You are uninformed.
1. Up to the Little Big horn, Custer had not been a loser and he was NEVER a fool.
2. A junior officer does NOT have the right to disobey an order just because the man issuing it is arrogant. It is their duty to obey. Benteen and Reno failed at this.
3. As to your review of his tactics of that day, you obviously no nothing of Indian fighting. It was common practice to split a command when fighting Indians. A good example would be the Battle of the Rosebud, just prior to Custer’s fight.
4. Prior to this date, the Indian men would put up a delaying action while the women, children and aged scattered. This time, the men put up a very determined fight.
5. Custer, according to many leading authorities, was attempting to get beyond the village to capture the woman and children. If he had done so, the men would have surrendered. If Reno had pushed the attack on the village, Custer would have been able to capture the woman and children. Reno would have lost more men in that fight, but not as many as Custer ultimately lost AND it would have been a victory.
Arrogance had nothing to do with Custer’s actions that day. Based on past experience, his plan was a good one. It was the type of plan that George Patton probably approved - grab ‘em by the nose (Reno) and kick ‘em in the butt (Custer).
Read a few books on the subject and get back to me.
Only from what we had in Command & Staff.
1) IMHO, we disagree.
2) Concur. IMHO, insufficient evidence to justly convict based upon contradictory timelines and when messages were received and corroborated by their peers. Due to the after action reports which were very much influenced by political climates in prof Army service, I have cause to question the veracity of either perspective, so I’ll withhold judgment on condemning the junior officers and survivors.
3) Principles of Warfare as taught from Napoleon to the American Civil War provided ample evidence of the consequences of failing to mass one’s forces at the critical moment of decisive engagement on the battlefield.
4) More critical than the determined fight was the size of the opposing force which was grossly underestimated by Custer.
5) His approach was closer to Janet Reno’s than Reno’s grab their nose and Custer “kick-em-in-the-butt”. Blunder in and get the hornet’s nest all riled up, then blunder in the rear with a split force, insufficiently supplied and reinforced, deploy without any recourse and face the mass of the enemy force which was 10 times the commander’s estimate of the situation, ...viola decimation of the attacking force.
BTW, arrogance was also a known attribute of Patton as well, although his military battlefield career is, IMHO, much greater, better planned, more professional, and well practiced than Custer’s.