WARNING: This post contains a lot of words. Many of them are long words. Some of them aren't even English words. Do not read this post if you don't like to do a lot of thinking or reading.
Introduction
It has come to my attention that there is a considerable amount of disagreement among forumites about the way stuff worked in the Battle of Ostagar. Viewpoints on the battle are deliberately contrasted in the game; different characters have different interpretations about the battle, and those different interpretations play a key role in one of the most important conflicts in the game itself: the civil war and the Landsmeet.
As I can tell, the basic question is whether the Battle of Ostagar was a 'winnable' battle for the Fereldan military, but it's invariably connected to a larger question, namely: who is to blame for the way the battle ultimately turned out? Some blame Teyrn Loghain; others, King Cailan.
I believe that, so far, people have not really thought about the battle in systematic ways. Although different interpretations are presented, people either fully accept one or fully accept another - or they ignore the issue entirely. Many people have not had education in military topics and therefore may not consider the logic behind various positions. All in all, it's a bit of a mess, really.
I propose to use this thread to take apart the Ostagar campaign as comprehensively as I can with the information provided in the game, and use that to draw out some conclusions about the decisions to fight - or not fight - at Ostagar. This will include an analysis of the various viewpoints expressed on the battle by characters in the game; we shouldn't take Loghain or Alistair at his word when he discusses what happened, but rather we should look at what he has to say critically. I will also take a look at what I believe are the most common forum viewpoints on the various people and subjects relating to the campaign, and the extent to which they have a basis in reality.
Unfortunately, I will not answer the question of whether the Battle of Ostagar was winnable. I don't believe we can ever know that, without Word of Gaider or somebody else to inform us. It didn't happen that way, so it's impossible to know. All we can do is speak in terms of probabilities.
Cailan's Beliefs
First, let's go through the logic that the king was operating under and see if it made any sense.
Cailan's main objective appears to have been to fight and defeat the Blight at the Gray Wardens' side, winning undying glory in combat and crushing the primary threat to Thedosian civilization. To that end, the king brought many of his troops to the fortified position at Ostagar, aided by a contingent of Fereldan Grey Wardens.
Was this wise? In the game, Cailan is depicted as not having much interest in military affairs, delegating command and "strategies" to his generals while focusing on the glory of combat and on the Gray Wardens in particular. These are not promising opinions for a commander to hold. Still, the fact that he wasn't interested in command and control does not automatically devalue the decisions he made.
First and foremost, Cailan's focus on the Gray Wardens was fundamentally correct. To end a Blight, you must kill the archdemon leading it; to kill the archdemon, you need Gray Wardens. It is impossible to kill an archdemon without them. Furthermore, Wardens are more valuable than other warriors when fighting darkspawn even if there is no Blight. It would be silly to claim that Wardens are all that one needs to take on an army of darkspawn, but taking one on without Wardens is a dicey proposition.
Secondly, Cailan's choice of the Ostagar position was also wise. This is not as unequivocally true as the thing about the Gray Wardens, so it requires some elaboration.
As a fortification, Ostagar was a better place to fight, tactically, than any other place we know of in the region. Fortified places are good for the defender: they offer his troops cover (improving their survivability) and place obstacles in the way of his enemies (decreasing their survivability). If you have the option, barring extenuating circumstances, fighting from a fortress is better than fighting anywhere else.
Ostagar also sat at a choke point in the terrain that made it extremely difficult to move large armies out of the Korcari Wilds without first controlling the fortress itself. (This information comes from the Codex, and there is no reason to suspect it of being untrue.) Fighting at Ostagar meant that it would be very difficult for the darkspawn to reach the northern Fereldan lowlands without first going through the Fereldan army. North of Ostagar, the terrain gets flatter and easier to navigate; the Korcari Wilds thin out until they yield to farmland and some rolling hills.
Compared to much of the rest of the kingdom, it's also relatively easy to amass and supply an army at Ostagar, because of its connection to the Imperial Highway. From the main settlements of Ferelden, one can travel to Ostagar on a raised stone road, not subject to the vicissitudes of most kinds of weather (mud, for instance, becomes virtually irrelevant) or terrain. That lends the position further value: it's not just that the Fereldans can access the fortress more easily, but that the darkspawn, once they are north of Ostagar, can themselves take advantage of the highway and move more quickly.
