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Maybe I missed something, but this method seems sketchy. Merely by counting the number and type of troops at a battle, the author then assigns a % chance for a

Maybe I missed something, but this method seems sketchy. Merely by counting the number and type of troops at a battle, the author then assigns a % chance for a win on each side. Since Napoleon won numerous battles, and there was much more data for his battles than others like Alexander the Great, the author concludes he was the best general ever. And yet all he has done is look at troop numbers. What about the succession of battles in linear time? The morale of the troops on both sides (side note: Napoleon thought morale was by far the most important characteristic of an army)? The conduct of lower ranking officers? The technology that is brought to bear? These unaddressed factors may clarify the analysis of General Lee, for instance, who was facing extremely incompetent opponents for the majority of the war, and by the end he was then facing more advanced weaponry, better supplied opponents, and another competent general in Grant. I am not on the Lee bandwagon by any stretch, I think he made some risky moves that paid off, but he also made an absolutely unforced error at Pickett's charge which completely lost him the troop number advantages gained at other battles. And if you're facing McClellan who is incapable of attacking you for months despite superior forces and odds, then you don't truly deserve heaps of accolades. These are all crucial questions that lie far beyond the author's simplistic approach. The data simply isn't enough to warrant the conclusions, nor does the author arrive at them in a statistically sound manner.

