-arab-armies-bad-worthless/

>The Arabs are what the sociologists like to call “amoral familists.” This means that they are nearly or totally incapable of forming bonds of love and loyalty with anyone not a blood relation. Even then, the degree of blood relation determines where loyalty legitimately lies. The saying in the area is: “Me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother and my cousin against the world.”

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>>1777063
Nah, they kicked the British officers out in 1956 to prove their independence from Britain. Jordan was just the only Arab army that actually paid any attention to the West's military teachings.

Jordan's deal was that they never wanted to fight the Israelis as much as all the other Arab nations, especially not after Black October where they lost their desire to actually help the ungrateful Palestinians. King Hussein actually tried to warn the Israelis about the impending Yom Kippur War, and when the Arab League forced them to join in it against their wishes, the Jordanian Army just had an unofficial truce with the Israelis to only fight "for real" when the Syrians were watching them.

>>1777084
Jordan and Oman are pretty much the only based Arab nations out there not getting involved in any of the shit in the ME.

I think most of the Gulfies want the same but currently under peer-pressure from the Saudis.

>>1777097
By pure coincidence, Jordan and Oman are the only Arab nations without significant oil deposits, so they're the only ones who bothered to diversify their economies. Jordan has always been the most Western of all the Arab states; Transjordan was where the Brits set up their Arab Revolt supporters and thus had a much closer relationship with Britain than Egypt and Iraq did and definitely a much closer relationship than Lebanon and Syria had with France. Their current good relationships with both Israel ("you and I against the rest of these uneducated hordes, we're the only ones here who know what we're doing") and the US is reflection of that.

Oman is still very much an Islamic tribal kingdom, but their current king is extremely moderate. He staged a coup against his own tyrant of a father, rumored because his dad was going to make him throw out his showtunes records. He'd much rather have a stable kingdom where his tribes keep their own differing standards of religious propriety than enforce it with a state religious police like the Saudis do.

>>1777084
Also, possibly as an indicator that the West knew Jordan was only going along with the wars against Israel because they'd be invaded themselves if they didn't, Jordan was still allowed to buy Western military hardware all through the Cold War despite all the other states around them switching to Soviet stocks.

>>1776965
When you bring shame to your empire, your dynasty, your mother, your daughters, your men and your own name.

>>1777071
Made me kek have a (you)

>>1777079
Interesting

>>1774543

>Khat outta hell

>>1776762

>fighting Sunni Saudi Arabia, chief Islamic terrorism sponsor
>better say death to Israel

>>1776876
I mean, he wasn't really that bad. He just fell into a trap. It was mostly political.

>>1776317
>lions led by donkeys meme
There were many competent generals on both sides, at least on the western front. They were very unpopular because a army of conscripts and a press full of journalists that had never known war couldn't understand the peculiar tactics of WWI. Austro-Italian front is the only theater where the strategic incompetence meme is kind of true.

>>1776876
Stabbed in the back by a traitor. It's bad that he didn't see it coming, but not "worst general in history" bad.

Now, Crassus easily qualifies as worst military leader of Rome.

>>1777580

desu Haig and Nievelle really didn't help making this meme look like bullshit. Those two were fucking vile. Nievelle, being the worst of the two.

>>1777621
>Haig
you literally have no idea what you are talking about
you are literally memeing
you are literally parroting some sort of a 1950s high school kind of history
li-tchurr-ell-ee

>>1776985
no, the leadership was largely decently competent

>>1777621

Forgot to add.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Army_Mutinies

>The government suppressed the news so as not to alert the Germans, nor depress homefront morale. The extent and intensity of the mutinies were disclosed for the first time in 1967 by Guy Pedroncini in his volume Les Mutineries de 1917. His project had been made possible by the opening of most of the relevant military archives 50 years after the events, a delay in conformity with French War Ministry procedure. However, there are still undisclosed archives on the mutinies, which are believed to contain documents mostly of a political nature; those archives will not be opened to researchers until 100 years after the mutinies, in 2017.

Something to look forward to discussing /his/

>>1777633

Spotted the delusional Brit.

>>1776114
Serbs fought for like 30 years against Turks in Balkan wars, by the time they fought Austrians, majority of the army were battle hardened veterans

>>1774402

SATAN

>>1776923
What exactly wasn't his fault?

>>1774402
Hitler
Also where is it >>1777777

>>1776930

>not having to fight the enemy to complete your objectives makes you a bad general now

>>1778002
Not him, but Rome wasn't a military objective. Italy had already surrendered by that point. The objective was to evict the German soldiers to both get them out of Itsly and to be able to pressure Germany from the south.

