[...] to Graziani in Libya in 1940

Well, to be fair Graziani seems to have been fully aware of his units' total lack of supplies and preparation; in this case, the one who wasn't was the Duce himself. Graziani had indeed chosen to dig in and prepare a defensive line which, notwithstanding its defects - it was too stretched out, meaning that the various strong-points (how are they called in English?) could barely support each other - may have served its purpose... had the plans been followed.

It was Mussolini who, as we said, was utterly convinced of Britain's impending defeat and sent Graziani a series of telegrams ordering him to dismantle everything and move his troops towards a much smaller (but also rather well-armed, supplied and agile) enemy, even going insofar as to threaten him with demotion or an eventual court martial had he failed to heed his words and take action. Something which he did, but ushered in total defeat.

[...] So is my perception of Italian military leadership during this period wrong, or was the general staff really full of terrible officers and if so, why?

Your perception is certainly not that wrong but is not very fair, either, and fails to take some factors into account:

• First, many in the Italian General Staff had an antiquated concept of warfare - quite a few were senile themselves! - which they carried over from their experience over the Alpine Front in WWI. They also failed to understand, notwithstanding the country's rather massive participation in the Spanish Civil War, many of the aspects that would characterise a 'new' conflict.

• Secondly, many of those who had graduated from the military academies happened to belong - more often than not - to the higher classes: this was all more apparent in WWI, an era in which decent social mobility and merit weren't quite widespread in the Kingdom at the time. How many of them, like the much vituperated Badoglio or Baratieri, were there because of their merits and not because of their (admittedly close) ties to the Court?

• Third, the WW2-era Comando Superiore del R.E. wasn't all that bad - true, there were some embarrassingly incompetent commanders, but for every single Visconti-Prasca (the sycophantic general in charge of the invasion of Greece) there was an Italo Gariboldi in there, somewhere. And not all of them were as incompetent or unimaginative as those you might have heard of... the much-discussed Giulio Douhet was one of (if not the) early proponents of air power; the Duke of Aosta proved to be a capable strategist; Giovanni Messe managed well on the Russian Front but also succeeded to slow down somewhat the Allied advance on Tunisia; and so on...

• Fourth, Mussolini's nosy attitude was just as bad as the fact of having to put up with the Army's very strict - and at times downright nonsensical - chain of command, which didn't leave the officers any space for manoeuvre. Speaking about the Navy, Adm. Angelo Iachino's shows very well in his memories ^1 how a British admiral could always rely not only on the constant presence of the Fleet Air Arm (something the Italians, due to interservice rivalry, didn't have) but were left with enough decisional autonomy to get the job done; whereas his Italian counterparts just had to follow the High Command's orders to the letter. And whenever air support was needed they had to notify the Command first, which would have then evaluated the request and relayed it to the Air Force - a support which, more often than not, couldn't be delivered due to the squadrons' land-based location that made reaching the battlefield in time an unnecessarily arduous task.

 

^1 Angelo Iachino, Il Tramonto di Una Grande Marina (Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milano 1966).