I read through the article and agree wholeheartedly with Brigadier-General Treuting with his overall assessment, especially regarding the source of the data and Will's comment that the assessment "lacks nuance".
The data must be flawed as it says about three-quarters of the way through the article that "Napoleon’s total WAR was nearly 23 standard deviations above the mean WAR accumulated by generals in the dataset". I agree that Napoleon was a truly great general but "23 standard deviations above the mean", really? That's a gigantic number. Although I can't convert the exact odds of 23 standard to odds I can say, using the very Wikipedia (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation) that he used in the analysis that the chances of something being a 'mere' 7σ above the mean is practically 1: 400 billion! Given his sample size to have one (i.e. Napoleon) that lies so far from the mean should have told him that either the data is corrupted in some manner or that the methodology was flawed. That there are others (e.g. Julius Caesar) that lie far outside the mean leads me to think that both the data and the methodology are flawed.
I was pleased to see that the author of the data says "In no way do I claim my analysis provides the full picture, or anything close to it." However, that's a massive amount of work to show, well, nothing.