Ah yes, I'm actually familiar with that one. Not a bad saber design at all, but yeeah... bit obsolete.) To his credit, cavalry being obsolete wasn't clear at the time (hell, to Haig it wasn't clear even after WW1, and to Kliment Voroshilov it wasn't clear even in early 1942), but, as I was saying, something that proved itself to be a bad idea in hindsight does count as a bad idea, so good call.
BTW, great to have an intelligent and pertinent conversation with you. I always knew you were more than capable of one, but occasionally you seem to refuse one : p
I really don't agree that hindsight is a valid metric here. For me it's really hard to think of a truly bad idea in warfare. Times when they (a) should have known better, and (b) had any better options in their time of need, seem very rare to me.
Like Patton and his superiors probably should have known that cavalry charges like that were a thing of the past, and investing so much time and effort in this project was kind of pointless. And they had the option of working on something else instead - a next-gen cavalry doctrine, for example.
Another one I suspect was a bad idea: President Carter and his staff's idea for Operation Eagle Claw. Arguments have been made that the people who conceived the plan knew or should have known it was a bad plan. And they certainly had the option of not putting it into action. See also:
Black Hawk Down, and the Bay of Pigs.
I suppose this also includes ideas like Operation Northwoods. It was never put into action, but it does meet the criteria of being obviously bad, and also having the option of doing literally anything else besides Operation Northwoods.
Where we part ways is your preference for using hindsight to judge these ideas. I think that's unfair, and I think it gives us a poor understanding of history and context. I'd much rather understand what actually happened and why, than come away with a "lies to children" impression that an idea was bad simply because they had to act without complete informatoin.
What about bad ideas that succeeded? Those are still bad, right? The
Anschluss, for example.
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Anyway, here's a puzzler for you:
The Battle of Khasham.
tl;dr - Wagner mercenaries and Assad-affiliated troops attacked a Syrian rebel base, while there were a few US special forces personnel there. The US troops called it in, and their superiors reached out to the Russian HQ to sort things out. The Russians asserted that there were no Russian troops involved. As a result, the US felt free to open a ridiculously overpowered can of whoop-ass on the attackers. Many Wagnerites died that day.
Was it a bad idea? Whose bad idea?