>>1778002

Going for a glory target instead of wiping out an army that is going to make your life a living hell for rest of the war.

>>1774402
Franz Conrad Von Hötzendorf.

If there was something to be done he would screw it up for the Habsburgs.

>>1778117

> Serbia will be easy, look how tiny it is!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cer

>>1776930
Never mind Rome, he turned a potentially game-changing outflanking maneuver (Anzio) into a disaster.

von Moltke

>>1778489

Don't forget how badly he handled the Avalanche landings, dropping his invasion force in pieces on the beachline unable to mutually reinforce each other. Got damn near thrown into the sea because of his idiocy.


Still, as bad as he was, there were worse, hell, there were worse in WW2.

>>1778117
> Conrad, here's the plan
> Lol fuck you Germany I'm going to do what I want
> Oh fuck, save me Germany!

How can someone who is so obviously incompetent be allowed to run the army for as long as he did?

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>>1778614

>"...We're shackled to a corpse."

>>1778614
It's the von in his name. Nepotism was rampant in that shitty fucking Empire.

>>1778759

Von didn't have that effect for the Prussians in both world wars. Austrians cannot into modern combat since Bismarck made them his bitch in the 1860's

>>1778777
Apples and oranges.

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>>1777057
Its a failure on all parts.
Its like why Koreans had to restructure how they flied airplanes.
I.E
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_incidents_and_accidents
>Contributing factors were the captain's fatigue and Korean Air's inadequate flight crew training. (See article: Korean Air Flight 801) Damage: Destroyed Injuries: Multiple/Severe Deaths: 228

>Korean Air Cargo Flight 6316 (McDonnell Douglas MD-11) from Shanghai to Seoul took off despite the Korean co-pilot’s repeated misunderstanding and miscommunication to the pilot of the height given by the tower in meters, while being understood in feet.
>The aircraft climbed to 4,500 feet and the captain, after receiving two wrong affirmative answers from the first officer that the required altitude should be 1,500 feet, thought that the aircraft was 3,000 feet too high. The captain then pushed the control column abruptly forward causing the aircraft to start a rapid descent. Neither was able to recover from the dive.
>The airplane plummeted into an industrial development zone 10 kilometers (6.2 mi) southwest of Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport. The plane plunged to the ground, hitting housing for migrant workers and exploded. Damage: Destroyed Injuries: 37 on ground Deaths: 8 (all 3 crew and 5 on ground)

>Korean Air Cargo Flight 8509 (Boeing 747-2B5F) from London to Milan The crew banked the aircraft into the ground while multiple audible warnings were sounding. Subsequent investigation revealed that maintenance activity at London/Stansted was done improperly and the pilots did not respond appropriately to warnings during the climb after takeoff despite prompts from the flight engineer.


So the thing is, Korean Air was shit. The social structure meant that if they tried to copy a Western flight structure, there would be severe accidents.
The same will be true of Arab armies and US military export.
If you expect US military structure to work for Arabs, you have already lost the war.

General Mack at Ulm
General Fredendall at Kasserine
Italian generals in Greece (Visconti Prasca, Badoglio, Soddu etc)
Percival at Singapore
Spanish generals during the French offensive over the Ebro in 1809
Conrad von Hötzendorf
Cadorna
Crassus (at least during his Parthian expedition)
generals at Hattin in 1177

>>1778821
Counterpoint: Jordan. Army was structured along British lines and hasn't had nearly as many problems as any other Arab army.

>>1778852
Because:
* British structure had been British for quite some time. Almost 40 years

Contrast to Saudi where some of the Branches are tribal in culture, and others are funded with US oil money.
The failure is that you can't have a Saudi Tribal Army emulate a US Chain of Command, when the culture doesn't work like that.
That sort of failure is the reason they bomb their allies, fail to maintain equipment, doesn't restructure tank squads into something sane.

To reiterate: When the chain of events is Tribal Army -> Oil Money -> Tribal Oil Army -> US Oil Money Gear, at no point will there be attempts to get a culture going.
Which is why they lose wars like bitches.

>>1778842
> Fredendall was given to speaking and issuing orders using his own slang, such as calling infantry units "walking boys" and artillery "popguns." Instead of using the standard military map grid-based location designators, he made up confusing codes such as "the place that begins with C."
>Fredendall rarely visited the front lines, and had a habit of disregarding advice from commanders who had been farther forward and had actually reconnoitered the terrain.[6] He split up units and scattered them widely,[7] and at critical defense points had positioned U.S. Army forces (against advice) too far apart for mutual support or effective employment of artillery, the strongest American arm.[8][9][10]
Was it autism?