m0nty 8y ago
He basically admits to most of what you have just said. > this piece is intended as a fun thought experiment, not a definitive ranking, or a scholarly contribution to the field of military history. I believe some of the results from this project, especially Lee and Rommel, provide interesting data points for broader discussions of their tactical abilities. In no way do I claim my analysis provides the full picture, or anything close to it. So yes, method is sketchy, is incomplete, is simplistic.
- zazen 8y ago
  Perhaps we could change the title to something less baity? I'm tempted to suggest "Military-themed toy data science project". But if there is more interest than that in there somewhere, then maybe a title that reflects whatever that may be?
  - Topgamer7 8y ago
    If the title were changed to something less baity it would be contrary to all the other articles on HN that go from more sensible titles to something very baity.
  - almost_usual 8y ago
    It’s not a proof but it’s a creative way to measure this. I’ve only seen WAR used in baseball. It’s interesting to see it applied to another domain even if there are holes in it.
    - zazen 8y ago
      Well, if it's not a proof, then it's not a proof, right? You see more interest and creativity than I do in the article here, and that's fine. But surely that doesn't affect the fact that the title's claim to have proved Napoleon was "the Best General Ever" is a) a gargantuan overstatement, and b) unhelpfully provocative. People would probably be more charitable to the article if it hadn't totally misrepresented itself in this way.
      - almost_usual 8y ago
        Can you prove it's a "gargantuan overstatement"?
        zazen 8y ago
        I think you know that's not a reasonable thing to ask for a "proof" for. On the other hand, anything which someone claims to have proved is a reasonable thing to expect a proof for. I'm not the one throwing clickbait headlines around.
- dfxm12 8y ago
  It makes me wonder how such a poor article made it to the front page of HN...
  - Nightshaxx 8y ago
    Idk, I think it is a pretty interesting thought experiment. Sure it's not focusing on overall tatics or deeper reasoning, but you can't really measure that with data. The author is just looking at purely combat performance as some sort of way to rank them. Anything deeper wouldn't really work from a data perspective because we really don't have the best records from back then.
    - Ftuuky 8y ago
      Exactly, it's just some dude having fun with sabermetrics.
      - yborg 8y ago
        Sabermetrics works for things like baseball with enormous amounts of data to work with over long timescales and a very well-defined and limited domain with explicit rules and constraints. This hardly applies to war, especially over millenia. If anything, this guy's analysis just proves the point. Reminds me of the tongue-in-cheek "power rankings" people make for granola bars or hot dogs.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Simplistic analysis aside, I'd consider winning your campaigns to be a hard requirement for "best" general and this excludes Napoleon, Lee, Rommel, etc.
- kochb 8y ago
  Excluding Napoleon due to a "winning your campaigns" criteria is a bit silly. You're weighting the loss at the end of his career instead of fairly judging the win/loss record on his entire portfolio of two decades of campaigns.
  - Marazan 8y ago
    His grand strategic strategy that aided him in winning many battles resulted, in the end, in the massive career defining loss.
    - VSerge 8y ago
      "[it is the] Berezina" is something us Frenchies say when something is a total and utter catastrophe, and it refers to Napoleon's disastrous loss in Russia. Usually Napoleon is remembered more positively for what he did in the legal area with the Civil Code, which remains the basis for civil law in France to this day.
      - baud147258 8y ago
        The Civil Code, built a lot on Roman law, is very backward concerning the place of women in society, like the obligation for a wife to secure her husband's permission to work and all kind of inequalities.
        williamdclt 8y ago
        None of that is enforced today, those are stale laws if they still exist.
      - 8y ago
jimmy1 8y ago
Right. Napoleon had a much lengthier career, but the manner in which Alexander won is what makes him the greatest. He didn't just win the battle, he truly conquered your entire civilization and turned you into his asset. Alexander didn't have the need to fight so many battles, and he avoided them whenever possible. Napoleon had 60 battles (probably more), Alexander, much fewer. An analogy in my mind is calling LeBron James and his career longevity the greatest over Michael simply on career length alone. In my mind, the manner in which Michael dominated, and going 6-0 in the NBA finals is what makes him clearly the best.
- tynpeddler 8y ago
  I think you have to look at the environment in which Alexander fought, compared to Napoleon. Alexander fought in a world that was sparse and heterogenous. His enemies were unable to learn from their failures and they were not able to adopt the means of Alexander's success. Alexander fought asymmetric wars were he benefitted from the asymmetry. Napoleon fought on a continent that had effectively been locked in a military stalemate for over 200 years (maybe as long as 800 years depending on how you count). The density of Europe during that time meant information about his means of victory would spread all his enemies, and the prevalence of writing helped ensure a degree of accuracy. Napoleon fought symmetric wars. He had no great advantages of culture or technology to help him. His enemies were able to learn from him and despite this he achieved incredible victories against huge numerical odds. Even his losses were incredible. The Battle of Leipzig started with Napoleon outnumbered and surrounded, then a third of his army (the germans) defected. Despite this, Napoleon inflicted more casualties then he received, and he escaped with his army in relatively good order despite the fact that an idiot colonel botched Napoleon's retreat plans.
  - barkingcat 8y ago
    So maybe, just maybe, there isn't a thing such as "best general" and to try to create such a title is a misguided viewpoint on history. Not everything has a best or worst. This kind of reductionist thinking is wrong. If it's something like a "just for fun" project sure fine, but this is not the way to evaluate wars and peoples.
dbatten 8y ago
I second the missing data points, especially technology and cultural/social conditions... but I'd also point out that a lot of history is written by the winners. Napoleon was able to win the way he did because social conditions in France permitted him to conscript as many soldiers as he wanted and basically usurp the entire economic output of the country for the war effort. He famously bragged to one opponent that he couldn't be stopped because he could afford to "spend 30,000 lives a month." Other European societies at the time hadn't yet conceived of making war that way. And, once they all finally got around to it, we ended up with World War 1. Julius Caesar was the other major outlier but Rome was undoubtedly more technologically and socially "advanced" than the Celts he fought early in his career. Furthermore, basically everything we know about Julius Caesar's exploits comes from books written by... Julius Caesar. Surely, he had an incentive to make his victories sound as dramatic as possible.
- sorokod 8y ago
  That was called "Total war" - the entire country is engaged. Things where different elsewhere, you will be forgiven going through Jane Austin's novels and not noticing that the United Kingdom is at war with the French empire. Sense and Sensibility (1811) Pride and Prejudice (1813) Mansfield Park (1814) Emma (1815)
  - philipov 8y ago
    It took a while for war to be something waged by The State because it took a long time for people to come up with an idea of a The State at all. Before nationalism, war was something fought by one king against another king, and what vassals each could muster. They were just petty disputes between individuals and their friends, not wars between countries. Countries were more like alliances of powerful individuals than what we now think of as a country. Power wasn't consolidated enough for kings to control the full resources of the country, and so people who had no feudal obligations to those disputes weren't At War in a meaningful way. France was the first major power to kill the kings and aristocrats whose squabbling kept any one of them from seizing control of the full resources of the country. It was the reorganization of society into a social contract each citizen held directly with an abstract all-powerful State that led to the consolidation of power that allows for Total War to exist.
