The Foxhole Reloaded... Again!

General Category => Off topic and silly / funny => Topic started by: Starfox on Sep 27, 2025, 10:01 AM

Title: The 100 militaries that won the most battles across history?
Post by: Starfox on Sep 27, 2025, 10:01 AM
From the lowest to highest here are the number of battles won by the 100 top military powers across history. Some of those nations don't exist anymore (obviously) like Ancient Rome, Sparta, or the Republic of Texas.

I double checked the figures myself because some numbers seemed odd to me but they appear to be roughly correct according to several different sources, including ChatGPT.

Some numbers are presented in a way that may appear odd to some people but make sense. For example the number of battles won during the American Civil War by the Confederacy is indicated on its own while there is no number indicated for the Union side of the war (this number is included instead in the total for the USA which excludes Confederates wins).

As well, there are separated numbers for Brittany and Normandy (currently parts of France) because at some point the Duchy of Normandy was a vassal of France but not a part of France and Brittany was its own state (it only became part of France roughly a century after the 100 years war).

Some numbers might be puzzling (why only 23 wins for the Spartans, weren't they badasses?) You got to remember that the Spartans were more than 2000 years ago, at a time when Greece was a patchwork of city-states and the wars back then were much less numerous than they are today so 23 is a high number... for the era.

Some flags may be confusing as well. There is the Russian flag applied to both Russia and White Russians. White Russians were members of the White Movement that opposed the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil war between 1917 and 1922. The Russian flag is applied to the USSR as well because when this video says "Russia" it refers to the whole history of Russia from the beginning to the current Russian Federation, including the USSR.

Russia is part of those nations that have changed form through centuries like the UK and France (when it is so the different names the nation had are indicated below the flag).

And yeah, honorable mention to the Papal States (currently Vatican) which won 15 battles (1 more than the Republic of Texas) despite the fact that they had virtually no army -- they mostly hired mercenaries. That may surprise a lot of people but across history Popes were very much involved in European politics, including the occasional use of military force... until Napoleon went and slap the Pope of the time in the face (virtually of course) telling him that from now on the Vatican would mind its own business and not interfere in problems that were none of its concerns (I can think of a few other leaders who tried that after him with much less success).

Finally the video must have been updated with new "info" at some point because the thumbnail doesn't present the numbers acknowledged today.



If anything, this little video makes it obvious why UK and France eventually decided to become allies in 1904 after centuries of confrontations. What's the point of fighting when you mostly end up tied anyway? :D

But this video is for laughs. It's actually based on folks knowledge and understanding, not what historians call academic facts.

According to Historians (and I agree) trying to tally real numbers is more difficult than it sounds. It depends on the era, the seriousness of the record keeping by all sides of a conflict and what you decide to call a "battle". Is a skirmish sufficient? Personally I don't think so. Historians don't seem to think so either. For example, before the battle of Waterloo there were a number of little battles and skirmishes but the only battle that history truly remembers is Waterloo because of its definitive impact on all the events that followed in Europe. Who ever heard of the battle of Quatre Bras (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Quatre_Bras), who took place two days before Waterloo and was marked as "inconclusive" (British tactical victory vs French strategic victory -- this battle could have been "important" and completely scrapped Waterloo if Marshal Ney, commanding the French side, had made some decisions he didn't make but as they say, hindsight is 20/20)?

According to the historian Niall Ferguson, who actually tried to compile a list with the strictest numbers not based on wide definitions -- unlike in the video above, which present the widely accepted popular view -- once all the counting and categorizing of battles since 387 BC is done, the top result is still France but with a much lower number including only "important" battles, the ones that actually achieved a change in history or the course of a war: 109 wins, 49 losses and 10 drawn over the 169 "important" world battles recorded -- apparently France was excluded from one of them, I wonder which... It wasn't Yorktown, we were there. :D

The video is still amusing though, even if a "tiny" bit exaggerated (my guess is that every confrontations ever recorded in history is included in there from squabbles between two soldiers to full blown battles). XD