Ishida Mitsunari

An able administrator who had run the cadastral survey and the logistics of the Korean campaigns, and whose operational plan at Sekigahara was militarily sound. What broke was not the plan but the premise that the body of men called the Western army would obey orders. He was one of five commissioners, with no authority to guarantee anyone's landholding; he acted in the name of a house whose head was a boy of seven. He could not play Ieyasu's move because he did not have the standing to play it.

Strategic signature — a sound plan made without the standing to order it

Ishida Mitsunari was not incompetent. He was an able administrator who had run Hideyoshi's cadastral survey and the logistics of the Korean campaigns, and the operational plan at Sekigahara — leaving Ōgaki castle to receive the Eastern army on that ground — was militarily sound²³.

What broke was not the plan but its premise: that the body of men called the Western army would obey orders. He was one of five commissioners, without authority to guarantee anyone's landholding. He acted in the name of the Toyotomi house, whose head was a boy of seven. He could not play Ieyasu's move because he did not have the standing to play it.

Recurring patterns

A sound plan is not the standing to execute it

The quality of an operation and the authority to make people carry it out are entirely different capacities.

You cannot negotiate what you cannot promise

Someone who cannot guarantee land cannot give anyone a reason to stay still. Negotiation is a function of standing.

Borrowed legitimacy

He acted in the name of a house whose head was seven. Borrowed legitimacy collapses the moment it is pressed.

Strengths and limits

Strength

Can run administration and supply; he assembled a large army quickly.

Limit

Whether an assembled army obeys is a separate question. The power to gather numbers is not the power to move them.

Connection to Sekigahara

Paullus at Cannae, Boucicaut at Agincourt, Pemberton at Vicksburg. A correct reading losing to a structure makes its eighth appearance here, this time in the variant "the man commanding has no standing to command".

Portrait of Ishida Mitsunari (detail), 18th–19th century, held by the Sugiyama family, his descendants. Not a contemporary likeness. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons