The balance is the duty of the leader.

General Lee’s answer was to make unwise attacks. He would have been quite at home in WW1 Somme/Verdun or Ukraine now. In fairness he did learn, too late.

Mr. Davis’s response was to gather power then choke.

General Jackson’s response was to soldier on then get killed. Here is the man who should have grasped the nettles, and throttled Davis, if necessary, Lee.

It is true there’s no Philosopher’s Stone. There are men, or there are not…

Precisely.

The Philosopher’s Stone, after all, doesn’t exist.

All your points contradict each other, in particular, point 1 and point 2. Of course, real life is often about balancing contradicting flows. Certainly that is the duty of leadership.

None, none of the men involved grasped the nettles of leadership. Mr. Davis, as he was referred to, was selected as leader by the other Confederates because he was non-threatening. “Mr. Davis had no policy…he drifted from beginning to end.”
— Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, ‘The Confederate Government at Montgomery.’

At which point Mr. Davis should have been retired by whatever means necessary, but that means true leadership, the kind Bonaparte showed, the kind Cromwell showed, the kind Marius, Sulla, Caesar, and Franco, and Pinochet, and, yes, the younger Adolf showed… but it is not to be found in Commercial Republics like Carthage or any version of America.

Real leaders take the reins if they must, so the weakling in the chair doesn’t bring everyone down.

The more I look at military history the more convinced I am of the danger of three things:

- Allowing theory to trump practical experience for the daily reality of the common soldier.
- Allowing the experiences of the officers from the last war to trump innovative theory coming from young officers.
- Prioritizing political considerations over battlefield efficacy.

I’m not fond of costly frontal assaults, and the man was nearly incapable of learning from his mistakes.