Meh.
For one thing, Austria-Hungary was going to collapse one way or another in 1917, when the Hungarians in their diet were going to make the abolition of the common army and the creation of an independent Hungarian foreign ministry the
sine qua non for the
Ausgleich negotiations. This would either have split Hungary off from Austria in every remaining sense, or it would have sparked a civil war, the end result of which would almost certainly have been a dissolution of the union (if the monarchy won, presumably it would be dissolved in favor of something federal or autocratic; if the Hungarians won, it'd all be over).
For another thing, the Austro-Hungarian military really was That Bad, and frankly the author's attempts to show otherwise are embarrassing. Yes, the Dual Monarchy had a military, and yes, it sometimes participated in victorious campaigns. But it was woefully undermanned, extremely poorly led (the author's transparent and futile efforts to rescue Conrad's image notwithstanding), indifferently equipped and supplied, and so on. Austria-Hungary's only quality troops and equipment were the 300,000 or so men in the regular army and their gear, and most of those were killed and the gear abandoned during the catastrophic routs in Galicia in 1914. After that point, the Dual Monarchy's military ceased to be fit for offensive operations.
Trialism was a farce - preserving a stupid, unworkable system with minor modifications that wouldn't actually fix anything and create even more of a bureaucratic headache. Federalism was just about as bad, being more politically sensible but less desirable to the various elements of the Habsburg polity and even more difficult to implement (much less implement in a way that would be generally satisfying to all parties). And the implementation of
either would have required a catastrophic and destructive civil war, and frankly, if you're going to have a civil war, why not go whole hog and reimpose the autocracy of the 1850s?
To be fair, the author acknowledges some of these concerns. But his method of acknowledging them is to point out that they existed, and then promptly state that the situation wasn't
that bad because of, uh, reasons. He claims that Austria-Hungary's military won "often over-looked victories" (what, exactly?). Then he states that Austria had "never been a militaristic country", which is itself a total lie, but even if it were true, presumably it would indicate the opposite of what he's trying to prove, namely, that the Dual Monarchy wasn't as decrepit and crappy as it's often described. At another point, he states that "few would deny" that Conrad's grand strategy was both workable and brilliant when in fact I can name several historians off the top of my head who
would deny such a thing (viz. Strachan, Zuber, Showalter, and Herwig). Stuff like that.
Anyway. Those paragraphs were very obviously written by a partisan and an apologist (although, mind you, it's kind of nice to see a black-yellow loyalist on the Internet; you don't get them very often, at least in my experience). The general thrust of what he has to say - that Austria-Hungary was not completely helpless, worthless, backward, decrepit, and weak - is more or less sound. Sure. But then he starts taking that conclusion to weird places. He lacks a basic understanding of the political situation in the Dual Monarchy, he ignores its parlous finances, and he glosses over the worst parts of its military while exaggerating its power rather dramatically.
In my Eurasian War timeline, I went to some lengths to sketch out the Habsburg situation, and although I spent less time on it than I would have liked, it still should make for a reasonably good perspective and something of a corrective to this article.
