Maybe it is debated. I usually have seen it portrayed as the single turning point of the whole war. That little battle (in the much bigger battle around them) was a really big deal.
I’m not sure I would put this in the “brilliant” category though. The Union soldiers had little choice. There was not much genius behind this, just brave soldiers. Kudos to all of them but this was not a planned thing. It was a thing of desperation…and it worked.
I’m away from my books right now but yes: they certainly knew about the disease from reports from Harfleur (huge casualties) and the trail of corpses on the march. Intelligence on the general state of the army and it’s provisions would have come from locals who had one way or the other supplied the English as well as from prisoners taken in skirmishes and also a well developed understanding of the capacities of contemporary logistics.
Why I included Agincourt.
Henry’s psychology of his men to get them ready to fight when by all rights they could have rolled over and died.
Changing the battle plans literally at the last minute to take advantage of the muddy fields.
Hiding the archers in the forest on what would eventually be the French flank.
Waiting until the French started lunch until attacking but it prodded the French into making a full attack to the French disadvantage.
Yeah, that’s all fair. Henry was not a passive participant in the battle. But I just always marvel at a) what a shockingly precarious position he’d put himself in, such that the only thing that could save him was a crushing defeat of a larger, better equipped army and b) just how much effort the French put into to giving him the chance to achieve that. No shade to Henry who can only play the team in front of him, but most of what you listed can equally well be rephrased as things the French didn’t have to do as well as things he did. Stay out the mud! Give yourself room on your flanks! Don’t be the ones to charge!
But let’s compare that to the Battle of Hastings. All Harold’s army had to do was stand their ground but the right wing was baited into charging by a second fake retreat and Harold gets to see an arrow really close up. But no one would put William’s plan on this list.
Are we to count being able to take advantage of a situation as it develops on the battlefield or are we meant to consider a strategy/tactic that was planned ahead of time?
I can go either way with this. (or both) Paging @Wesley_Clark
OP said operation so I assumed that includes what led up to the battle as well.
Either one is fine as far as I’m concerned. I’m surprised how few examples there are in modern (meaning post industrial revolution) times. Maybe some of the best strategic and tactical decisions are still classified. Stuxnet was supposed to remain classified for example.
The reason Ukraine released evidence of its drone attacks on Russia may have been for psychological warfare purposes (forcing Russia to check every truck, slowing down logistics and their economy).
Desert Storm-I was pretty masterful from start to finish. General Norman Schwarzkopf out-thought the Iraqis at every turn.
Remember, at the time, on paper, Iraq had something like the 4th biggest military on the planet. Stormin Norman dismantled them completely. Arguably the most successful military campaign ever.
Ah, but why not? “Draw them out their shield line with a fake retreat” is at least as brilliant and creative as “shoot them full of arrows as they struggle through the mud”.
The Mongols were famous for this tactic. It worked well for them many, many, many times. Kinda their go-to move. They won many battles doing this.
Not sure this counts as effective. The dams were quickly repaired, of the 1,600 civilians killed in the attack, about 1,000 were enslaved Soviet prisoners, many of them women from Ukraine–Allies, that is.
I mean, he also had the benefit of a hugely superior army, in numbers, training, and technology. He did make very good use of his advantages, but even an incompetent general would have won sooner or later.
Iraq had the fourth biggest military at the time.
Vietnam defeated the US with a lot less.
Korea fought to a standstill with less.
Afghanistan defeated the US with less (and Soviets too).
They managed despite our much superior military.
I recall from some book reading about Coalition bait tactics with using drones to entice Iraqis into turning SAM radars on and then promptly mass-striking them with HARM missiles. Probably standard practice today, but in 1991 was pretty cutting edge.
The terrain helped a lot, too. With flat desert in many of the spaces, there was no place for Iraqis to effectively hide from Coalition air/space surveillance/recon.
It reminded me of the poem from the great WWII documentary “The World At War”
“The Desert” Episode about the Northern Africa campaign:
This land was made for war.
As glass resists the bite of vitriol,
so this hard and calcined earth
Rejects the battle’s hot, corrosive impact.
Here is no nubile, girlish land;
No green and virginal countryside for war to violate.
This land is hard.
Inviolable.
I don’t agree personally. The Iraq war was a show of how important technological differences are in warfare. Its like saying the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 was strategic brilliance. It was more due to a difference in technology.
The Iraqis had been decimated by 8 years of war with Iran, and were using outdated military hardware against a more advanced military. Plus only about 20% of Iraqis identify as arab sunni, with the rest being Shia and Kurdish, so they likely didn’t want to fight for a Sunni dictator. I thought people were surrendering in droves in Iraq because it was their chance to escape Hussein.
The US destroying half of Iran’s navy in 1988 wasn’t really an act of tactical brilliance, just technological superiority.
I’d say the brilliance was epitomized in how few casualties the US suffered. Even being technically outclassed Iraq was on their home soil with prepared positions. Even weak, under-equipped armies…or even citizen rabble…can give an invader a bloody nose.
There’s an old adage that the largest air force in the world is the US Air Force, the second-largest air force in the world is the US Navy, and the third-largest is the US Army. It doesn’t matter how many other nations were between us and Iraq; what matters is the ratio of our size to theirs.
And the reason why we lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and stalemated in Korea, was because we couldn’t win. We had no win condition. If there’s no win condition, we can’t achieve it, no matter the general, no matter all of our many advantages. Bush the Elder wisely kept our mission in the first Gulf War to getting Iraq out of Kuwait. That’s a well-defined objective, and Schwarzkopf achieved it, and so we won.