History has shown you can have the most competent and skilled generals, but if you have an idiot leader who constantly interferes with your strategy, you will suffer a massive defeat.
(Looks at Franz Halder, Gerd von Rundstedt, Friedrich Paulus, ect )
It's interesting that you bring up Hitler's generals. After the destruction of the Third Reich, many of the
Wehrmacht's higher officers were eager to distance themselves from the
Führer for the obvious reasons. The likes of Manstein and Guderian wrote memoirs claiming to have identified Hitler's gross strategic errors that made the war unwinnable; the clear subtext was that if Hitler had not been in the picture, or if he had paid more attention to the recommendations of his generals, Germany might have won the war.
But this is nothing more than the
Dolchstoßlegende, the "stab-in-the-back legend", of World War I, only in a new form. After 1918, Germany's generals claimed that they weren't truly defeated, and that only the actions of revolutionaries and the "November criminals" behind the lines ruined Germany's chance for victory over the Allies. By arguing that defeat in the war had been in spite of Germany's superior generals and excellent fighting men, leaders after 1918 and 1945 could make a case for competence. They could save their own reputations, and their place in German society and history, by besmirching the reputations of others - especially if those others were conveniently dead, or rotting in Spandau prison.
Academic historians have chipped away at these myths for both of the World Wars over the past several decades. Writers like David Glantz and Holger Herwig have pointed out that the generals who seemed so angry with Hitler's "errors" after 1945 wrote down diary entries and letters
during the war that were full of nothing but praise for the
Führer's strategic initiatives. After all, Hitler's personal intervention with his generals led to the creation of the SICHELSCHNITT plan, which laid the groundwork for Germany's stunning 1940 victories in the Low Countries and France. At other times, Hitler compelled his generals to accept ideas, like the "hedgehog" defensive positions on the Eastern Front, or the delay of Operation ZITADELLE to allow the German armies to take delivery of more
Panther tanks, that they later agreed turned out to be correct. Other times, the
Führer was willing enough to listen to advice, such as Manstein's efforts to adopt an elastic operational defense in depth on the Eastern Front in late 1943.
To be sure, Hitler was wrong plenty of times. But so too were his generals. Hitler was not the one who mismanaged the TAIFUN offensive by frittering away troops on exploitation missions in the face of a dug-in enemy with superior numbers. That was Fedor von Bock. Hitler wasn't the one who decided to abandon the initial objective at Kursk in favor of a more ambitious, and ultimately fruitless, attempt to carve out a bigger salient: that was Manstein and his subordinate commanders in Army Group
Süd. And, of course, one must also take into account that Germany's enemies were numerous, well trained, and led by intelligent commanders of their own: they were not simply targets with no agency. Germany didn't merely lose the war; the Americans, British, Russians, and so on
won it.
What does all this have to do with Loghain and Cailan? A fair amount, I'd say. I recently created a thread that argued that Loghain's military decisions during the course of
Dragon Age: Origins were not all that well thought out, and in any case were often wrong, or at least no more
right than, say, Cailan's. The fact that Cailan was stumbling into these decisions almost by accident, and that he himself did not possess any great military competence, is almost irrelevant. Great generals still make stupid decisions, and even the correct decisions that they make come as often from intuition and gut feeling as from ratiocination or a considered appraisal of the military situation. Finally,
Dragon Age warfare predates staff systems, modern cartography, and any systematic attempt to come up with a theory of war. Even the best Thedosian general would not be very good by modern standards. I don't think that Loghain
was the best Thedosian general, but even if he were, his reputation and experience still wouldn't be worth all that much in the greater scheme of things.
Loghain's attempt to play off his reputation and claim that he was doing what was best for Ferelden is, therefore, a familiar refrain. There are plenty of examples of generals who screw up trying to pin the blame on other leaders - and if those leaders are outside their little fraternity of military professionals, so much the better. And the thing about a lot of those examples...the generals are often wrong. They were wrong when Hitler clashed with the
Wehrmacht, they were wrong when Lincoln clashed with the generals of the Army of the Potomac, they were wrong when Bismarck clashed with Moltke, and they were certainly wrong when the IJA clashed with the remnant of civilian authority in Japan in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
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