Tactics is the art of battlefield destruction of the enemy; its essence is the concentration of strength against enemy weakness in space and time. Tactical success, like that at the operational level, requires seasoned and daring leadership, creative freedom for subordinates, foresight, coordination, movement and surprise, firepower, and support. The three services displayed varying degrees of tactical inadequacy. The army's recruitment, training, and promotion policies; tactical intelligence and reconnaissance; tactical communications; ability to engage the enemy in a coordinated manner; and logistical support of its combat units were all moderately to severely deficient.

Part of the inheritance of the Regio Esercito hierarchy was a congenital inability to create effective fighting units. Fear of regional mutinies and the Liberal state's hope that military service would “make Italians” had from the mid-1870s dictated the recruitment of each regiment from several different regions and its stationing in yet another region. Only the Alpine divisions, in which each battalion derived from the close-knit mountain communities of a particular valley, were exempt. Neither the battlefield disadvantages of national recruitment in a society fractured by dialects, nor the enormously slow and cumbersome mobilization system that resulted, nor the obvious success of the German and British armies in creating strikingly cohesive regiments and battalions through regional recruitment led to revision of what by the 1940s had become time-hallowed dogma.

Relentless individual and unit training might have redeemed the performance of units thrown together from disparate human materials. The obvious alternatives or complements to such training were ideological fanaticism on the one hand, and on the other the disciplinary terror that the Italian high command of 1915–18 and the Wehrmacht of 1941–45 practiced enthusiastically.