Isamu 8y ago
>McClellan who is incapable of attacking you for months despite superior forces and odds I know he always gets this kind of criticism, but don't think he was an idiot, he knew his advantage. I think he was genuinely reluctant to ratchet up the slaughter of his countrymen, especially when he had the clear advantage.
- sverige 8y ago
  > I think he was genuinely reluctant to ratchet up the slaughter of his countrymen, especially when he had the clear advantage. Yes, they were his fellow countrymen in a sense, but they had declared themselves to be another country and were, in fact, his enemies. That reluctance is a serious flaw in a general.
  - Isamu 8y ago
    >That reluctance is a serious flaw in a general. Agreed. But regarding your other point, it was actually the official position of the federal government (Union) that the South was still a part of the union, and that the confederate government was illegitimate and in rebellion. So, still fellow countrymen. And I imagine he still admired Lee greatly, many did.
  - not_weev 8y ago
    The slaughter McClellan was concerned about, and the source of his timidity, was that of his own men. That Grant & Meade had no such compunction is precisely why Lincoln turned to them. The Union victory then became a simple matter of attrition and its willingness to bleed.
    - philwelch 8y ago
      "I can't spare this man--he fights."
- lmkg 8y ago
  I have heard it argued that Grant's success as a general was directly tied to his alcoholism, for much the same reason. He also knew what slaughter (of his own men as well as the enemy) would be necessary to conclude the war, but drank himself numb enough to go through with it. I am not a historian, don't take this as truth.
EGreg 8y ago
Bringing to mind guys like: Hannibal - amazing general from Carthage who beat Romans early on, mentioned in the article Vercingetorix - beat Roman legions and used scorched Earth policy until Caesar’s sheer numbers overwhelmed him Spartacus - beat Roman legions using slave armies that he trained himself!! This is JUST the Roman empire. Napoleon the greatest general? Sparta - Held off an insane number of Persians with 300 men, though a lot could have been a legend Hey, so if Montezuma and the Aztecs were beaten by 20 guys with superior weaponry this guy would conclude just by the numbers that they were even greater. Actually if this guy’s math took into account wins where the battle didn’t take place, Temujin (Genghis Khan) would probably be #1 as he built a larger empire than Alexander and many cities fell with ZERO battles due to his similar policies of sparing cities who didn’t fight, but utterly destroying cities that did.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  > Sparta - Held off an insane number of Persians with 300 men, though a lot could have been a legend And don't forget the 700 Thespians fighting with Sparta. And the 400 Thebans. And there may have been 1000 Spartans, not 300. In any event, our historical sources don't make much tactical sense when taken literally, and there is a great deal of mythical allusion and propaganda going on here. > Hey, so if Montezuma and the Aztecs were beaten by 20 guys with superior weaponry this guy would conclude just by the numbers that they were even greater. The Aztecs were defeated largely by the 20,000 Tlaxcala allies of Cortes. But sure, let's ignore the importance of the natives so we can make the Europeans seem righteous and laudatory.
  - elboru 8y ago
    The argument of how few Spaniards fought in Tenochtitlan has been used in both sides. Here in Mexico is common for pro-native and anti-hispanic proponents to try to picture the evil few Europeans who got advantage of their technology against the innocent Aztecs. But they usually fail to mention that Tlaxcala and a lot of other native kingdoms joined the Spaniards against the Aztec empire that dominated Central Mexico, it's easier to picture a war between Native vs Invaders, but that doesn't mean it's correct. For some proponents Europeans were the good ones, for some other they were the evil ones. Evil vs good is easier to picture than trying to understand the whole story with its gray areas.
baud147258 8y ago
Even if such statement flaters my chauvinism, I agree with you.
samstave 8y ago
Your comment intrigued me, and so I went looking for more info on morale... and I found this interesting reddit comment in askHistorians https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ourxp/what_was_done_to_maintain_morale_in_armies_during/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ourxp/what_...
lkrubner 8y ago
The other thing that is missing is the percent by which someone won. If you tell me the Knicks beat the Jazz I will shrug with boredom. If you get me the final score was 131 to 84 I will be like "Whoa! What happened?" So this method undercounts the success of Hannibal, who had 4 victories of annihilation or near annihilation.
- almost_usual 8y ago
  A win is a win. WAR doesn’t measure the point disparity, works fine in baseball (which has way more stats than basketball).
  - PeterisP 8y ago
    Quite the opposite, in sports a win is a win and the rest matters only as a tiebreaker, you'll start the next game from 0:0 anyway; however, in a war every little detail absolutely matters, if you could have won with a bit less casualties, or a day earlier, or with more devastation to your enemy before the next battle, or with less atrocities to your enemy making easier to reconcile afterwards - all of that could have been a meaningful improvement over a simple win. As Clausewitz stated, war is the continuation of politics by other means. Whether an outcome should be considered a "win" isn't decided by military factors (e.g. manpower lost or who flees the battlefield) but rather by the political outcomes, how much the battle helped to achieve the political goals.
    - almost_usual 8y ago
      >Quite the opposite, in sports a win is a win and the rest matters only as a tiebreaker, you'll start the next game from 0:0 anyway If you're in a baseball game starting a series and your starting pitcher went 8 innings while the opponent went 4 (below average) you will have the upper hand in the rest of the series. The opponent will work his bullpen more and potentially his players having to rely on their offense heavily as the bullpen exhausts. Getting starting pitch counts high to exhaust or to exhaust a bullpen is a known strategy in baseball and it carries over multiple games. It's not a simple "you'll start the next game from 0:0 anyway". You can deal an incredible amount of damage to an opposing team by winning a game by one run (especially extra innings) and have the upper hand the rest of the series. You'll actually see managers put in position players to not kill their bullpen if they are losing a game by a significant amount (9+ runs). The original comment actually has the opposite damage effect in baseball. The "a win is a win" comment is in the context of WAR which is what we're talking about. As the season ends and approaches 162 games WAR is a good (but not perfect) metric on measuring a player's worth and amortizing situations like the one above across a season.
MR4D 8y ago
I think you're spot on. Also, what many people don't realize is that Napoleon burned thru roughly 30,000 troops per MONTH ! Most countries couldn't burn through that many in total without coming to the negotiating table, but France was the first country to subscribe to the idea of Total War, where everyone in the country was oriented (more or less) towards arms. When you have a huge country supplying troops and arms to the battlefield in a conveyor belt, anyone will win a large number of battles simply because he can grind the enemy down to nothing, and then still have more troops. So better? Maybe, but the data definitely does NOT prove it.
Steko 8y ago
The bigger problem is, as he mentions (and addresses in updates), "Napoleon benefited from the large number of battles in which he led forces". That puts it mildly. When he says "the next highest performer ... had less than half the WAR accumulated by Napoleon across his battles" he somehow fails to connect that to what follows shortly after "No other general came close to Napoleon in total battles". Mousing over the interactive, the War per battle statistic he added in the updates shows that Napoleon was not particularly outstanding vs other high WAR generals.
Maybestring 8y ago
Perhaps most importantly, Napoleon was at the helm of the first citizen-army with a modern sense of nationalism. It was the only military in Europe that appointed and promoted officers based on merit.

