#people VASTLY underestimate the minutiae that goes into a functioning military

[vultures-and-scavengers]

cullen is 100% unqualified.

cullen is unqualified for the role he ends up playing, but also there is NO ONE in thedas who would be qualified.

he is creating an entirely new military and on a massive scale. he is not taking a place in an already established structure. you can be a general who spent their life in the military, but if that military has been around, then you are not creating a power structure, you are taking your place in one. much of this has been organized for you.

and militaries are not just infantry. you need to set up A LOT.

you need construction. you need to be able to house your people. you need fortifications to project your objectives. you need storage space because you will need a fuck ton of supplies. you might need bridges and you might need walls and you need to be able to be flexible with what you have the ability to build.

you need acquisitions. you need to know appropriate amounts of supplies you need. you need to be able to outfit your soldiers with the gear they need, which can change depending on their assignment. you need to know the supplies you're acquiring come from reputable sources and are not sabotaged in any way. you need to have redundancies within your supply chain.

you need transportation. you need to be able to move people. you need to be able to move food. you need to be able to move weapons and armor. you need these transports to be secure and well guarded. you need to (probably) vary their routes so you don't risk predictable convoys being seized. you need animals to provide transportation. you need stablehands who also need housing and pay and food and supplies. you need to feed the animals. you need to fulfill your animals' needs adequately. you need medical care for your animals.

you need personnel management. you need to feed them. you need to manage morale and you need to manage pay. you need to know how to encourage cohesion within units while making sure those units can work with others. you need to assign differing specialties and duties appropriately and you need to provide guidance for how each role should be filled.

you need to train them. this is not just swinging a sword; this is enemy recognition, this is how to work within a rank structure, this is how to operate within a highly regulated environment. you need your people to be educated enough to handle what tasks they need to carry out. you need exercises and wargaming so your people know what to expect from the field.

you need coherent rank structure. you need uniforms so your people know who they are and who those around them. you need to plan units with different capabilities that also fall within a coherent rank structure. you need to have emblems for ranks that are easy to read. you need guidelines and standards for what is expected of different ranks because different ranks have vastly different responsibilities. you need to have standards for promotion and demotion.

you need regulation. you need to ban criminal activity. you need standards for discipline. you need to write all the guidelines and be able to provide them to your units. you need one set of rules that all your units adhere to. you need to balance the needs of the people serving with the regulations that need to be written. you need appropriate ways to alter regulations and then publicize these changes.

you need doctrine. you need to plan out how you fight and why. how do you strategize. how do your larger tactics filter down to the smallest fighting units. how centralized or how flexible is your command structure. how are you appropriately using the resources you have. how do you work with allies. why are your units set up the way they are.

you need health services. you need pest management. you need disease control. you need battlefield medicine. you need standard guidelines for triage and care that all your healers understand so they're not doing wildly different things. you need care for long term issues like broken bones. you need to consider what to do with people who are in long-term care. you need to consider what happens to those who are injured and no longer able to serve.

you need security. you need to know your communications are encrypted, obfuscated, or otherwise made difficult to intercept. you need counterintelligence. you need to have guards on patrol. you need to secure your food and water sources. you need to secure incoming shipments.

this is not at all a complete list. but cullen has to find people who can organize all of this, or he has to organize it himself. he is starting from scratch. the inquisition has nothing at the beginning. there is not a single person in thedas who knows how to come up with all this on the scale that the inquisition will require of cullen and with haste.

the inquisition's army must respond to multiple unprecedented threats: hole in the sky raining demons, tears in reality all over ferelden and orlais, red templars, a tevinter cult led by a returned darkspawn magister with a quasi-archdemon, and an army of mind-controlled wardens and demons.

respond. not plan for. they have to pivot and face these things, which all present different challenges and require different tools and methods to fix.

so yes. he is unqualified. fucking find me someone who isn't.