So: the Ostagar fortifications maximized the Fereldan army's combat power, provided an important operational bulwark against darkspawn incursions to the north, and could be supplied by the rest of the kingdom relatively easily.
The way that the Fereldans intended to fight the darkspawn is also reasonable, on the face of it. Defending Ostagar with a smaller force that can use the fortifications to survive long enough to buy time made tactical sense: the darkspawn would have to commit to the attack on Ostagar and deploy their forces to assault the position, whereupon Loghain's larger detachment would be able to fall on the darkspawn rear or flank and destroy them. This basic plan and variants of it is simple, but it is also a proven winner in military circles. It uses the fortifications to greatest effect, to attract and blunt the assault of a larger force, while also adding the effectiveness of a shock charge against an unprotected flank that is the hallmark of offensive operations. More crudely, it's a classic "hammer and anvil" maneuver. A real-world comparison might be the Battle of Muret, during the Albigensian Crusade in 1213. A fictional one would be the Battle of the Fields of Pelennor in the Lord of the Rings series. If one were going to fight at Ostagar, the plan that was adopted for the battle was a sound one; it is difficult to think of a better way to use the army to fight there.
One might point out that Cailan's plan had many authors, most notably Loghain himself. That's fine; I don't believe that Cailan was a military genius or anything, and he was, again, famously averse to any thinking about stuff like strategy or tactics. What matters is less that Cailan's plan was not actually articulated by him, and more that it was Cailan who actually followed it, in sharp contrast to Loghain's eventual conduct.
Cailan does not, however, get a pass on other aspects of his conduct. For example, his lukewarm attitude toward numbers is troubling. It is military orthodoxy to avoid splitting one's forces. Concentrate the most men possible at the best place possible and use them in the best way possible. The king didn't even manage to follow the first one of those dicta. Cailan failed to take advantage of the forces under the command of the arl of Redcliffe, and showed little interest in pursuing the matter. True, there would be costs to bringing Arl Eamon's men; they would increase the Ostagar forces' requirements of supplies, for example. Cailan, however, seemed to care more about 'getting in on the glory' than anything else.
In the event, of course, it did not matter that Redcliffe troops weren't at the battle, because even if Cailan had brought them, they would not have reached the field before the Fereldan army was defeated. ("Could be here in a week" doesn't work when the battle will be fought that evening.) Duncan's comment about Eamon 'reminding' Cailan about their existence implies that those soldiers could have departed Redcliffe earlier had they been given orders earlier, perhaps in time to make it to Ostagar, but we don't know for certain.
On the face of it, then, the way that Cailan wanted to fight at Ostagar makes good sense. Loghain, however, raised some salient objections to it. Let's see if those hold any water.
Loghain's Opinions
To start with, let's look at Loghain's bona fides. By the Battle of Ostagar, Loghain mac Tir had a long-standing successful reputation as a great leader of men, an excellent tactician, and the closest thing to a national hero that a pre-national entity like Ferelden could possibly have. He was a key architect of the Fereldan resistance's war effort against Orlais and the Meghrenite regime, he was the hero of the Battle of the Dane, and he remained a key military authority and one of the most prominent aristocrats in the country.
This would appear to compare well with Cailan's cavalier attitude, boredom with 'strategy', and overall glory-hunting. Nevertheless, that's not any reason to take what Loghain might have to say uncritically. For one thing, this is effectively a pre-institutional military we're talking about here. Loghain had no staff system, no effective cartography, no bird's eye view, and may not even have had an accurate count of his own forces. These are no deficiencies of his, personally, but they are conditions endemic to all warfare before the industrial age. That meant command and control took a lot of guessing and a lot of gambling. Skill was relevant, but even generals widely agreed to be 'skilled' were often horrifically deficient in what modern observers would describe as basic military knowledge.
Here's an example. Robert E. Lee is generally regarded as having been one of the most competent military minds of the nineteenth century. He frequently exhibited what observers would refer to as 'military genius', applying troops to the right spot at the right time, and with that skill he won a great deal of battles in the American Civil War. Yet Lee's thought process relating to these battles was actually kind of primitive. His understanding of the relative forces at any given point was vague and colored by inaccuracy (e.g. an exaggerated belief in the military quality of his own army). When he made the decision to attack, he would often do it simply because he had a gut feeling that it was a good idea as anything else. This sometimes served him brilliantly, as at the Second Battle of Manassas, where his forces virtually destroyed an enemy army in one of the most comprehensive victories of the entire war; sometimes, it served him incredibly poorly, as at Gettysburg, where he got his army into a fight against enormous odds and ended up losing the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of the American continent.
The excellent military historian Dennis Showalter once wrote that "ratiocination is a staff function". A commander and his staff are supposed to bounce ideas off of each other, work out the logic behind them. Given a commander's intent, a staff should be able to help him formulate the best way to accomplish that intent. Lee didn't have a staff, although sometimes he talked things over with individual subordinates, and he was notorious for issuing vague orders that failed to specify intent. (This is in sharp contrast to one of his Federal opponents, Ulysses S. Grant, who wrote fantastic orders and who developed one of the great early staff systems of any military in the world.) Loghain didn't even have as much as Lee had. When he made the enormous decision to retreat from Ostagar, he didn't talk it over with his subordinates at all. He did not express his intent, and he did not offer his subordinates any chance to play devil's advocate. In fact, his lieutenant, Ser Cauthrien, was shocked and surprised at the order to retreat, and had to be physically coerced into issuing it to her men. This does not speak well of Loghain's military ability, and hints at significant hypocrisy. He demanded latitude from the king in interpreting his orders, but did not offer that same latitude toward his own subordinates.
Gut feeling and instinct comprised a very high proportion of a given preindustrial commander's rationale for doing anything, and that should make us intrinsically skeptical about anything any such authority might believe about a military situation. Loghain might have had the military ability of an Alexander the Great (I doubt that very strongly, but let's be charitable), and even that is still far less than even a modern captain would be able to draw on for a modern battle. So Loghain's military opinion may have had more weight than Cailan's. But it's not that much more weight...and it certainly doesn't make Loghain incontrovertibly right and Cailan incontrovertibly wrong when they do disagree.
With that in mind, let's bring up Loghain's objections to Cailan's plan.
Firstly, Loghain accused Cailan of being too attached to the Gray Wardens and too reliant on their skills. (The novel The Calling gives some context about Loghain's opinions regarding the Wardens' unreliability.) It's hard to see how this holds water, because again, it is impossible to defeat a Blight without the Wardens, and it is much easier to fight darkspawn with their participation. Fighting an archdemon necessarily relies on the Wardens' presence and military skill. It doesn't matter if they're politically unreliable, because without them, you don't have a ghost of a chance against the darkspawn.
It's also unclear why Loghain is bringing this up. He suggests that relying too much on the Wardens is unwise, but doesn't offer a reason why this might be the case, nor does he have an alternative plan in mind. What ought to be done with the Wardens, if not using them as the core of the king's troops at Ostagar? Should they be with Loghain's flanking troops instead? Employed as some form of reserve? What exactly are we talking about here? Without some form of alternative plan, all Loghain's complaint about the Wardens amounts to is innuendo.
Secondly, Loghain suggests that the situation for the battle is unfavorable. This is the claim that he repeats later, especially at the Landsmeet, and also mentions during the Return to Ostagar DLC if he is brought along. It bears more examining.
The odds for fighting at Ostagar may very well have been against the Fereldans. A variety of opinions are offered about this subject over the course of both games. Elric Maraigne claims that even Cailan knew that he was doomed to die there, but this is probably just projection, because the king's observed actions certainly don't bear it out, whereas Elric has strong personal psychological grounds for believing something like that even if it isn't true. Aveline Vallen and Alistair both claim that the battle could've been won if the king's men were not betrayed, but they are both bitter veterans of the fighting who had no way of knowing the overall course of the fighting and were searching for an easy person to blame. Loghain himself is unreliable on this point; without a view of the battlefield at the very least, there's no possible way for him to have known if the king's troops were doomed, and he didn't have such a view. All he could see was the Tower of Ishal. He also has potential reasons for wanting to lie about his own motivations, especially if you believe that Loghain betrayed the king instead of merely cutting his losses and retreating.
Embedded Counterfactuals
However, that stuff is arguably irrelevant. What matters most about Loghain's decision is not that the situation at Ostagar might have been unfavorable, but the unspoken assumption inherent in that statement - that by retreating and sacrificing the king and his men, he would improve Ferelden's ability to fight the Blight at a later date. This is something called an "embedded counterfactual" - a judgment that turns on a claim that if something were done in a different way, it would work better. And it's crucial for assessing decision-making. A decision is only wrong if there is a better alternative.
