The Grande Armée suffered high improvisation and corruption before 1812

Evidence

For even if one assumes that Mehmed Ali was mainly borrowing from the French, Napoleon’s army was not as well supplied and properly organized as those studies that concentrate on the Emperor’s military genius would like us to believe. A recent study of Napoleon’s Grande Armée finds that a lot of its campaigns were highly improvised, with corruption, looting, arrears in pay and low morale hitting it and affecting its performance years before the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 949

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to the reader’s interest in army performance — undercuts the clean European model against which Egyptian failings are commonly measured.