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I know that the PoD could be placed before 1900, but i chose placing this thread in the "after 1900" forum since most ottoman military disasters occured in the span of ten years between 1911 and 1921.
I was reading a wikipedia article on the First Balkan War and stumbled upon the "reasons for turkish defeat" sub-section. As stated:
Under the tyrannical and paranoid regime of Sultan Abdulhamid II, the Ottoman Army had been forbidden to engage in war games or maneuvers out of the fear that this might be the cover for a coup d’etat.[95] The four years since the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 had not been enough time for the Ottoman Army to learn how to conduct large-scale maneuvers.[95] War games in 1909 and 1910 had shown that many Ottoman officers did not know how to efficiently move large bodies of troops such as divisions and corps, a deficiency that General Baron Colmar von der Goltz stated after watching the 1909 war games would take at least five years of training to address.[96]
The Ottoman army was divided into two classes; Nizamiye troops who were conscripted for five years; and Redif who were reservists who served for seven years.[97] Training of the Redif troops had been neglected for decades, and the 50,000 Rediftroops in the Balkans in 1912 had received extremely rudimentary training at best.[98] One German officer, Major Otto von Lossow serving with the Ottomans complained some of the Redif troops did not know how to handle or fire a rifle.[99]
Support services in the Ottoman army such as logistics and medical services were extremely poor.[99] There was a major shortage of doctors, no ambulances, few stretchers and the few medical faculties were entirely inadequate for treating the large numbers of wounded.[99] Most of the wounded died as a result, which damaged morale. In particular, the badly organized transport corps was so inefficient that it had been unable to supply the troops in the field with food, who were forced to resort to requisitioning food from the local villages.[99] Even so, Ottoman soldiers lived below the subsistence level with a daily diet of 90 grammes of cheese and 150 grammes of meat while having to march all day long, leaving much of the army sickly and exhausted.[99] The heavy rainfall in the fall of 1912 had turned the mud roads of the Balkans into quagmires which made it extremely difficult to supply the army in the field with ammunition, which led to constant ammunition shortages at the front.[100]
After the 1908 Revolution, the Ottoman officer corps had become politicized with many officers devoting themselves to politics at the expense of studying war.[101] Furthermore, the politicization of the Army had led to the Army being divided into factions, most notably between those who were members of the Committee of Union and Progress and those opposed to the CUP.[101] Additionally, the Ottoman officer corps had been divided between Alayli (“ranker”) officers who had been promoted up from NCOs and privates and the Mektepli (“college-trained”) officers who had graduated from the War College.[102] After the 1909 counter-revolution attempt, many of the Alayli officers had been purged.[102] The bulk of the Ottoman Army, comprising peasant conscripts from Anatolia were much more comfortable with the Alayli officers than with the Mektepli officers who came from a different social milieu.[102] Furthermore, the decision to conscript non-Muslims for the first time meant that jihad, the traditional motivating force for the Ottoman Army was not employed in 1912, something that the officers of the German military mission advising the Ottomans believed was bad for Muslim morale.[102]
So, my question is: what is the best PoD for the ottoman leadership to focus on eradicating the above military problems, preventing the disasters at Libya and the balkans?
Yesterday, i postulated on sultan Abdul Hamid II being assassinated in 1905, but i doubt that the time frame would be enough.