Generalship can matter but is overwhelmingly not the most important factor in war. My take is out of exasperation with the amount of airtime generalship discussions take up relative to their importance, what matters is who won and what implications it had.
Also, bad generalship can lose wars but great generalship rarely wins them over a materially superior foe. The battle of France was partially lost by catastrophically bad force design & generalship but no amount of stunning victories would have stopped the Soviets from crushing the Nazis in time.
Yeah, that's the "what if the Japanese won at Midway?" kind of thing. In that case, the war lasts 6m longer, because the firehose of ship construction replaces them and more.
Yeah my understanding of Civil War generalship is that the CSA had competent leaders from the beginning while the USA was in that "generalship so bad it loses wars" category for the first couple years but were so superior in other ways that they could keep fighting until they found competent leaders
The CSA had its share of shitty political generals too. The debacle at Forts Henry and Donelson were mostly because they had about 1 competent General in the theater (Buckner) and he was subordinate to several idiots.
Which is also what happened to the Soviets, funnily enough. They lost 5 full army groups in the opening stages of Barbarossa, 4 million men all told and basically their entire pre-war military strength. So they just…built a second, cooler army behind the Urals & put guys like Rokossovsky in charge.
Yeah the WWII Eastern Front and ACW have oddly a lot in common - you can see where @hntdove.bsky.social got the idea to model the US vs CSA WWII equivalent in the Southern Victory Timeline on the Eastern Front