History's Greatest General

Thanks. That's enough clue to get me started.

Yes, because in the end, Hannibal could not survive against the enormous power of Rome, and cut off from his main base or supply and reinforcement. But, still, he made Italy hell on earth for Rome whom he constantly kept off balance.

Side note he never did lay seize to Rome.

Deeply divide North?

Most of those hundreds of thousands of troops that fought in the war for the North was voluntaries the draft never amount to must.

Lee in fact should have listen to Longstreet and break away from the Northern Army and do a war of maneuver and threaten major northern cities.

The Northern army could not allow Lee get between them and Washington and that would had handicap them.

http://www.grandestrategy.com/2007/12/sword-of-allah-khalid-bin-al-waleed.html

There might have been little spread of Islam if not for him.

Thanks!

So you can't really rate generals only by how successful they are, because that's not totally in their hands. So it's how well they engaged allies, used resources and intelligence.

Rome move in force on two others war fronts while at the same time containing Hannibal so I do not think you can claim he kept Rome off balance.

He had one small window to move on Rome and with luck and Roman panic end the war at the very start of his invasion and he did not do it.

As a general one has not only have to be a good fighter, but be able to win the war.

Hannibal was a good fighter, but never won the war against Rome, even when he had the oppotunity to crush Rome.

Alexander however never lost a battle and won all his wars.

Many gets blinded by the great many achivements Alexander and Hannibal have had, that they have been able to prove themselves over time, where other had only a few battles to prove their brilliance. We should also look at other generals who only had few battles Imo.

For most successful Philosophical General I would nominate Sun Tzu. Unlike the rest of the people discussed here, His military philosophy is still actively read, pursued, and adapted to new situations to this day.

Those r foolish things to say, born of ignorance.





David

Alexander the Great and Douglas MacArthur.





David

Douglas MacArthur?

He was lucky he did not get court martial a numbers of times in his career.

The very worst error/misdeed in my opinion was his allowing the whole damn Philippines airforce to be wipe out on the ground neatly line up when he had many hours of warning after the attack on Pearl.

Next, he did not play well with others.

The navel forces directly under his command supporting his return landings in the Philippines was not allow by him to have direct communication with the Seven fleet.

This cause a misunderstanding that almost permitted the Japan navel forces to reach and to blow his landing forces out of the water off the beaches.

Last, he did not take orders well or support his Commander and Chief and needed to be fire.

Great topic!

Hannibal was not really beaten by an enemy, but by his own country. They never reinforced him to any true degree, and at the battle of Zama he was beaten on the field because the untrained elephants and troops he was given.

They could not greatly reinforce him as they was being press hard by the Romans in their own lands.

Second it was never the plan for him to be greatly reinforce from home but to get allies instead in Italy something the Romans did not allow him to do to the extend he was hoping for.

In terms of battles consistently won over an extended period of time Timur (the Lame) has no competitors.

In virtually every case, you would be comparing apples to oranges. How Philip of Macedon fought can hardly be reasonably compared to how Gustavus Adolphus fought, because of different weapons and tactical doctrines.

That being said, i would suggest that the greatest military organization of all time was the French army of the late royal and early revolutionary period. Napoleon did not actually invent the tactical doctrine and staff organization which is usually called Napoleonic warfare. He simply exploited a system which had been created in the years after the Ameican revolution and before the French revolution.

In the exploitation of the organizational changes, Napoleon was brilliant because of his own organizational genius. But the greatest operational practitioner of the new system which the French had adopted before Napoleon ever rose to power is arguably Davout. His performance at Auerstadt is truly unparalleled in the annals of tactical combat.

Prior the the massive overhaul of their military doctrine by the French in the 1780s, all battles which were not accidental meeting engagements were fought in parallel order. That means that both sides lined up facing each other, and their operational axis was toward the enemy center and rear. Gustavus Adolphus was the first commander of whom i know who was able to adapt at tactical speed to change the operational axis of his forces, as he did at Breitenfeld when Tilly attempted to get on his flank. But otherwise he operated against his enemies in parallel order just as everyone else had done since time immemorial.

The French tactical doctrine allowed corps, divisions, brigades, regiments and even battalions to move and fight on seperate operational axes, and Davout exploited this to the maximum at Auerstadt.



Most of this is nonsense. As well ask if there is a philosophical outlook which distinguishes great bankers, or general contractors. Leadership in any field is characterized by an ability to rise above the mediocre and to see possibilities unhindered by hidebound attitudes. This is as true of general officers as it is of successful chief executive officers of great corporations.



You watch too many cheesy movies.

The amount of bullshit which has been spread in this thread would fertilize an entire county in Iowa.

I didn't know that. Was this made possible by a societal change?

Yea, but I did say "a" general. I read of biography of Huey Long and it occurred to me that he would have taken power in any time period into which he might have been born. His genius was in accessing the power that was up for grabs. In his world it happened to be the latent power of public opinion in a democracy. In another time and place he could have been a military leader.

That was actually my point. I was looking for alternative sources of nitrogen.

I mostly have the soul of a pacifist. Understanding martial anything is challenging for me. Everything looks upside down and backwards. I still try... note my screen name.

No, it wasn't.

Well, you asked for it.

