Big Serge
If you ask someone to name the worst military or geostrategic blunders in history, the standard answers will tend to center on doomed invasions of the Russian interior, either in the form of Napoleon’s 1812 campaign or the Third Reich’s invasion of the USSR. Someone with a deeper well of knowledge might point to a more esoteric and specific blunder: perhaps Erwin Rommel’s failure to neutralize Malta, the Byzantine division of forces at Manzikert, or Britain’s Gallipoli campaign. Perhaps we could return to the age of heroes and cite the Trojans bringing that wretched wooden horse into their city without inspecting its interior.
What most of these mistakes (perhaps with the exception of the Trojan Horse) have in common is that, although they all misfired spectacularly, they at least possessed a certain strategic logic which made them defensible on theoretical grounds. Mistakes, the actions of the enemy, and bad luck can all compound to create a disaster, but usually there is no sense that decisions were made for no reason at all. Usually.
Between 1897 and 1914 Imperial Germany conducted its own geostrategic blunder of the highest order, when it unilaterally launched a naval arms race against the greatest sea power of the age in the Royal Navy. What is remarkable about the German naval buildup is that it was justified on tenuous strategic speculations about the British response; despite the fact that it was apparent in real time that these speculations were untrue, the buildup continued for its own sake, and Germany repeatedly eschewed opportunities to turn aside from a dead end path.
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