Again, I paraphrase. Mary Beard, the historian who sparked this thought didn't use those exact words. She's far to polite for that. I can't recall the exact words, but I feel like "they're all absolute morons" catches the sentiment.
I've made my weekly drive over to my semi-regular weekly game session my No Such Thing As A Fish catch-up time. There and back, I get through one and a quarter-ish episodes, depending on the traffic. I think I'm up to about September-ish?
Anyway, there was a guest - Mary Beard, moderately famous historian (for a historian in England). Her fact, was something to do with Julius Caesar iirc. The discussion following it got into how you got into the upper ranks of the roman army, the gist of it being that if you were poor, you signed up and could maybe if you were lucky, get up to commissioned officer level - maybe to the rank of captain. The upper echelons - that was all the rich kids.
The practical upshot of this is that you had no guarantee as to how onto it your commanders were. And most of them, were ... not the brightest. So all you had to do to stand out as a military genius, was not be a moron. Whilst not claiming to an expert military historian, or tactician, Prof. Beard's assessment of 'ol Julius's military genius is that his strategy for the vast majority of his battles boiled down to something along the lines of "hit them from behind at the same time" or "pen them in at the back" combined with "completely out-number them". This doesn't scream military genius to me, this seems more like a perfectly sound, competent approach to beating the shit out of someone else's army.
It feels like this isn't something that is as prevalent in modern armies - the upper echelons can't just buy a commission for the 3rd son. Though it wouldn't surprise me if there's more toff's in the officer ranks these days but my assumption is you don't rock up, throw down a half a million and get made a colonel anymore. Which is a good thing.
It would mean that (if you squint a bit) that in one sense, the army is more progressive than almost everyone else, in that they've come to accept that having money is not the same thing as being smart.
I feel like people/society tend to accept this when looking at the military, but not so much in other parts of society. Being rich and/or powerful, does not make you smart. There's a lot of people with a lot invested in the the idea that the powerful are playing some sort of super clever, very complicated game. To me, the general omnishambles of the world looks a lot more like it's caused by the people with power behaving like a bunch of idiot teenage boys in the midst of dick measuring contest.