m0nty 8y ago

He basically admits to most of what you have just said. > this piece is intended as a fun thought experiment, not a definitive ranking, or a scholarly contribution to the field of military history. I believe some of the results from this project, especially Lee and Rommel, provide interesting data points for broader discussions of their tactical abilities. In no way do I claim my analysis provides the full picture, or anything close to it. So yes, method is sketchy, is incomplete, is simplistic.

zazen 8y ago
Perhaps we could change the title to something less baity? I'm tempted to suggest "Military-themed toy data science project". But if there is more interest than that in there somewhere, then maybe a title that reflects whatever that may be?
- Topgamer7 8y ago
  If the title were changed to something less baity it would be contrary to all the other articles on HN that go from more sensible titles to something very baity.
- almost_usual 8y ago
  It’s not a proof but it’s a creative way to measure this. I’ve only seen WAR used in baseball. It’s interesting to see it applied to another domain even if there are holes in it.
  - zazen 8y ago
    Well, if it's not a proof, then it's not a proof, right? You see more interest and creativity than I do in the article here, and that's fine. But surely that doesn't affect the fact that the title's claim to have proved Napoleon was "the Best General Ever" is a) a gargantuan overstatement, and b) unhelpfully provocative. People would probably be more charitable to the article if it hadn't totally misrepresented itself in this way.
    - almost_usual 8y ago
      Can you prove it's a "gargantuan overstatement"?
      - zazen 8y ago
        I think you know that's not a reasonable thing to ask for a "proof" for. On the other hand, anything which someone claims to have proved is a reasonable thing to expect a proof for. I'm not the one throwing clickbait headlines around.
dfxm12 8y ago
It makes me wonder how such a poor article made it to the front page of HN...
- Nightshaxx 8y ago
  Idk, I think it is a pretty interesting thought experiment. Sure it's not focusing on overall tatics or deeper reasoning, but you can't really measure that with data. The author is just looking at purely combat performance as some sort of way to rank them. Anything deeper wouldn't really work from a data perspective because we really don't have the best records from back then.
  - Ftuuky 8y ago
    Exactly, it's just some dude having fun with sabermetrics.
    - yborg 8y ago
      Sabermetrics works for things like baseball with enormous amounts of data to work with over long timescales and a very well-defined and limited domain with explicit rules and constraints. This hardly applies to war, especially over millenia. If anything, this guy's analysis just proves the point. Reminds me of the tongue-in-cheek "power rankings" people make for granola bars or hot dogs.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