So Loghain's alternative to committing his army to the battle at Ostagar was to withdraw, leaving the king, the king's men, and the Wardens to die in order to, I guess, buy time or something. On the face of it, this is outright wrong, because without Wardens, you can't defeat the Blight. Retreating effectively destroys Ferelden's war effort.
One can make the argument that Loghain either A: did not know that Wardens were necessary to kill the archdemon or B: did not believe that Ferelden faced an actual Blight, as evidenced by his comment at the Ostagar war council that his troops hadn't sighted any dragons in the Wilds. This would mitigate the colossal strategic error he made in abandoning the Wardens to their fate; it would mean that he screwed up because he didn't know any better. Still, either way, it's a screwup of rather disastrous proportions, magnified by the fact that he made Wardens persona non grata in Ferelden after the battle and ordered them to be hunted down. If he merely believed that the Wardens with the king could be sacrificed to buy Ferelden time to defeat the Blight, then it's easy to see where the orders to hunt down any remaining Wardens came from: his conspiracy theories. The Calling suggested that Loghain may have believed that the Wardens had created some sort of coterie around the kings of Ferelden to influence the king's decisions in a bad way; Cailan made oblique reference to this belief at Ostagar and Loghain himself brought it up at the Landsmeet. He also appeared to connect the Wardens and the king together with nebulous "Orlesian" interests in this conspiracy.
This is beginning to create a picture of Loghain not as a Snidely Whiplash style of cartoon villain but as a man who may have honestly believed in some things that happened to be very, very wrong and who made military decisions based on those beliefs. Still, that leaves us with assessing the other aspects of Loghain's plan. Even if we ignore the disastrous consequences of losing the Gray Wardens, does Loghain's effort to combat the Blight make sense?
The counterfactual embedded in the decision to retreat from Ostagar is that Loghain could have defeated the Blight in some other way. Presumably, this would take the form of a military engagement of some kind. What other places in Ferelden offered the sorts of tactical advantages that Ostagar possessed? We certainly know of a few other fortresses in the region. Redcliffe and Denerim both seem like strong candidates; both are fortified, and both are important enough for the darkspawn to want to attack them. Highever might work, although Howe did enough damage to the place that it probably wouldn't be as useful as the alternatives. Smaller cities like Amaranthine and keeps like Vigil's Keep would be less effective, because the darkspawn could always avoid them.
Yet this approach yields other problems, because in deciding not to fight at Ostagar Loghain effectively opens up the rest of Ferelden to pillage and depredation. There is no other place to stop the darkspawn south of Lothering, and Lothering itself is not well fortified. It makes more sense to fight at Ostagar with the whole army than at Lothering with a piece of it. After Lothering, the country opens up dramatically; from there, the darkspawn can use the Imperial Highway to reach most points in the country with relative ease, and the main agricultural regions of the country are also easy pickings. Once they reach Lothering, the darkspawn become a vastly greater threat to the population of Ferelden.
As a Fereldan leader, Loghain should have an ethical responsibility to the people of Ferelden anyway. But let's say he doesn't, and evaluate the position simply from a military point of view. Allowing the darkspawn to reach Lothering and attack the Fereldan populace directly harms the basis of Loghain's ability to make war. In order to supply his army, he needs arms and armor from local industry. In order to feed his army, he needs the produce of Ferelden's farmlands. In order to clothe his army, he needs textiles from Fereldan villages. In order to pay his army, he needs the receipts of Ferelden's taxpayers. If those people fall under darkspawn threat, Loghain's ability to make war is dramatically reduced. He already weakened the army by withdrawing from Ostagar; he will weaken it more by allowing the darkspawn to invade Ferelden.
That, at least, is objective. I have a hypothesis about why Loghain believed the way he did, though. The teyrn made his bones as a resistance fighter against the Orlesians and their 'puppet king', employing insurgent and partisan warfare to whittle down his enemies' forces until he brought everything together and smashed the Orlesians' reinforcements on the Dane. He could fight like that because Orlais and the puppet king couldn't just smash and burn everything; they were fighting to control and rule the population of Ferelden, not destroy it. Loghain could sustain his forces via guerrilla actions against the Orlesians.