>>1776325
you mean the best right? Lincoln took units from him for political reasons and stopped critical advances

>>1778957
I await with bated breath your explanation for the Peninsular Campaign.

>2nd Armored Division commander Ernest Harmon, in his after-action report for the Kasserine battles, called Fredendall "a son of a bitch" and later said he was both a moral and physical coward.

If his bullshit didn't get a lot of good boys killed, it would be funny.

>>1778969
And I will oblige kind sir: look at what grant did. it took him tens of thousands of men to get to the same position and I am not talking about the city, but the position across the james which could be properly supplied and removed from confederate threat

>>1779004
it was considered a retreat but was a important battle field manuever

>>1779004
The important point was that Grant won. McClellan had the same resources available to him and had the strategic initiative and he still sat on his ass.

>>1778990
>Patton noted in his diary that Fredendall was “Very nice, conducted himself well – very well.” In a letter to his wife Beatrice that day, Patton even wrote that “Fredendall is a great sport, and I feel sure, is a victim largely due to circumstances beyond his control.” However, only a week later, after an initial inspection of his new command, Patton had completely changed his mind: "I cannot see what Fredendall did to justify his existence."

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>>1778842
>“Fredendall is a great sport, and I feel sure, is a victim largely due to circumstances beyond his control.” However, only a week later, after an initial inspection of his new command, Patton had completely changed his mind: "I cannot see what Fredendall did to justify his existence."

>>1779022
He was literally ordered to recall, because lincoln fell for a faint by the confederate that they did toward's DC. It is a textbook case of a politicians listening to his yes men and not letting the general who know anything to do their jobs.

>>1778821
Korean air fixed this problem by only having staff speak English to each other. This avoided their ingrained cultural status games.

>>1779064
Korean air changed a lot more than that.
I.E They could no long have the Captain take off, because the subserviant pilot would be unable to communicate with the Captain.

I have to get my E-reader program working again, but Antony Beevors description of Heinrich Himmler being assigned to Army Group Vistisia was an abysmal one. The only map he had was the map his Wehrmacht Attache brought with him on his first day, he knew absolutely nothing about commanding and would frequently try to impress Hitler and the General staff by using command cliches like 'Attack their Flank' or 'Drive a wedge' or 'Pincer them' without any elaboration or plan. He designated a Panzer regiment as a SS Panzer Army because he thought the name sounded better; and somehow he managed to make Hitler look like a saint when it came to following the advice of professionals.

Eventually Hitler realized Himmler was a total asshat and replaced him with Hasso Manteuffel, which is a real competency switcheroo.

>>1774452
Yeah you're right their troops has -1 attack (would have been more if not for the mortars) and -3 morale due to negative "ethnic tensions" modifier. It's just unreal bro.

On a real note kys fucking fag

hannibal

>>1778031
>your enemy is no longer occupying this city
>what a bad general >:(

>>1778070
>le ebig lord of the rings final battle dood xDDD

The quality of discourse is shit today. Hope you two are trolls.

>>1777615
That's retarded, he too basically just fell into a trap. He didn't behave well in the actual battle, sure, but compare to how he trashed the slave uprising, he couldn't have been THAT shit. Especially since the uprising claimed the careers of a couple praetors and I think that year's consuls too, so at the very least those were worse than Crassus.

>>1779287

Do you even understand what an Open city is? Uncontested. The Germans were abandoning the city before the Clark even arrived. He Could have swung around and snapped a whole army into a encirclement and shorten the war in Italy.

But yeah, I'm the fucking idiot with the shit opinion.

>>1776325
>confederate abandon undefendable position
great victory for the union
>disorganized and retreating confederates fire a few shots at numerically superior union vangaurd
retreat back to DC

>>1777026

Here's a thorough deconstruction of the issue from a a former US Army colonel's experience in Arab countries.

http://www.meforum.org/441/why-arabs-lose-wars

>>1777026
I read a report from the 90's that it has to do with tribalism-like mindset. One of the stories goes like:
Some Egyptians buy some American tanks and the US sent some advisors to teach them how to use them. Class time comes and one of the advisors starts to hand out the tank manuals to the crewmen, only for a Egyptian commander to start taking all the manuals back. In this case, the commander is from a different "tribe/ethnicity" than the tankmen, so in order to keep his power over them he's the one with all the info. This means you have a very rigid top-down approach and whenever you leave the soldiers without instructions they won't be able to do anything. If you're fighting against arabs the only thing you need to do is to sever the chain of command.

