Note: I kinda enjoyed Attack on Titan. More on the level of "eh, it looks pretty" than anything else
Those are some of the stupidest fuckers I've ever had the "pleasure" of watching. Their military has literally the worst training of any I've ever seen in something that was intended to be taken seriously.
Seriously, watch any combat scene; there is not really any coordination between the characters, beyond the most basic. It's as if they haven't been trained to work together as a team. Hell, the "elite" unit is filled with quirky characters who are individually good at what they do, instead of being a cohesive unit that uses coordination to take down the enemy.
And another thing: whose stupid idea was it to use swords to fight something 4+ metres tall? Seriously, if you gave me an enemy that required an extremely precise blow to kill, my first idea wouldn't be "invent a device that swings people around so quickly that they need specialized training to not panic, and then hand them swords."
It would be "whaling harpoons. We need whaling harpoons." OK, not necessarily whaling harpoons, but an explosive-tipped spear isn't a difficult concept, and they have the technology to launch small objects at something with extreme accuracy. It would result in a lot less of your soldiers being dead, idiots.
And another thing: the characters don't really have any connection to each-other. Seriously, it results in the characters being rather flat, because we're left with their motivations, and motivations don't carry a character.
Now, before people yell at me vis-a-vis "Rule of Cool"; I like the Rule of Cool. Attack on Titan, however, is thematically one of those things where Rule of Cool just doesn't fit with the rest of the series.
Looking back, I feel like Attack on Titan can be compared in many ways to Evangelion; both are about a "military" facing down a superior threat, on the edge of despair. Ignore for a second that Eren is Generic Shonen Protagonist #1324345 (seriously, there isn't much about his character other than "want to kill Titans.") and Shinji is a depressing sad sack; you can't argue though, that NERV doesn't handle their problems better.
NERV plotted out their strategies every step of the way, and acted as a reasonably cohesive force (despite the fact that one of the big themes of Eva is "wow, these people are really, really shitty at communicating"). They kinda realized that the battlefield isn't the time for bullshit. In other words, they acted like a military force.
The "army" in Attack on Titan, on the other hand, acts more like a militia; they have horrible morale, they make no real effort to learn about their enemy or their instincts, and just generally acts like a bunch of individuals that just happen to be fighting in the same general area at the same time.
Finally... am I the only one sick of Regeneration on monsters in like every anime? I know that they need some justification for whatever crazy gimmick they are using instead of just "let the army take care of it", and something to make the "characters who tries fighting it who isn't a main character" get terrified at because "oh noes, our attacks don't do anything", but seriously?
There are tons of ways that aren't "the monster is immune to everything but this one particular method of killing them."
I just wanna see smart monsters...
