Basic Trope: An incompetent military commander of the highest order.
- Straight: Gen. Millhouse of Company D is best known for never winning a battle, due to his inability to keep his secret plans secret.
- Exaggerated:
- Gen. Millhouse of Company D is best known for never winning a battle, because he refuses to keep a clock; thus, he's either too early or too late to spring a surprise attack on his enemy.
- Gen. Millhouse of Company D doesn't understand the concept of winning or losing.
- Downplayed: Gen. Millhouse of Company D is known for being a decent general. Unfortunately, his battles are all fought against hyper-competent foes, who often seem to know his plan before he came up with it.
- Justified:
- His placement on Company D is part of a plan of some kind.
- Gen. Millhouse's side suffered horrible losses previously and needed to fill gaps in its command structure, resulting in Millhouse undergoing You Are in Command Now. However good he was in handling small-unit tactics or even field-level strategy, high command is a whole different ballgame, one he's not up to handling.
- He's in a high position because of his who his friends and/or family are, not because of his skills or experience.
- Gen. Millhouse should have retired in 1995, now he's just a Scatterbrained Senior.
- Gen. Millhouse's tactics are outdated and being a firm believer in Older Is Better, he refuses to keep up with the times.
- Inverted:
- Subverted: Gen. Millhouse is just a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass...
- Double Subverted:
- ...with more emphasis on moron.
- ...who's a Modern Major General; he can fight better than his subordinates but is completely incompetent at commanding an army.
- (from Averted) Brightest doesn't say a lot when Company D's IQ totals 55.
- … or when the whole army's IQ is in that range.
- Parodied:
- Gen. Millhouse gets high on a daily basis, frequently plots improbable strategies, and plays Russian Roulette because he thinks it's a fun game.
- (At security monitor) "I keep clicking on the tank, but it won't answer! I think the game's broken, man!"
- Zig Zagged: Gen. Millhouse is a mad man one day, a bright one the next.
- Averted: Gen. Millhouse is the brightest man on Company D, period.
- Enforced: "Let's show them all what not to do in a war! Make one general a total dunce!"
- Lampshaded: "I wonder how somebody that incompetent became an officer."
- Invoked: "Don't assign Millhouse to lead this operation! That idiot might as well be working for the enemy!" Guess what they're gonna do.
- Exploited: General Mohl, who actually works for the enemy, deliberately assigns General Millhouse to the strategically important Company D just before a major attack.
- Defied: Gen. Millhouse is stripped of his command once it's apparent how stupid he is.
- Discussed: "What planet is that Gen. Millhouse from?!"
- Conversed: "How did the supposedly invincible Company D end up with such an idiot commanding officer?"
- Implied:
- In the strategy game Tropian Wars, your first few missions as a commander have you taking over for Millhouse. As you get further into the game, the player learns strategy and only then can realize what a mess the troops were in during the first level.
- Gen. Millhouse is only seen in command once and that is before the Troperian Forces get stomped.
- Deconstructed: Gen. Millhouse's stupidity gets his men and everyone around him into deep trouble, and he's called out for his idiocy before he's stripped of command or court martialed.
- Reconstructed: ...But that was actually part of The Plan to win the war in the first place...
- Plotted A Good Waste: Millhouse never has a significant improvement. When it seems he may be using better tactics, he ends up wasting the opportunity he made and loses yet another battle.
- Played For Laughs: It's not that Millhouse is bad; it's that it's impossible for him to win a battle, but everything gets pinned on him, including soldiers taking breaks, defying orders, or incredibly random items like a plane suddenly crashing on an allied building.
- Played For Drama:
- Gen. Millhouse callously throws his troops at the enemy, resulting in mass casualties on both sides.
- Gen. Millhouse is a traitor who is intentionally sabotaging the war effort by being so incompetent.
- Played For Horror: Gen. Millhouse is not a bad general and tries his best; unfortunately, the surroundings he works in are a Kafkaesque hell where nothing ever goes right, and Millhouse is eventually stripped of command after one too many of his soldiers die to random strokes of misfortune and he suffers a nervous breakdown.
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