You give him credit for too much cleverness. My impression was that he's just another blundering American.

Captain Renault: We musn't underestimate "American blundering". I was with them when they "blundered" into Berlin in 1918.

My father is a veteran of Normandy and The Battle of the Bulge. The way he describes it: "We won because we fucked up less than the other guys."

At a high-end ambassadorial type cocktail party, an ambassador was talking to the German ambassador how weak, unorganized, and ineffectual the American army was. The German ambassador looked him in the eye and said, "Yah, we thought so too - twice".