Against the darkspawn, however, there would be no chance of doing that. The darkspawn just kill everything in their path; they don't try to win hearts and minds, they don't try to extract taxes and supplies, they simply destroy. If Loghain proposed to fight the darkspawn like he fought the Orlesians - by drawing things out, hitting the horde with a million pinprick raids, and eventually crushing them with some sort of decisive battle on his own terms - then he would lose. He would run out of food, because the darkspawn would kill the farmers and blight the land. He would run out of supplies, because the darkspawn would kill the smiths and tailors and their equipment. Loghain may have developed a reputation for genius at one form of warfare, but this may have meant that he was psychologically blind about other forms of warfare, and that in turn may have caused him to make poor military decisions when he was pulled out of his comfort zone.
That's just theory. In practice, there were several options available to Loghain that may have allowed him to receive reinforcements and make good on the losses of Ostagar in the short term. That, at least, would go some way toward rectifying the numerical balance sheet.
He could call on foreign allies, such as Orlais, to lend direct military support. This, unfortunately, had approximately zero chance of happening, because Loghain believed that the Orlesians were involved in a conspiracy to reconquer Ferelden, and that they would use the cover of the Blight to sneak their forces into the country for a coup or something similar like that. So they're out. Another option would be to call on his directly loyal unengaged forces. We know that Rendon Howe's troops from Amaranthine, for instance, were not engaged. This would probably help, although there is considerable anecdotal evidence from the game (e.g. the comments of Denerim law enforcement) that Howe's troops were of low military value. Thirdly, he could try for support from the banns who weren't already pledged to him but who also sat out the Battle of Ostagar, such as the forces loyal to Arl Eamon. He did actually try to do this, but failed to convince his opponents in the Landsmeet that he hadn't simply betrayed the king out of opportunism.
Would these additions to his army make up for the losses at Ostagar? In one sense: no, of course not, because all but two of Ferelden's Gray Wardens died at Ostagar, and Loghain was actively trying to kill the two remaining hopes for defeating the Blight that Ferelden had. But if we ignore that rather important point, and focus on pure military numbers and quality...well, we don't know, because we don't know anything about the numbers involved in the battles or the troop quality involved. But it seems unlikely to me that this hodgepodge of unengaged forces - even if they all pledged unconditional loyalty, which itself would be vanishingly unlikely - would make up both for the king's personal troops and for the serious operational problem of allowing the darkspawn to attack the rest of Ferelden.
Which ultimately means that if Loghain had logical reasons to believe that the army was doomed if it stayed and fought at Ostagar, those logical reasons would also apply to retreating from Ostagar. By retreating, Loghain would not be making the situation better. He would, in effect, be saving the army only to allow it to die at a later date.
Untangling Alternative Motivations
Of course, there are plenty of reasons to believe that military considerations weren't the only thing floating around in Loghain's mind at Ostagar.
Firstly, there's the issue of personal pique. Loghain is reported to have argued with Cailan a lot, and there is documentary evidence from Return to Ostagar suggesting that one major reason this occurred is because of Loghain's suspicion that Cailan would divorce Anora and remarry into the Orlesian royal family. If one is being charitable to Loghain, one would note that this would be a slap in the face and a mark of severe disrespect; if one is being less charitable, one could point out that Loghain stood to lose influence and power under such a new arrangement and that he may have been motivated by his bizarre Orlesian conspiracy theories. Either way, Loghain was not exactly the king's best friend by the time of the Battle of Ostagar.
We can add to that the fact that he stood to gain immensely, at least in the short term, if the king were to die in this way. Teagan's comment about Loghain's retreat being rather 'fortuitous' was exactly right. Loghain would be left with the largest army remaining in the kingdom, enough to intimidate or defeat any internal opponents. His daughter would become the sole monarch, allowing him to plausibly make himself regent and become ruler in truth if not in name. He would have allowed one of his key internal "enemies", the Gray Wardens, (at least, enemies in his own mind) to be comprehensively destroyed, which would further strengthen his position.
Then, there's the issue of how exactly Loghain 'knew' that the king's army at Ostagar was doomed. Remember, he could not see the battlefield. All he had eyes on was the Tower of Ishal. All he knew was that the king's army had just signaled him to make the charge. His capacity for logically evaluating the relative military position was exactly nil. Why, exactly, did he think that the army was doomed? What happened between the war council, when he asserted "the plan will work", and the Wardens' signal? What could have made him think that the whole army was in danger of being destroyed? One explanation might be that he just had a bad feeling about it that had only developed after he left the council. That's plausible, but it doesn't speak well of his generalship that he would get his king and the king's men killed purely on instinct. (As we saw with Lee earlier, generals, even good generals, often fall victim to this sort of thing. But it doesn't matter who it happens to, it's still an error. Military decisions must be weighed rationally.) There is, of course, another explanation, namely: he was planning to leave anyway, and deliberately lied to the king about his faith in the battle plan in order to get the king and his troops killed.
