![]() Since French troops slightly outnumbered the forces of Russian Empire, the model gives a replacement general in Napoleon’s position a 51% chance of victory. 49 WAR for his victory at the Battle of Borodino. For instance, French Emperor Napoleon gained. I did so by isolating each general’s battles, and assigning a WAR score to their performance in each battle. I was ready to rank each general and delve into the results. In this project, however, the results potentially inflate the importance of a commander’s tactical acuity compared with other factors. The resulting model was surprisingly conservative in its weights, suggesting that raw soldier quantities have a relatively small effect compared to other factors such as terrain or technology, which further research could investigate in more detail. I could then weight a general’s numerical advantage or disadvantage compared to their adversary, and better isolate the general’s ability as a tactician. For each battle, I separated the combatants’ forces into infantry, cavalry, artillery, air force, and navy. ![]() I then constructed a linear model from that sample of battles. Sample of battle data scraped and processed into dataframe In other words, I would find the generals’ WAR, in war. I can then evaluate a general’s quality based on how much they exceeded or fell short of a replacement general in the same circumstances (assuming a replacement general would perform at an average level). My model, which I explain below, provides an estimate for the performance of an average general in any given circumstances. I adopted WAR to estimate a given military tactician’s contributions beyond or below an average general. WAR is far from perfect, but provides a way to compare players based on one statistic. For example, a baseball player with 5 WAR contributed 5 additional wins to his team, compared to the average contributions of a high-level minor league player. It calculates the total wins added (or subtracted) by the player compared to a replacement-level player. WAR is often used as an estimate of a baseball player’s contributions to his team. ![]() Inspired by baseball sabermetrics, I opted to use a system of Wins Above Replacement (WAR). ![]() The result is a system for ranking every prominent commander in military history. Unlike Hannibal, I sought to use data to determine a general’s abilities, rather than specific accounts of generals’ achievements. Like Hannibal, I wanted to rank powerful leaders in the history of warfare. Then Scipio broke into a laugh and said, “What would you say if you had defeated me?” When Africanus asked who, in Hannibal’s opinion, was the greatest general, Hannibal named Alexander… as to whom he would rank second, Hannibal selected Pyrrhus… asking whom Hannibal considered third, he named himself without hesitation. Ranking Every* General in the History of Warfare Napoleon was the Best General Ever, and the Math Proves it. ![]()
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