…Doesn't Understand About War.
Very interesting article which I agree with the military concept.
"Edmure Tully should have talked back to the King in the North.
On last night's Game of Thrones, the new character of Lord Edmure (Tobias Menzies) can't understand why his nephew and king, Robb Stark (Richard Madden), upbraids him for beating the hated Lannisters. Robb explains that Edmure made a dumb battlefield decision — more on that in a second — that redounded to the Lannister enemy's benefit, all for negligible strategic gain. It's never wise to talk back to the King, but someone needs to tell Robb: Oh, you mean like your entire war plan?
Not only is Robb Stark the white hat of Game of Thrones — a warm, generous and reluctant king — he's portrayed to viewers as one of its fiercest warriors. "He's a boy, and he's never lost a battle!" rages his enemy, Tywin Lannister. But the Young Wolf is a case study in the difference between winning battles and winning wars. Robb is an excellent company commander, leading from the front and inspiring his men with both his bravery and his battle prowess. He's also a terrible general.
Robb's bad decisions as a king are shaping up to be a major plot point of the third season of Game of Thrones, much as they are in its source material, George R.R. Martin's A Storm of Swords. But the HBO series, which has the unenviable task of adapting a sprawling storyline for TV, obscures Robb's equally poor generalship in an understandable search for narrative economy. You can still see why the Young Wolf needs to rescue his war from himself this season, but the show doesn't make it easy.
For instance: the gorgeously rendered map displayed during the opening credits never shows you the Westerlands, an omission with inadvertent implications. South of the Iron Islands and just beyond the Riverlands, the Westerlands are the heart of Lannister territory, the source of House Lannister's immense wealth — and the field of battle for Robb's campaign. You can be forgiven for watching all the beautiful scenes with Robb and Lady Talisa in the second season of Game of Thrones and not having a clue where any of it takes place. (Tywin fuming that Robb is "too close to Casterly Rock!" is about as much as the show provides.) Without a sense of the terrain, you can't really understand Robb's war. So to make all this clear, we've mapped Robb Stark's march from Winterfell, through to last night's episode.
You don't have to be a West Point grad to see the problem here.
Robb launches his western expedition at the beginning of season two. He has fewer soldiers than the Lannisters, and no seapower. Instead of marching on King's Landing, Robb's plan is to attack the Lannisters' home turf until they sue for peace — and acknowledge northern independence — and his means is to "litter the south with Lannister dead." Robb defeats Stafford Lannister's army at Oxcross, the offense for which King Joffrey has Robb's sister Sansa stripped and beaten in King's Landing. Then he pushes to the western coast, at the Crag, to accept the surrender of its lord and Tywin's bannerman. So far, so good.
But at the beginning of season three, Robb marches his army way eastward to Harrenhal — something that isn't in the books — where Tywin ordered his brutal lieutenant Gregor "The Mountain" Clegane to command a garrison force. It's an inexplicable decision (one concealed, alas, by the show's poorly explained geography of the west): Robb has given up raiding the heart of Lannister country to cross over into the Riverlands, all to defeat one admittedly mountainous henchman. The Lannisters "have been running from us since Oxcross," Robb notes, even though the northern army is outnumbered. Robb might have thought harder about why that is.
By ceding the west, Robb does Lord Tywin a massive favor. Tywin faced a difficult decision at the end of season two: march west to fight Robb and risk Stannis Baratheon seizing the capitol at the Battle of Blackwater Bay, or march to King's Landing and risk Robb laying waste to the Lannister stronghold. Once Robb leaves the west, the Lannisters face no pressure at all. Suddenly, Robb is caught between the remnants of the Lannister field army to his west and the Lannister/Tyrell alliance at King's Landing. Whatever battlefield successes he gained on the Lannisters' ancestral doorsteps grow more ephemeral every day…"
Full article here.
link
Do you agree?
Amicalement
Armand