We have motive and opportunity, which is generally good enough for a court of law. Yet there are also strong reasons for believing that Loghain wasn't just betraying the king, too. I may have spent a great deal of time suggesting that his military reputation was not all that it was cracked up to be, but he still had a good military reputation. It's implausible that Loghain did not understand the extent of the threat that the Blight posed to Ferelden (although he almost certainly underestimated it and overestimated it as was mentally convenient), and he should have known the severe damage that he was doing to his country by leaving the king and his men to die.
Contrary to what you may have learned in class, the Roman Empire was not destroyed by 'the barbarians'. Rome was vast, populous, wealthy, and unimaginably powerful; the 'barbarians' were few, militarily weak, and economically impoverished. There was no 'barbarian' conquest. More importantly, no sane person even wanted to destroy Rome. There were no anarchists in late antiquity. What people were trying to do was keep the Empire alive and strong - they just wanted more of the benefits of having an Empire be directed to themselves. Rome was rich and prosperous and the rewards of being high up on the ladder were fantastic.
So the Gallic aristocracy repeatedly rebelled and raised up rival emperors after Emperor Gratianus moved the capital back to Italy and took away the patronage of the imperial court that used to go to Gallic interests. Various other military commanders tried to bargain their way into more power, and used 'barbarian' symbols and rhetoric to enhance their bargaining position and propaganda. The Empire fell apart in a paroxysm of civil wars fought between a variety of different men who all wanted to control it, many of whom were the ones creating themselves new 'barbarian' identities as fall-backs if they failed in their grasp for supreme authority. One field army in Gaul started to call itself 'Frankish'; another, which moved from the Danube border to Aquitaine, took on the moniker of 'Gothic'. Those armies, which had started out being filled with Roman citizen-soldiers, ended the fifth century as new countries of their own.
The main point here is that Rome died essentially because of historical irony. A bunch of people who were trying to not destroy Rome ended up doing exactly that. You can see a similar pattern in Loghain's behavior. Given what he did after the Battle of Ostagar, it seems plausible that part of the reason for his actions is that he was launching a Griff nach der Königsmacht: to forestall the likely consequences of Cailan's further rule, to annihilate the conspiracies he saw opposing Ferelden, and because, y'know, power. But like the Roman Emperors and would-be Emperors of the fifth century, he wasn't only concerned with power; he probably honestly believed in those conspiracy theories. You don't need to incorporate malice to explain Loghain's military failure at Ostagar, although malice was probably there. It was at least as much of an honest mistake as it was a betrayal.
As with many figures in BioWare games, Loghain's status as an antagonist does not make him unalloyed evil, and it's nice how he's portrayed with qualities that many would consider to be laudable: patriotism, for instance. Loghain might have nearly destroyed Ferelden, but he wasn't trying to destroy it: he was trying to save it from what he considered to be threats, in the way that he settled on as the 'best' way of managing the situation. He was wrong about the threats and he was wrong about the way to handle them. In the name of saving his country, he did many morally abhorrent things. That made him an antagonist, and depending on who you ask it made him a villain, as well. But in both of those things he was an eminently believable one. He wasn't some elemental force of evil like the darkspawn or the archdemon. He was all too human...up to the Landsmeet, at which point he became a Heroic Ally or just dead.
The Battle of Denerim
But wait, you might point out. Loghain was right after all, wasn't he? When the Fereldan army faced down against the darkspawn horde a second time, at Denerim, the Blight was ended and the darkspawn were crushed. Doesn't that validate Loghain's decision to preserve the army? If he hadn't saved it from Ostagar, you might say, the Wardens would never have had the army that they used to ultimately win.
First of all, this is flawed logic. When the Wardens' army met the archdemon at Denerim, it was supported by dwarves, elves/werewolves, and magi/templars that would not have been available to Loghain. He didn't have the treaties, nor did he have the capacity to embark on the adventures that the Wardens did in securing the allegiance of the armies named in the treaties.