Simplistic analysis aside, I'd consider winning your campaigns to be a hard requirement for "best" general and this excludes Napoleon, Lee, Rommel, etc.

kochb 8y ago
Excluding Napoleon due to a "winning your campaigns" criteria is a bit silly. You're weighting the loss at the end of his career instead of fairly judging the win/loss record on his entire portfolio of two decades of campaigns.
- Marazan 8y ago
  His grand strategic strategy that aided him in winning many battles resulted, in the end, in the massive career defining loss.
  - VSerge 8y ago
    "[it is the] Berezina" is something us Frenchies say when something is a total and utter catastrophe, and it refers to Napoleon's disastrous loss in Russia. Usually Napoleon is remembered more positively for what he did in the legal area with the Civil Code, which remains the basis for civil law in France to this day.
    - baud147258 8y ago
      The Civil Code, built a lot on Roman law, is very backward concerning the place of women in society, like the obligation for a wife to secure her husband's permission to work and all kind of inequalities.
      - williamdclt 8y ago
        None of that is enforced today, those are stale laws if they still exist.
    - 8y ago

jimmy1 8y ago

Right. Napoleon had a much lengthier career, but the manner in which Alexander won is what makes him the greatest. He didn't just win the battle, he truly conquered your entire civilization and turned you into his asset. Alexander didn't have the need to fight so many battles, and he avoided them whenever possible. Napoleon had 60 battles (probably more), Alexander, much fewer. An analogy in my mind is calling LeBron James and his career longevity the greatest over Michael simply on career length alone. In my mind, the manner in which Michael dominated, and going 6-0 in the NBA finals is what makes him clearly the best.

tynpeddler 8y ago
I think you have to look at the environment in which Alexander fought, compared to Napoleon. Alexander fought in a world that was sparse and heterogenous. His enemies were unable to learn from their failures and they were not able to adopt the means of Alexander's success. Alexander fought asymmetric wars were he benefitted from the asymmetry. Napoleon fought on a continent that had effectively been locked in a military stalemate for over 200 years (maybe as long as 800 years depending on how you count). The density of Europe during that time meant information about his means of victory would spread all his enemies, and the prevalence of writing helped ensure a degree of accuracy. Napoleon fought symmetric wars. He had no great advantages of culture or technology to help him. His enemies were able to learn from him and despite this he achieved incredible victories against huge numerical odds. Even his losses were incredible. The Battle of Leipzig started with Napoleon outnumbered and surrounded, then a third of his army (the germans) defected. Despite this, Napoleon inflicted more casualties then he received, and he escaped with his army in relatively good order despite the fact that an idiot colonel botched Napoleon's retreat plans.
- barkingcat 8y ago
  So maybe, just maybe, there isn't a thing such as "best general" and to try to create such a title is a misguided viewpoint on history. Not everything has a best or worst. This kind of reductionist thinking is wrong. If it's something like a "just for fun" project sure fine, but this is not the way to evaluate wars and peoples.