>>1776772
>>1776883
>>1776965
>>1777146
For one, Darius III wasn't a general. Secondly, he had little experience as ruling as a satrap for his great-uncle when he ascended to the throne. Timeline is sketchy but he more or less only had a few months ruling over a small province before being put up as his murdered uncle's successor. Thirdly, his military experience was solely as a fighter and soldier and not as an officer; which he did win fame for killing and slaying a Cadusii champion in single combat. Fourthly, Darius III was in his late 40s to early 50s when Alexander the Great invaded Persian and fiftly he was murdered by one of his own family members and the act was considered treasnous by both the Greeks/Macedonians and Persian loyalists like Ariobarzanes.

Try with an actual military commander instead of a old guy who was getting advised by primarily incompetent and corrupt court officials. He wanted to attack when Alexander had his army's rear exposed to him but his officials told him to wait for the next day before advancing, losing the advantage. Something Ariobarzanes also disagreed with.

>>1780039

Yea..1780009's link mentions what you've posted.

>>1779243
He won at least once

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>>1777580
>They were very unpopular because a army of conscripts and a press full of journalists that had never known war couldn't understand the peculiar tactics of WWI.
Everyone agrees WW1 was full of shit tactics, somewhere.
But there is shit like "He was nicknamed "Butcher Haig" for the two million British casualties endured under his command."
I think Futurama did everything right when it Criticized Army leadership

>>1777637
> General Robert Nivelle had promised a decisive war-ending victory over the Germans in 48 hours; the men were euphoric on entering the battle. The shock of failure soured their mood overnight.
>The new commander General Philippe Pétain restored morale by talking to the men, promising no more suicidal attacks, providing rest for exhausted units, home furloughs, and moderate discipline.
>Robert Georges Nivelle (15 October 1856 – 22 March 1924)
WTF.
Why didn't they just hang the man in 1917 and be done with it?

>>1783035
>moderate discipline

He had 43 men shot, but I suppose that's pretty moderate considering almost 700 were given death sentences.

>>1783116
Only 750 shot for something that engulfed 48% of the French army?

>>1776236

>great defensive potential

Except if you count no ammo.

>>1779022
McCellan was ordered by the White House to disengage and return to DC. That's not his fault, he had to follow orders.

>>1774402
Me when I play Rome 2 as greeks

>>1777060
They do not hold Allah's favor inshallah

>>1777621
>>1777637
Haig is thoroughly maligned. He may not have been the best general for the job, but he was neither as befuddled nor as left behind by the times as anecdotes seem to indicate.

Nivelle was an Artillery General, and a fairly talented one at that when it came to the use of Artillery. Nivelle was one of the first generals on the Western Front to make use of the Creeping Barrage, which became the dominant form of Artillery in the combined assault.

Nivelle's failure was that he thought too much of his own branch, and that he overhyped the assault to No Man's Sky levels. As far as botched operations of the Western Front went, the Nivelle Offensive was hardly the worst, and it was less its military failure than its failure to meet Nivelle's extravagant promises that ruined French morale. He was a bad general (perhaps, like Rommel and McClellan, simply given too much power beyond their talents) but he's nowhere close to the worst.

>>1774402
general Custer (custardbrain) ofc...

>>1783154
Only those 43 were actually carried out, the rest were commuted, but yeah it was remarkably restrained considering the scale of the mutiny. For all his faults later in life Pétain was a pretty cool guy at the time.

>>1783286
Little Mac was a battlefield bungler, blaming DC for his shortcomings is nonsense. The Seven Days was a shambles, despite winning six out of the seven battles and overall poor performance by the Rebel leadership he was the one losing his nerve and withdrawing which crushed Union morale. The Confederates were well entrenched afterward so it made sense to pull out and try elsewhere.

Yeah he cared for the lives of his men but ironically ended up sacrificing far more than were necessary at Antietam by not taking control of the situation and acting like a proper battlefield general. It was a golden opportunity to smash Lee's army in detail and he blew it, later compounded that error by refusing to commit his reserves when the Rebels were essentially spent and put the cherry on top by not immediately pressing and pursuing them after the battle. Meade made the same last mistake at Gettysburg but I've no doubt the overall battle was fought better under him than would've been under McClellan.

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>>1784186
>Little Mac was a battlefield bungler

>>1784356
Not an argument.

>>1784363
Neither is you not being aborted.

>>1777131
>He staged a coup against his own tyrant of a father,
>rumored because his dad was going to make him throw out his showtunes records
Based as fuck. Still need proof tho

>>1776965
The collapse of empire

>>1776876
Varus wasn't bad in Syria and he was entrusted a great responsibility in Germania by Augustus for a reason. The fault isn't in him, but the total genius that was Arminius.
Arminius beat his legions and later Marobrodus of Marcomani at their height.

>>1777026
Inshallah

I was in Iraq in 2005 and did some time trying to train Iraq recruits. They would not even try to aim their rifles as instructed. It was enough to just have them keep their eyes open while shooting. Most of them were just in the military because it was a pay check.

Then a few years later I was working as a contractor in Saudi Arabia. There is a huge class stratification in the army. The officers are all from the powerful families and you get a lot of princes. Then the enlisted are all from the commoners. Neither of them feel like doing any work. They prefer to push it down to the lowest rank possible or which ever foreigner they are paying. They were pushing me to do work outside my contract all the time. I quit a $10,000 a month contract a few months in, because I was getting afraid for my life and liberty. the oil fields, refineries, storage tanks, etc, are not guarded by the normal military or police either. They spend a lot of money on their military. Yet you can see in Yemen how are no better than rebels.

Michael Hayden.

>>1784509
Out of curiosity did you find any who did try to learn from you? i.e. any star students or exceptions?

>>1784548
Edward Snowden had to cover up his mess.

>>1784551
When you need people to clean your shit up. You did a horrible job.

>>1784450
>It's not a phase, dad, it's who I am!

>>1784502
Didn't Tiberius kick the shit out of the Germanic tribes after that though?

>>1777026
Merchants suck as warriors. Always have. Always will.

>>1776079
I see the despair in his eyes.
What is going on here?

>>1784692
This. Also Arabs have a slave master mindset. They treat those perceived to be lower status like slaves, thus the high command and the grunts have low skill and organisational levels

>>1783308
This, Nivelle was far from the worst general ever.
He failed in 1917, sure, but that was not the disaster some people make it to be.
Overall the losses weren't that terrible (compared, for example, with the Somme and Verdun the year before) and the German forces nearly lost as much.
But as you said, the offensive had the whole "War ended by next week" speech and somebody had to take the blame.

>>1776930

He wasted so many lives wanting to be 'the guy who captured Rome'

Bit of a dickhead

>>1777580
>There were many competent generals on both sides, at least on the western front.

Competent enough to recognize (after a few disastrous clashes) that they weren't going to win this artillery/machinegun dominated war by 'elan vital' alone - and they adapted accordingly.

The Allied high command made a pretty rational calculation regarding the war of attrition the Western Front eventually became: Do we have more men and materiel? Check.
Are we going to outlast the Germans throwing all this shit at them and win the War? Check.
Well then, let's do it.

The only problems are hindsight and popular opinion. While this strategy did eventually win the war, changing viewpoints made the tremendous loss of life hard to justify.

>>1786260
the entire "lions led by donkeys" memery is literally "feels before reals"
not trying to be edgy, just saying that the above has no place in talking about this particular bit history
"oh no they commanded men in a war in which soldiers died what awful men they are! ;((" gets my blood boiling
especially as it is further enhanced by the travesty that is the popular history of the conflict in a technical/tactical sense ("dey walked lyk napoopan into dem machine gunz and shieeeeet")

>>1786272

But lions led by asses was from Crimea, not WW1, and it definitely has some merit to it then. Charge of the Light Brigade is infamous for a reason.

>>1786377
It might have started in referring to the Crimean War, but modern """historians""" have long since added it to WW1. You can't throw a stone without hitting some idiot saying "OMG so sad what a waste of like :((((( I can't believe how dumb all those stupid aristocratic officers were and how they hated their men >:((((".

>>1777026

They're fighting Arabs. They're good in gorilla warfare but shit in regular armies.

File: Augustus_Bevilacqua_Glyptothek_Munich_317.jpg (2MB, 1529x2209px) Image search: [Google]

2MB, 1529x2209px

>>1776876

Triggered

>>1774412
Holy hell what a cuck

>>1776325
Mclellan was a good defensive general he just was a bit overly cautious misunderstoon much like admiral spruence in the PTO

>>1774514
This
Though there's more houthi deaths than that, just goes undocumented more easily

>>1786377
Charge of the light brigade was communication error coupled with sheer bravery/stupidity/loyalty

Mussolini and everyone in italy