Most irrational and counter intuitive decisions ever made

Chiang Kai-shek deciding that the best way to win the Taiwanese over is by opening fire on them, and keeping on doing that, even after he's lost the civil war and has nowhere else to go.
 
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The Great Leap Forwards! AKA "Let's allow inexperienced idiots with zero management skills be in charge of major projects because they're loyal Communists! Also, Steel production is whatever I say it is!"

Also, the Four Pests Campaign.
 
The Great Leap Forwards! AKA "Let's allow inexperienced idiots with zero management skills be in charge of major projects because they're loyal Communists! Also, Steel production is whatever I say it is!"

Also, the Four Pests Campaign.

Oh yes, and that. Plus "in which the entire country is plunged into an orgy of violence courtesy of homicidal teenagers because I do not like taking the heat for said Great Leap Backwards, also I don't care if you were loyal and faithful, you must die in public."
 
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Not allowing the Sixth Army to break out of Stalingrad when it still could is up there with irrational decisions.

Not following up on the successful Romanian defense along the Don in October should be higher, as the Germans had mobile forces to attack the exhausted Soviets in their bridgeheads over the river. They ultimately used them for little gain in Stalingrad, while the Soviets recovered, built up their logistics, and ultimately launched the encirclement from these positions in November.
 
"What are these damn Brit agents yakking about? Hitler attacking me? What bullcrap! We'll be just fine..."

Okay, sure, Stalin thought the British were trying to drag him into the war, and the Germans did some actually decent maskirovska work prior to Barbarossa, but did he really think Herr Hitler would just wait for the USSR to fight on its terms?
 
Barbarossa's infamous enough as it is, and so is the Japanese military's decision to fight a two-front war. But any from WW1?
The leadup to the war was more tragedy and compounded grudges than farce, sadly, but I got a nice one.

"Glory to the Great Soviet Revolution! Now that the Proletariat are victorious, we don't need an army! Disband that shit! Wait, what do you mean we're still at war with Germany?!"

Or.

"We need to distract the USA from fighting in our war. I got it! Let's get Mexico on our side, promise them the territory they can't realistically take or hold, and give them no weapons or supplies to fight with! Genius!"
 
Stalin's decision to start the Winter War. For what?
Well, he did want a safety zone for Leningrad and a bigger Baltic Sea coastline. And he (eventually) won that safe zone. Though admittedly, preparations, logistics, and planning were all in the crapper.

It also showed the weaknesses of the Red Army. Imagine if Stalin hadn't ironed out the worst of the problems by the time of Barbarossa?
 
Well, he did want a safety zone for Leningrad and a bigger Baltic Sea coastline. And he (eventually) won that safe zone. Though admittedly, preparations, logistics, and planning were all in the crapper.

It also showed the weaknesses of the Red Army. Imagine if Stalin hadn't ironed out the worst of the problems by the time of Barbarossa?

The safety zone which resulted in a Finnish attack in 1941 and Siege of Leningrad... Winter War did reveal problems with the Red Army, but at a very high cost, Finnish participation in Barbarossa as well as significant casualties. Without the Winter War Stalin would have had dozens of more divisions to meet the German threat as well as a shorter frontline.
 
The leadup to the war was more tragedy and compounded grudges than farce, sadly, but I got a nice one.

"Glory to the Great Soviet Revolution! Now that the Proletariat are victorious, we don't need an army! Disband that shit! Wait, what do you mean we're still at war with Germany?!"

Or.

"We need to distract the USA from fighting in our war. I got it! Let's get Mexico on our side, promise them the territory they can't realistically take or hold, and give them no weapons or supplies to fight with! Genius!"

Wasn't the Mexico thing an invention from the Brits to get the US in the war? Or did they just intercept the message and (conveniently) informed the White House?
 
Wasn't the Mexico thing an invention from the Brits to get the US in the war? Or did they just intercept the message and (conveniently) informed the White House?

No, it was the real deal Bougnas(& if it
sounds like lunacy undiluted, it was. That’s
why a # of posters up above are mentioning
it). The British had indeed intercepted the
message & turned it over to the Americans
(but via the American ambassador to Great
Britain Walter Page; later First Lord of the Admirality Arthur Balfour would call the
moment he handed Page the telegram “the
most dramatic in all my life.”*) The tele-
gram whose authenticity is still being de-
bated today is the Zinoviev telegram of
1924. This was supposed to be a cable from
Gregori Zinoviev, head of the Communist
International, to the British Communist Party
directing it to do all it could to forment rev-
olution in Great Britain. It has been charged
that this document was a forgery, made up by British intelligence, in order to frighten British voters into voting against the Labour party in that year’s general election(& when the letter was made public, the electorate did indeed turn against Labour, handing the
Conservative party a decisive victory).

*- Quoted in Christopher Andrew, HER MAJ-
ESTY’S SECRET SERVICE, p. 111 of the 1987, Penguin paperback edition. An encyc-
lopedic history of the British intelligence
agencies MI5 & MI6(the British equivalents
of our FBI & CIA)from their beginnings up
through WWII.
 
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I suppose the obvious one is picking a fight with Britain, the USA and the USSR at the same time while all 3 are allies, and it's debatable whether you could even beat one of them on its own.
 
Well, on December 7, it was the 77th anniversary of one of the more counter-intuitive decisions of all time: the Japanese attacking the US fleet in Pearl Harbor...

Basically, that was national suicide for the Japanese...
 
Democratic Kampuchea was like an orwell novel come to a life. Most people didn't even know who their country's leader was, the party simply called the leadership Angkar (literally just "the organization" in Khmer).
Literally a Kafka novel with how surreal it was.
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Barbarossa's infamous enough as it is, and so is the Japanese military's decision to fight a two-front war. But any from WW1?

"Let get all our soldiers to line up in perfect rows and march them straight at the enemy positions. Our artillery, despite not enough big guns and lots of defective shells, should totally destroy the entire enemy position and we can break through the whole line and win the war! Sure, it hasn't worked before, but it should this time, since we have a lot of fresh, barely trained volunteers!"

British Generals right before the Battle of the Somme, 1916
 
Well, on December 7, it was the 77th anniversary of one of the more counter-intuitive decisions of all time: the Japanese attacking the US fleet in Pearl Harbor...

Basically, that was national suicide for the Japanese...

"The best way to keep a much bigger, more powerful nation out of a war who have a habit of sending Marines to small Caribbean islands when their companies are under threat and last entered a war because the Germans sank ships without warning... is to launch a surprise attack on their biggest naval base, sink a bunch of battleships, and cow them into submission while we take over the rest of the British and Dutch territories in South East Asia... all so we can have the resources to fight in China!"

What a chain of logic this was.
 
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