dbatten 8y ago

I second the missing data points, especially technology and cultural/social conditions... but I'd also point out that a lot of history is written by the winners. Napoleon was able to win the way he did because social conditions in France permitted him to conscript as many soldiers as he wanted and basically usurp the entire economic output of the country for the war effort. He famously bragged to one opponent that he couldn't be stopped because he could afford to "spend 30,000 lives a month." Other European societies at the time hadn't yet conceived of making war that way. And, once they all finally got around to it, we ended up with World War 1. Julius Caesar was the other major outlier but Rome was undoubtedly more technologically and socially "advanced" than the Celts he fought early in his career. Furthermore, basically everything we know about Julius Caesar's exploits comes from books written by... Julius Caesar. Surely, he had an incentive to make his victories sound as dramatic as possible.

sorokod 8y ago
That was called "Total war" - the entire country is engaged. Things where different elsewhere, you will be forgiven going through Jane Austin's novels and not noticing that the United Kingdom is at war with the French empire. Sense and Sensibility (1811) Pride and Prejudice (1813) Mansfield Park (1814) Emma (1815)
- philipov 8y ago
  It took a while for war to be something waged by The State because it took a long time for people to come up with an idea of a The State at all. Before nationalism, war was something fought by one king against another king, and what vassals each could muster. They were just petty disputes between individuals and their friends, not wars between countries. Countries were more like alliances of powerful individuals than what we now think of as a country. Power wasn't consolidated enough for kings to control the full resources of the country, and so people who had no feudal obligations to those disputes weren't At War in a meaningful way. France was the first major power to kill the kings and aristocrats whose squabbling kept any one of them from seizing control of the full resources of the country. It was the reorganization of society into a social contract each citizen held directly with an abstract all-powerful State that led to the consolidation of power that allows for Total War to exist.

Isamu 8y ago

>McClellan who is incapable of attacking you for months despite superior forces and odds I know he always gets this kind of criticism, but don't think he was an idiot, he knew his advantage. I think he was genuinely reluctant to ratchet up the slaughter of his countrymen, especially when he had the clear advantage.

sverige 8y ago
> I think he was genuinely reluctant to ratchet up the slaughter of his countrymen, especially when he had the clear advantage. Yes, they were his fellow countrymen in a sense, but they had declared themselves to be another country and were, in fact, his enemies. That reluctance is a serious flaw in a general.
- Isamu 8y ago
  >That reluctance is a serious flaw in a general. Agreed. But regarding your other point, it was actually the official position of the federal government (Union) that the South was still a part of the union, and that the confederate government was illegitimate and in rebellion. So, still fellow countrymen. And I imagine he still admired Lee greatly, many did.
- not_weev 8y ago
  The slaughter McClellan was concerned about, and the source of his timidity, was that of his own men. That Grant & Meade had no such compunction is precisely why Lincoln turned to them. The Union victory then became a simple matter of attrition and its willingness to bleed.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    "I can't spare this man--he fights."
lmkg 8y ago
I have heard it argued that Grant's success as a general was directly tied to his alcoholism, for much the same reason. He also knew what slaughter (of his own men as well as the enemy) would be necessary to conclude the war, but drank himself numb enough to go through with it. I am not a historian, don't take this as truth.

EGreg 8y ago

Bringing to mind guys like: Hannibal - amazing general from Carthage who beat Romans early on, mentioned in the article Vercingetorix - beat Roman legions and used scorched Earth policy until Caesar’s sheer numbers overwhelmed him Spartacus - beat Roman legions using slave armies that he trained himself!! This is JUST the Roman empire. Napoleon the greatest general? Sparta - Held off an insane number of Persians with 300 men, though a lot could have been a legend Hey, so if Montezuma and the Aztecs were beaten by 20 guys with superior weaponry this guy would conclude just by the numbers that they were even greater. Actually if this guy’s math took into account wins where the battle didn’t take place, Temujin (Genghis Khan) would probably be #1 as he built a larger empire than Alexander and many cities fell with ZERO battles due to his similar policies of sparing cities who didn’t fight, but utterly destroying cities that did.

