11–20 of 41 posts
"Alexander the Great, despite winning all 9 of his battles, accumulated fewer WAR largely because of his shorter and less prolific career."
It's a ranking of a few popular wikipedia articles, based on metrics drawn up without any connection to the realities of war.
"Ranking Almost Every General in the History of Warfare" Not even close to "almost every general". Even taking into consideration his own admission that he left out the Mongols, his analysis is obviously very, very Western centric. Somehow the omission of the most populous continent in the world and probably throughout history didn't dissuade the author from making such a bold claim. The most obvious omissions were t…
Garbage in, garbage out. If your data set comes from scraping wikipedia, you're going to have these kinds of flaws and omissions. What's the alternative though, other than to hire an army of grad students? If flawed, at least it's interesting. I wish the author had gone into more detail about counterintuitive results (like Rommel), but part of the point of an exercise like this is to find instances where the model di…
I wouldn't trust this model to compare Montgomery to Patton during the Sicily invasion, let alone compare Caesar to Napoleon.
How about ranking some ambassadors and heads-of-state who prevented or avoided war? Less thrilling, I know ...
Otherwise, a general who was willing to nuke the other side might "win" a lot of battles, especially against a "replacement" who is morally opposed to civilian casualties.
You can also win the battle and lose the war. Are generals that overcommit to win a battle really good generals?
The probability of accomplishing such a feat by pure chance is .00004 . But then the campaign was over, and that general never fought another battle, with a total WAR (according to the article) of 0.99996 .
Do you see my problem with the article? It rewards generals that fight unnecessary battles, completely discounts the decisiveness of the victory, and assigns a nearly arbitrary value for average replacement general. It is clear to me that the metric is measuring belligerence and battle prowess, rather than overall efficacy. The article even says it discounts strategy.
If, for instance, the general lured the rival's army away from the capital, while suffering a decisive defeat, but married his son to the widow empress during the battle, so the son could order the execution of the rival, the battle tactics were completely irrelevant in the face of the instantly-winning strategy.
You should try this for admirals !
There are several issues with this analysis. Perhaps a more modern example would serve to illustrate this. Gregg Popovich is probably one of the greatest NBA coaches ever. However, if you look at the talent on his team compared to his opponents, maybe his wins with that talent isn't so impressive. However, an NBA coach's responsibilities include acquiring and developing talent. So the fact that he had more talent tha…
Fighting battles on the eastern front in WW2 is significantly different then warfare during ancient times or even the 18th century. For one, warfare is far more deterimental to the rest of society, and fighting effectively requires a lot more effort in the modern world compared to early times in terms of logistics, production, technology and strategy. Also, "warfare performance" is very much influenced by the enviroment one fights. How does one measure who is a better general when one, for instance, is severely undersupplied or in complete foreign terrain? there are simply too many variables to take into account to do suchs a study across suchs an incredibly large timeline.