Applicability of real-world military tactics?

I study (albeit informally) military history, slightly different, but relevant, lack of expertise notwithstanding. Though I've never played DBA or DBM and their ilk.

The answer is yes, but only to a certain extent. Owing to the relatively static nature of attacks, actual battlefield tactics is has limited applicability. The removal of morale kinda buggers up the idea that an attritional loss can still lead to victory by assassination or scenario victory. Since it is purely set-piece as opposed to modern mission-type tactics/auftragstaktik or whatever label you want to put on it, the idea of an encounter battle is chucked out. Basic tactics (refused flank/en echelon being the obvious one) can be applied, but only for attrition. I think this is part of the reason why Circle is always so salty about being unable to leverage the hit-n-run tactics that their faction was conceptually based on. The table is no longer large enough for a genuinely high-speed army to go trolling shield-walls a la Carrhae.

In terms of casualties, we as gamers by and large don't care about battlefield losses on a tactical level because the result of the game is your be all and end all. However, unless generals know for sure that the battle they're fighting will be decisive in determining a war's result, they will genuinely care about the losses they sustain. I'm playing Napoleon Total War atm, and sure, my losses per victory will be on the order of 5%, but inflict 75%+ casualties on my enemy. 75% casualties rarely happens for morale, continuity and practicality purposes (and typical game losses in WMH are variable based on mode of victory, but it can be as bad as nigh 100%... for the victor!). Soldiers that see three out of four of their colleagues die won't stick around, nor will they willingly follow a commander that allows such a result. Now, I say continuity because if you play an attrition based campaign for tabletop, under most rules systems now, the campaign is over by the second battle unless you have very flexible reinforcements rules/abilities. You win the first game on scenario but your army's wrecked. Your opponent wins the attrition and steamrollers you next round. If we as tabletop gamers acted as generals and appreciate that losses are permanent from game to game (or at the very least that replacements are either very slow in coming, or slow in coming and crap), our willingness to grind out a game to 6 turns would not be so great. However, that said, it would make games very boring... whoever gets the first discernable attritional advantage wins.

And on the whole, tabletop gaming suffers from the same problems as RTT/RTS games for having no accurate fog of war (whether literal or Clausewitzian) equivalent applied. Terrain in WMH is not really reflective of what they do on the battlefield, like hills. If you have infantry on a reverse slope, chances are, they'll hunker down and remove LoS (and other situations, this is just the first one that came to mind). WMH tends to employ more stratagems rather than tactics, since only general tactics can be used owing to the low priority of attrition (whether general or as a result of localised superiority/supremacy and consequent effects on morale) when compared to actual warfare.

The most easy real world tactics to apply is overwhelm the enemy with sheer number of forces, at least regionally each times when you fight. Such as dispatching many ranged weapons and concentrate fire on the enemy and pick the important target first. Ranged weapons are easy to set the target and concentrate the fire than melee weapons, means you can pick the fight and the participant in the small combat.

As with any simulation, only up to a point. Flanking has value, as does overlapping fields of fire or some degree of hit and run (e.g. stepping into a forest to fire then repositioning back out). I still don't take the blockhouse with Trenchers because I prefer a mobile army, and stuff that is mobile (and by extension, fast things too) can dictate the flow of battle a bit more.

I think Warmachine is similar to WW1, clueless generals running their troops into certain death to try and take arbitrary pieces of land

Nope. If you want military tactics pick up a myriad of great hex games.

What Warmachine _IS_ about is chess. If you are good at that game you are good at warmachine - especially in Mark3 with premeasuring.

How would buying an ELO boost work in Warmachine? Asking for a friend.

I have LONG thought that WM could benefit from an ELO system because it would allow for handicapping. I also get that it further pushes the game toward one side of the competitive/casual spectrum.