He wasn't and didn't, famously.

As for why he was as successful as he was, simply put, he was a great military leader with a sense of strategy, tactics, and organization, and his army was almost fanatical in terms of their loyalty to him.

His tactics were quite innovative for the time:

• Talented usage of artillery and cavalry
• Surprise attacks
• Quick movement of his armies across land, often ignoring supply lines and using local resources
• Extremely high morale of his army - Napoleon knew how to make soldiers loyal and inspire them

He also gained huge support of civil population in France, meaning that he got his back covered throughout the wars.

Because France had its popular uprising, and no longer was a monarchy, he had access to a substantially larger army than any other leader of the time. His grande armee was over a million, which is a truly colossal number at the time, and it would take a coalition of multiple nations banding together to come up with similar numbers.

Because he was really good at what he did, and he had behind him a country with very motivated population that has just recently overthrown monarchy in a successful and popular revolution.

Something not mentioned yet is that France had a massive population for the time, and thus a much larger army

Firstly he was a good publicist and claimed victories for battles which were actually draws. Next he used his army's ability to forage on the move to march faster without a huge slow moving baggage train so could get his forces to s crisis point quicker than the opposition though this would upset the locals where he was marching through which would come back to bite him later. Next he attempted to fight opposing armies in detail, so use the large part of his army to batter away at a smaller army until it surrendered then turn the army towards another force which was being delayed by a smaller group of his army and defeat that one in turn, continue to repeat his until all opposition is crushed. Finally unlike most armies he didn't bother with sieges where his army potentially could be tied down in the same location for weeks instead he either took places by storm or ignored them and defeated armies in the field until there was no armed forces left to defend the towns.

One of the big factors was reorganising the logistics train such as lighter equipment to advancing on wider front to improve forage. This dependence on forage, made a smaller supply train and allowed swift movement that allowed him to choose where and when to fight. This fell apart with the guerrilla war in Spain and the retreat from Moscow where he was forced to fall back or the same path as his advance and the Russians using scorched earth tactics.

To build on what some others have pointed out:

He would divide his forces into smaller units. This would allow them to cover more territory/ strategic points. This gives you multiple places to defend against any enemy strikes as well as allows you to forage for food a lot easier, as feeding 500 men in ten different cities is much easier than feeding 5000 men in one city.

You might think that defending multiple fronts is terrible, and you'd be right, but the enemy would do the same thing to counter your armies from encircling them. If they didn't split their forces, then you would possibly disrupt their own supply lines or take vital cities.

If they did split their forces, Napoleon would then gather up most of his forces from each of his different parts of his army, march them through the night or through the early morning, and then attack the divided enemy forces. Once a majority of the enemy was routed, he would go back and try and save all the smaller skeleton crews he had left behind to stall the enemy from uniting his forces.

He would do this while adding in some truly ingenious artillery and infantry tactics. His cavalry tactics weren't great, but he had a lot of great cavalry generals help him with those tactics (as well as great infantry and artillery generals). His generals were generally better than their counterparts in opposing armies, too. This is because they were not only getting a lot of experience in fighting, but also Napoleon started building his officers out of a meritocracy and not a monarchy's lords and nobles.

He also broke his army up into smaller yet still complete units. Which made huge supply lines unnecessary.

[removed]

Please read this entire message

Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):

• Loaded questions, or ones based on a false premise, are not allowed on ELI5 (Rule 6).

If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the detailed rules first. If you believe this was removed erroneously, please use this form and we will review your submission.

Please read this entire message

Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):

Loaded questions, or ones based on a false premise, are not allowed on ELI5. A loaded question is one that posits a specific view of reality and asks for explanations that confirm it. These usually include the poster's own opinion and bias, but do not always - there is overlap between this and parts of Rule 2. Note that this specifically includes false premises.

If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the detailed rules first. If you believe this submission was removed erroneously, please use this form and we will review your submission.