All of the sources of the French overhaul of their military systems and doctrines were the product of their experiences in the War of the Austrian Succession (and to a much lesser extent, the American Revolution) and an uncommon recognition of the genius of serving officers in a period of roughly 1730 to 1780. One of the most colorful figures of the late 17th and early 18th centuries in Europe was Augustus the Strong, hereditary and Electoral Duke of Saxony and elected King of Poland. His oldest (bastard) sone was Moritz, known as Moritze von Sachsen, or, to the French, Maurice de Saxe. He first marched off to war at 12 in the War of the Spanish Succession (1700-1713). By the time of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), he was a gouty old man who could no longer sit a horse, and tore around the battlefield in a little buggy. He was a genius. He fought two great, bloody battles against the Army of the Pragmatic Sanction, nominally lead by King George II of England, and until Maurice beat 'em up, the most successful army to that time in the war. At Fontenoy, he tore back and forth between his commanders, and sent his regiments out on individual axes or operation as the situation demanded. He had already written Mes Rêveries, but it was not published until after his death. It is, arguably, the most influential book on warfare ever written (up yours, Tsun Szu).

During that war, the French invaded the Kingdom of Sardinia, which was the island of Sardinia and the northeastern portion of Italy. That northeastern portion of Italy was known as Piedmont, and the French wanted to knock them out of the war. General Bourcet planned the invasion, and his plan was another brilliant use of separate operational axes. Invading Italy from France was difficult because a small number of defenders could hold up the attackers in the mountain passes of the Maratime Alps. Bourcet solved this problem by sending the army in in nine columns, any one of which outnumbered the defenders. Each column commander was instructed to put pressure on the defenders, but if informed that any column to his right or left had successfully infiltrated the passes to his right or left, he was to leave a screen and move by his right or left, as the situation dictated. The Franco-Spanish army arrived on the plains in the heart of Piedmont in two weeks, with minimal casualties as the defenders retreated in disorder, unable to deal with what was to them a bewildering and incomprehsible operation. The French and Spanish managed to lose all the value of the campaign by bickering, but that did not lessen the value of the lessons learned.

The principle lessons they learned from the American Revolution were in the use of light infanty and skirmishers. All of lesson were taken to heart by Frech military men, and Saint Germain who was Louis XVI's war minister in 1775 began the process of the review of French militay doctrine. He died in 1778, and was generally hated by an aristocratic officer corps, because he wanted to reduce the numbers of officers and rationanlize the organizational structure. Nevertheless, the reforms he started were carried forward by de Broglie, and when Napoleon was a snot-nosed child at Brienne, and then a student at the Ecole militaire in Paris, the new doctrines were being refined and taught.

New drill was introduced, and the soldiers were taught to march in three kinds of columns--march columns, "waiting" columns and columns of attack--from which they could deploy into line as necessary. The units were organized in the tripod system (used by the U.S. Army in the Second World War), with three "divisions" (what we would call companies) forming a battalion, three battalions forming a regiment and usually (but not invariably) three regiments forming a division (as we understand the concept of an army division). The battalion was the basic unit. It would deploy with a company to right and left, and a company in reserve. The reserve company would send half its number out in front of the line as skirmishers. If the enemy approached close enough to threaten the skirmishers, the remainder of that company would advance through the interval (a gap left between the left and right companies) to form a line on which the skirmishers could fall back. The reserve company could then fall back to its reserve position, or form to the right or the left, or form in the interval to produce a line from all three companies. The battalions of a regiment could operate in the same way, and the regiments in a division could perform in the same manner. It gave the army marvelous flexibility, and it was used to great effect against the Austrians, Prussians and Brunswickers in the Wars of the French Revolutioon before Napoleon came to power. Them boys just didn't understand what was happening, and what the French were doing just look like confusion to them, but they were still getting their asses kicked.

Teaching the officers to operate on an axis dictated by local conditions meant that a battalion or regiment could move to face an attack or to lauch one without reference to the behavior of the battalions or regiments on their flanks--it was the responsibility of higher command to assure that their flanks were not left "in the air." A march column could be moved to the side of the road and doubled up (made twice as wide) to become a waiting column until the unit were needed, or lauched as an attack column using the weight of the mass of men to break the enemy line, which was especially effective if they could be launched at the enemy flank.

The higher order organizational changes meant that each regiment had a staff with an intelligence officer, a commisary officer, a quartermaster, an ordnance officer, etc., etc.--all the offices of a modern army as we now know them. All of these regimental officers were responsible to the officer of the division with the same responsibilities, who was in turn responsible to the officer of the corps with those responsibilities, who was in his turn responsible to army intelligence, commisary, quartermaster, ordnance, etc. This was the part which Napoleon exploited so brilliantly, because he was an organizational genius. That was how he was able to launch his grand armies of hundreds of thousands of men, on foot, across hundreds of miles of any type of landscape Europe could offer, and arrive before the enemy barely knew he was moving.

The Wagram campaignn was the most brilliant expression of this ability, and also the best example of Napoleon's total lack of tactical command skills. Having rolled the Austrian army down the Danube, reeling from the speed of the French advace, he halted, waiting weeks, and then attacked them head-on. He won the battle of Wagram, but at the cost of his best veteran officers, non-coms and private soldiers. Commanding directly on the battlefield, Napoleon was hopeless.

The Prussians completely revised thei military doctrine in 1813, and the document they produced showed that they learned absolutely nothing from the wars with Napoleon--they just didn't get it. The English, of course, just decided that nobody had anything to teach them, and didn't ever seem to have learned anything from the experience. The Americans enthusiastically embraced the new doctrines, and even though the Europeans sneered, the armies which fought our civil war were as modern and well-organized as any on earth. Despite continuing worship of the Prussians by historians, the United States Army in 1865 was superior any on earth, the Prussians and the French included.

Today, military organizations take for granted the innovations the French credated in the late 18th century. Before de Broglie, modern staff systems simply didn't exist. These days, people take them for granted, and hardly know what i'm talking about when i try to explain it to them.