Osan'gar, do you know what scorched earth means? That's exactly what they were doing. They were falling back, denying the opponent any of the resources of the newly conquered territory. They literally burned their own and their enemies corpses because Trolloc armies don't carry food

Yeah, I was clumsy in my wording. They were willing to destroy things as they withdrew, but not to give up any part of Randland they didn't have to.

I agree that the Light's strategy was very bad.  From their perspective the situation was thus:  The enemy had divided their forces into three.  You have interior lines, plus instantaneous travel.  Your enemy cannot use instantaneous travel, and must rather walk.  You're willing to go full on Stalin with a scorched earth policy.  Therefore the light can easily create overwhelming superiority on any one front, and defeat the dark in detail.

 

The light clearly should have formed up all of their military power at one point, and gone and defeated each army in succession.  Victory would have been nearly assured, rather than a close run thing, and losses, while still severe, would have been much less.  Mat should have been in charge from the beginning. :)

But they WEREN'T willing to go full scorched earth. Darth Rand was, and he had a better plan given that. He wanted to let the trollocs split into smaller bands (remember, if they're not fighting, they can't eat) and then hit them with parties traveling by gateway in rapid succession. It's a good plan, except that a LOT of trollocs are going to escape. Not enough to destroy your armies, but enough to slaughter a lot of villagers. The Light here made a conscious decision that that was unacceptable.

Some of the choices in how the forces were divided up, on the other hand, were more problematic. But then how much can you expect when Elayne is running the show?

According to the Encyclopeadia WOT, "Men with the spark inborn develop the ability later than women, often after they are twenty." A handful of the male characters are young enough that they may still manifest the spark (Mat, Perrin, and Gawyn, but not Galad). They're much more likely to just have the ability to learn, but none has shown any interest in finding out, which is a prerequisite. Not that I think either is likely.