Very few books give enough details to criticize or applaud, when they do they usually just rewording a classic battle like agincourt or gettysburg, I think I've read a small horde of books where the exciting battle was just agincourt 2.0 with orcs or something. I'd say the default bone to pick would be a tendency of 'brilliant' characters to ignore amazingly simple solutions to problems, but that's not just tactics obviously, I remember one series where they were full of experts and not one thought of using handwriting analysis to find out who the bad guy was, evne though they had samples of his writing, samples of the culprits writing, and even suspected the guy. From a strategic POV, they tend to just overlook obvious stuff, just to give a quick familiar example, on hearing that the Shaido were marching towards CArhein, Rand didn't set his own force marching and proceed to take a hundred or so Aiel skimming ahead to ambush and harass, then skim back, grab more and repeat. That's an obvious tactic since he does transport troops that way at the end of the book, but it doesn't get used, and RJ even repeatedly talks about the advantages of small forces for harrassing and elaying the enemy, so it was surprising it wasn't done. RJ's way better at writing such things than most too, but ironically he's easier to pick on because he actually does give details and fairly solid details in most occassions. Sort of like in Sci-fi, nobody complains about the bizarre piece of supertech until they try to explain it scientifically and suddenly it's not a miracle plot piece but something specific and specifically wrong at that.