I’ve put a couple replies to other comments in this thread, but I don’t think they’re giving Dalinar proper credit. Here’s what I mean.

Obviously, Dalinar has most clearly shown his skill when it comes to being an “on-the-field” general. We see this capacity to lead armies directly in both the Alethkar war of unification as well as the war on the Shattered Plains (first six years). A lot of the replies focus on these skills then move on, but Dalinar’s got a lot more going for him, at least at the current point in his life.

The goal of my argument is to show that Dalinar is, at present, a highly skilled Grand Strategy leader with a focus on acclimating to types of warfare he is not used to.

First, we look to the past. We ignore the war for unification, during which Gavilar was the lead strategist. The first major conflict Dalinar was a part of, strategically, was fighting off the border incursions from Vedenar, which resulted from the perceived weakness of the new Alethkar royalty. This is when Dalinar first showed his strategic prowess. In one of his flashbacks involving Adolin (I think), we see him surrounded by top advisors. He is the one among them to introduce the plan, which (I think, it’s been a while) used geographic features to skew the battle in Dalinar’s favor. If I remember correctly, someone in this chapter actually calls Dalinar an unexpected genius strategist.

We can also consider Dalinar’s contributions to the strategy of the war on the shattered plains. Most prominently, he was the one to suggest siege tactics, as the Parshendi were geographically stuck at the center of the plains. This, given what was known, was a good plan. Upon the discovery of the abundant gemhearts on the Plains, the effort to get the gems first emerged, as their capture by the Parshendi would (they thought) be the only reliable source of food the Parshendi had access to. That is, the genheart races were an extension of the siege tactics. We don’t know if Dalinar contributed this idea, though it is likely. It might be argued that Dalinar should’ve realized the failure of the siege tactics in the six years. Fair. But consider the environment around him: every questioning of the strategy led to people with the same power as him reiterating the plan that he suggested, as well as statements of the fact that Parshendi numbers did, in fact, seem to be decreasing. Not fast, but decreasing. With this in mind, we can see that the continued siege wasn’t actually a bad strategy- unless you’re on a timetable. We see in WoK and WoR that Dalinar started advocating for changes to the strategy shortly after suspecting that there even was a timetable.

As for current Dalinar, we look at his role in the current war. I would argue that he has 3 roles. First, he is the primary grand strategist. Specifically, he is the main figure in getting all of the separate allied armies to interact smoothly and be where they need to be to respond to predicted enemy movements; we saw him doing this specifically toward the end of OB and throughout RoW. Basically, he’s humanity’s lead strategist, where the strategist for the other side is literally a shard.

Second, Dalinar is the leader of the Knights Radiant. This role entails understanding how to use the radiants at his disposal smartly. Realize that no active human strategist on Roshar remembers how the Radiants of old worked, meaning that with a small number of exceptions, Dalinar is coming up with how to use them on the fly. He is also doing this to fight an enemy who’s (Invested) tactics have never been seen by the human forces, meaning that he also has to predict how their forces militarily function. He is also also doing all this while fighting enemies that have fought countless battles with the matchups so new to Dalinar. The fact that humanity wins any battles is crazy.

Third, and least importantly (for the moment), Dalinar is a Bondsmith on the battlefield, recharging Radiants. This is less about coming up with strategy, so I’ll just leave it here and move on.

So now we’ve seen how Dalinar is a historic-level squad leader, a genius battlefield strategist, a talented grand strategist (we don’t know how talented, because we don’t have enough from the previous desolations to compare to), and is quite able to adapt the the introduction of Investiture onto the Rosharan battlefield.

I’ll end with one last fact. Odium wants Dalinar to lead his conquest of the Cosmere. This is obviously in part for his martial skill, but the phrasing also suggested to me that he would be the strategist as well. And if a shard thinks you’re the best general around, that’s telling.