The defeat at Caporetto in 1917 has remained in the collective Italian memory as the defeat par excellence. Immediately after the battle in which Austro-German troops broke through the front, the hunt for the culprits began. Generalissimo Cadorna accused the troops of cowardice, who, incited by the socialists, had surrendered without a fight, while fellow generals of the Royal Army passed tactical blame back and forth, blaming the incorrect use of artillery and the positioning of units. Finally, the commission of inquiry also highlighted the inhumane methods of army leadership adopted up to that point, which had compromised the soldiers' morale. In all of this, we must also consider the enemy's merits, who attacked our front in the Caporetto area with a new tactic: "infiltration." Unlike our units, the German troops, and by imitation the Austrian ones, had developed a method of attack that no longer involved a simple frontal assault on enemy trenches by a large shock mass of men, but rather the targeted action of small units, so-called "sturmtruppen," highly trained and equipped with transportable machine guns. These units were tasked with exploiting gaps in the enemy front created by bombardment, whether due to terrain or fog, to infiltrate enemy lines, outflank them, and strike them by surprise with machine-gun fire from the flanks or rear. If an enemy stronghold continued to resist, these troops were ordered not to persist in conquering it, but to continue their advance toward the enemy command centres to provoke their flight and leave the enemy units without orders. In this way, even where the enemy initially resisted, as the penetration progressed, they would soon find themselves surrounded and forced to surrender. In this way, many Italian units that had withstood the initial onslaught were forced to surrender. This tactical innovation was favoured by the high level of autonomy granted to officers of small units in the German army, an autonomy that was completely absent in the Italian army, where the existing specific assault troops, the so-called "Arditi," were still used only for targeted, particularly risky actions and not for large-scale breakthrough offensives. The tactical evolution that won victory for the forces of the Central Powers was quickly adopted by virtually all armies, including the Italian one.