Tactical victories do not necessarily translate into Operational victories; Operational victories do not necessarily translate into Strategic victories.

We could go over the obvious, numerous, strategic blunders the Axis made, but why trod a beaten path? We all know them; primary schoolchildren are often able to name a few. Lets take it down to the Operational level for a moment; because there's firm evidence that Germany began to lose its grip on reality following Fall Gelb. Why? Well, there's a lot of reasons, lets start with a political one.

Fedor von Bock was one of the foremost operational and strategic planners of Germany during the early stages of WWII, himself, along with others, such as Rundstedt and Manstein, would be increasingly marginalized, repeatedly fired or put out to pasture; their ability to influence strategic and operational planning weakened every time. Why? Asides from their collective, often fiery disagreements with Hitler, none of them were exactly the ideal National Socialist, Bock was an ardent Monarchist, as were most of the Junkers that formed the upper echelons of the pre-war Reichswehr. These are the same Generals and Petty nobles that Hitler blamed when he gave his fiery orations to baying crowds: In short, their mentality and philosophies, their politics, were irreconcilable with that of Nazi Germany. Couple that with, again, frequent and fiery disagreements at OKW, and it becomes a bit easier to understand why the German general staff began to find itself so bereft of competent planners.

A strong case can be made that, by 1943, the General Officers of the Wehrmacht were beginning to become a very mixed bag indeed. For every famous name one can throw around, like Kesselring, or Rommel, we can find an example of a person promoted far past their abilities, such as Dietrich, Hausser, or Paulus. The promotions were a dangerous cocktail of party politics, empire-building, legitimate losses, and in some cases by martial merit (creating a caste of dependable, but indifferent strong-men Officers). Operational Art in the Wehrmacht was deeply affected as a result. From brilliant attacks like Fall Gelb, we begin to see quirky, often disastrous deviations from well thought out plans, such as Case Blue, or suicidal or fanatically unrealistic operations, such as Luttwich, Wacht am Rhein and Zitadelle. Some fully sprang from the mind of Hitler, but he had sycophantic or equally delusional (in a folie au duex way) Generals at OKW in the form of Keitel and Jodl; men who were in their positions not because they had the Strategic minds of Zhukov, or Manstein or Eisenhower, but because they were Lackeys that said what wanted to be heard. I don't think I need to iterate the point further: It was a recipe for disaster.

This is only one potential explanation, one small reason in explaining why Germany's initial tactical dominance didn't translate into higher victories. Its interesting however to compare it to later Allied operational planning, which was almost universally solid and robust, if not as ambitious as German planning. With perhaps the exception of Market-Garden, late war Allied operations usually went very well for them; Bagration was one of the largest and most well thought out land battles ever fought, and relied on a series of smaller breakthroughs and envelopment, rather than some grand one like the Germans conducted in 1941. Even Allied operational failures rarely broke their back, Operation Queen for example only brought the Americans to the bank of the Rhine, not across it, but the greater failure did not erase local successes and left the Americans in a comfortable position. Forces that had participated in Queen not even a month earlier would be key in reversing Axis fortunes in the Ardennes; showing that logistically and tactically the Allies could fail an operation without ruining force preservation. Where as in contrast, Axis operations 1942 onwards - asides from often lacking the input of the brilliant minds behind the invasions of Poland, Greece, France, Yugoslavia, etc. -also tended to gamble in the extreme, and made grand intelligence assumptions; which resulted in operational failure usually ruining the Wehrmacht's ability to salvage anything from it. The deep contrast becomes even more interesting when one is reminded that the Allies had to deal with all the cultural and political clashes that come with waging coalition warfare, all the supply problems following the August '44 thunder run, and the constant hovering of two deeply passionate political leaders. The Western Allies had to please each other, their subordinates, their population, their allies subordinates, Churchill and FDR; and yet for all that showed far more maturity and realism in their final plans.

Could you clarify on which war you are talking about?