Secondly, again, we don't know that the army would've lost the Battle of Ostagar if Loghain hadn't retreated, and there are good reasons for believing that it might have won. We don't know that it would've won, either, but on the basis of probability it had as good or better a chance at Ostagar as it would have had anywhere else.
More importantly, however, this army was created in spite of Loghain, not because of him. Loghain's effort to eradicate the Gray Wardens would have, if successful, destroyed any chance of ending the Blight before it wiped out Ferelden. Loghain interfered with the Wardens' plans when he could; having made them into a threat to his newfound power, the regent tried to undermine that threat by attacking them and their allies.
Had Loghain's plans been successful, he would have wiped out the Wardens, defeated and subjugated Redcliffe and his other internal opponents, and then the entire country would have fallen out from under him as the darkspawn continued their inexorable advance. You simply can't give him credit for something that he didn't want to do, something that he was in fact actively trying to avoid.
The chain of events that eventually led to the Battle of Denerim was effectively unpredictable. Neither Loghain nor Cailan nor even Duncan could have realized just how powerful and deadly the eventual Hero of Ferelden would become. They could not have banked their war effort against the darkspawn on the survival of a cache of Gray Warden treaties that they did not know existed (well, Duncan knew, but he only wanted them as insurance, and certainly did not expect them to provide the basis for an army that would save the country), much less banked it on a once-in-an-Age warrior coming out of nowhere to kill a god.
There's some more historical irony at work. Duncan was not planning for the Battle of Denerim any more than Loghain was. Recruiting the eventual Hero of Ferelden, seeking out the Gray Warden treaties, making sure that Alistair and the Hero didn't try any 'heroics'...these actions all eventually set the preconditions for the victory over the Blight. One can't say that they were all accidents; each move was done because Duncan thought it might help in some way. It's another common tactic (or storytelling trope); you can find it everywhere from Otto von Bismarck to Matthew Stover's Caine. Inch toward daylight, trying to shave the percentages a little here, and a little there. Eventually you put it all together - wham! - and you look like a genius even though there was no big overarching plan to start with.
Conclusion
The Ostagar campaign amply demonstrates something that I believe to be a fairly deep truth about warfare in the preindustrial era. It's really, really hard to have all the answers. Armies of the nineteenth century have been described as blindfolded boxers staggering around looking for an enemy to slug, and that was in an era of telegraphs and of fairly well-developed reconnaissance. Loghain, Cailan, and the rest of the leadership at Ostagar were operating under severe information constraints, in addition to their own personal neuroses and psychological blind spots. Even formulating an informed opinion from what they knew was difficult enough; applying it to the field of battle was another thing entirely.
People often get the impression from the History Channel, from map studies, pop-history books, and strategy games that warfare is relatively simple. The biggest concession to a fog of war might be to darken a portion of the map so that it can't be easily seen. But then, the observer has vastly more information than almost any commander in history. She knows where all the 'friendly' troops are. She can see what they look like from a bird's eye view instead of the actual view, "whatever high ground you've got in the area". She probably has an accurate map that until the nineteenth century at the earliest would not have existed. She can probably discern battlefield events and give orders with no time lag, if she's playing some sort of game.
All this creates an unfair imbalance between modern observer and the reality of any military situation. And that, I believe, creates a similar imbalance between the modern observer and the historical commander. They are expected to know much more than they can possibly have known, and to have thought in ways that they cannot possibly have thought. I think that, on the whole, this has redounded to Loghain's favor; people think that he was much more knowledgeable, smarter, and logical than he actually was. Although I doubt it, he may very well have been the military commander of the Age - but in the land of the blind, the man with one eye is the king.
From the information available in the game, I think I have demonstrated that many of the assumptions underlying the military decisions taken in the game were not true. Other assumptions were true, but not because of the reasons that many figures in the games thought. I hope that in writing this, I have better clarified the background behind one of the most crucial events in the entire Dragon Age franchise and help people think through the complicated decision matrix related to it. If in so doing I have humanized and contextualized one of the most controversial characters in any BioWare game, then I would also consider that to be a plus.
Naturally, there are plenty of people who might disagree with my reasoning and/or with my conclusions, and I would be more than happy to address such disagreements in this thread whenever I remember to check it. 
I would also welcome BioWare writers come to tell me that I am wrong, and why I am wrong. I'd be really interested in the whys.
Tl;dr
I don't really have a way to sum all this up quickly, so how about an unrelated jpop song?
Retour en haut