jcranmer 8y ago
> Sparta - Held off an insane number of Persians with 300 men, though a lot could have been a legend And don't forget the 700 Thespians fighting with Sparta. And the 400 Thebans. And there may have been 1000 Spartans, not 300. In any event, our historical sources don't make much tactical sense when taken literally, and there is a great deal of mythical allusion and propaganda going on here. > Hey, so if Montezuma and the Aztecs were beaten by 20 guys with superior weaponry this guy would conclude just by the numbers that they were even greater. The Aztecs were defeated largely by the 20,000 Tlaxcala allies of Cortes. But sure, let's ignore the importance of the natives so we can make the Europeans seem righteous and laudatory.
- elboru 8y ago
  The argument of how few Spaniards fought in Tenochtitlan has been used in both sides. Here in Mexico is common for pro-native and anti-hispanic proponents to try to picture the evil few Europeans who got advantage of their technology against the innocent Aztecs. But they usually fail to mention that Tlaxcala and a lot of other native kingdoms joined the Spaniards against the Aztec empire that dominated Central Mexico, it's easier to picture a war between Native vs Invaders, but that doesn't mean it's correct. For some proponents Europeans were the good ones, for some other they were the evil ones. Evil vs good is easier to picture than trying to understand the whole story with its gray areas.

baud147258 8y ago

Even if such statement flaters my chauvinism, I agree with you.

samstave 8y ago

Your comment intrigued me, and so I went looking for more info on morale... and I found this interesting reddit comment in askHistorians https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ourxp/what_was_done_to_maintain_morale_in_armies_during/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ourxp/what_...

lkrubner 8y ago

The other thing that is missing is the percent by which someone won. If you tell me the Knicks beat the Jazz I will shrug with boredom. If you get me the final score was 131 to 84 I will be like "Whoa! What happened?" So this method undercounts the success of Hannibal, who had 4 victories of annihilation or near annihilation.

almost_usual 8y ago
A win is a win. WAR doesn’t measure the point disparity, works fine in baseball (which has way more stats than basketball).
- PeterisP 8y ago
  Quite the opposite, in sports a win is a win and the rest matters only as a tiebreaker, you'll start the next game from 0:0 anyway; however, in a war every little detail absolutely matters, if you could have won with a bit less casualties, or a day earlier, or with more devastation to your enemy before the next battle, or with less atrocities to your enemy making easier to reconcile afterwards - all of that could have been a meaningful improvement over a simple win. As Clausewitz stated, war is the continuation of politics by other means. Whether an outcome should be considered a "win" isn't decided by military factors (e.g. manpower lost or who flees the battlefield) but rather by the political outcomes, how much the battle helped to achieve the political goals.
  - almost_usual 8y ago
    >Quite the opposite, in sports a win is a win and the rest matters only as a tiebreaker, you'll start the next game from 0:0 anyway If you're in a baseball game starting a series and your starting pitcher went 8 innings while the opponent went 4 (below average) you will have the upper hand in the rest of the series. The opponent will work his bullpen more and potentially his players having to rely on their offense heavily as the bullpen exhausts. Getting starting pitch counts high to exhaust or to exhaust a bullpen is a known strategy in baseball and it carries over multiple games. It's not a simple "you'll start the next game from 0:0 anyway". You can deal an incredible amount of damage to an opposing team by winning a game by one run (especially extra innings) and have the upper hand the rest of the series. You'll actually see managers put in position players to not kill their bullpen if they are losing a game by a significant amount (9+ runs). The original comment actually has the opposite damage effect in baseball. The "a win is a win" comment is in the context of WAR which is what we're talking about. As the season ends and approaches 162 games WAR is a good (but not perfect) metric on measuring a player's worth and amortizing situations like the one above across a season.

MR4D 8y ago

I think you're spot on. Also, what many people don't realize is that Napoleon burned thru roughly 30,000 troops per MONTH ! Most countries couldn't burn through that many in total without coming to the negotiating table, but France was the first country to subscribe to the idea of Total War, where everyone in the country was oriented (more or less) towards arms. When you have a huge country supplying troops and arms to the battlefield in a conveyor belt, anyone will win a large number of battles simply because he can grind the enemy down to nothing, and then still have more troops. So better? Maybe, but the data definitely does NOT prove it.

Steko 8y ago

The bigger problem is, as he mentions (and addresses in updates), "Napoleon benefited from the large number of battles in which he led forces". That puts it mildly. When he says "the next highest performer ... had less than half the WAR accumulated by Napoleon across his battles" he somehow fails to connect that to what follows shortly after "No other general came close to Napoleon in total battles". Mousing over the interactive, the War per battle statistic he added in the updates shows that Napoleon was not particularly outstanding vs other high WAR generals.

Maybestring 8y ago

Perhaps most importantly, Napoleon was at the helm of the first citizen-army with a modern sense of nationalism. It was the only military in Europe that appointed and promoted officers based on merit.