The Byng article is interesting. I have this theory that military officers are mainly evaluated on how many of their soldiers that die or go missing. It is the

The Byng article is interesting. I have this theory that military officers are mainly evaluated on how many of their soldiers that die or go missing. It is the easiest hard number to make a metric off. Easy to verify. The more soldiers an officer can kill, the better he seems. Obviously admirals had a harder task since sunk enemy ships is easier to count. And Byng had witnesses from land. He should have sunk 3 or 4 ships, in hind sight.