For all those who don't know, Alltime10s is a pretty famous youtube channel well known for generating countdowns of the top 10 of anything you can think of. And occasionally, their videos have fuck-ups in them.

Take this one, in which they state that Napoleon and Hitler invaded Russia while being "completely unprepared."

For one, no army executes any offensive operation without any preparation whatsoever, primarily because well, there's a reason it's called an "operation." You don't just throw troops at the enemy like wood into a fire, you make sure that you can actually cause serious harm to the enemy. Hence, to state that the French and the Germans were "completely unprepared" while invading Russia is wrong on a fundamental level.

Furthermore, there are many factors that complicate a discussion of how "stupid" Barbarossa supposedly was. I'm only going to deal with the German invasion of the Soviet Union as that is a topic I have some knowledge in, but if anyone is willing to discuss the French invasion in a similar context, they are welcome to do so.

Military History Visualized has made a great video on the same topic. To put it simply (a) hindsight is always 20/20 (b) Germany won in almost every engagement on the eastern front in WWI in spite of numerical inferiority, which ultimately culminated in the collapse of the Russian army and forced them to sign a peace treaty (c) The Germans also utterly crushed armies in the western front at the beginning of WW2, through highly successful mobile warfare, something that they never managed to do in WW1 (d) The Red Army was still terribly incompetent at the beginning of WW2, thanks to Stalin's utterly idiotic purges, incompetence that was highlighted by the heavy casualties suffered by the Soviets during the Winter War of 1939-1940. This incompetence served to undermine the Red Army's reputation. Hence, if we look back at the context of 1940, the Red Army truly did appear to be inferior in comparison to Nazi Germany's armed forces.

In addition, the Germans, as I implied earlier, did undergo a significant amount of preparation before Barbarossa. The plans can be seen on this wikipedia page. Part of the planning involved reviewing Napoleon's failed invasion.

German military planners also researched Napoleon's failed invasion of Russia. In their calculations, they concluded that there was little danger of a large-scale retreat of the Red Army into the Russian interior, as it could not afford to give up the Baltic states, Ukraine, or the Moscow and Leningrad regions, all of which were vital to the Red Army for supply reasons and would thus have to be defended.

The very fact that they did carefully review and make some sort of risk assessment shows that a significant amount of thought was put into the whole thing.

That is not to say that the German invasion plan wasn't without its flaws. The Germans had a persistent knack of underestimating Soviet strength and tenacity, thought that the war would be over in a few months, and failed to give two flying fucks for logistics over the vast expanse of the Soviet Union thanks in part to poor communication between logisticians and the high command, among many, many other failings. These were failures that Nazi Germany would pay for dearly in May 1945, as Berlin was reduced to a pile of smoking rubble. HOWEVER, there is a difference between saying that the Germans were poorly prepared as compared to saying that they were completely unprepared. It is inaccurate and disrespectful to imply that the Allies had to put in so much effort to take down an enemy that was supposedly formed of a bunch of incompetent, bumbling fuckwits who couldn't put two and two together.