Military Misfortunes

The Anatomy of Failure in War

Eliot A. Cohen

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781439135488
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Why do competent armies fail? Eliot Cohen and John Gooch explore answers to this question throughout this extensive analysis of unsuccessful military operations. Since it was first published in 1990, Military Misfortunes has become the classic analysis of the unexpected catastrophes that befall competent militaries. Now with a new Afterword discussing America's missteps in Iraq, Somalia, and the War on Terror, Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch's gripping battlefield narratives and groundbreaking explanations of the hidden factors that undermine armies are brought thoroughly up to date. As recent events prove, Military Misfortunes will be required reading for as long as armies go to war.

Why Misfortune?

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT a particular kind of failure—failure in battle. Much of the literature dealing with this subject has tended to oversimplify what is in reality a complex and complicated phenomenon. Therefore, to explain how and why such failures occur we must begin by questioning some popular and much-cherished misconceptions.

“All battles,” John Keegan has remarked, “are in some degree . . . disasters.”1 It is certainly true that every battle, and particularly every lost battle, looks like a disaster; but disaster is not a term that translates easily from the civil world to the military one. For one thing, it overlooks the fact that men in uniform are trained to function efficiently and effectively in an environment marked by danger and the imminent prospect of death—that is to say, to do their job in exactly those conditions that characterize civil disasters. Everyone in uniform lives with what has perceptively been called “the knowable possibility of disaster.”2

So we do not expect sudden shocks to have the same paralyzing effect in the world of the soldier as they do in the world of the civilian. More important, war is a contest between two sides, and once a battle begins each party will do its level best to make a disaster occur by breaking the enemy’s physical strength and destroying his mental resilience. Thus in every military setback or defeat there is an interplay between adversaries that is never present in the world of civil disasters. A fire will not “react” to the actions of the men who are trying to put it out in a way that makes their task more difficult. An enemy will do exactly that. This makes war a very special kind of “disaster environment.”

At a superficial level, military setbacks do seem to bear comparison with civil disasters insofar as they come in different shapes and sizes and have consequences of different magnitudes. An operation may fail with small loss of life and be only a minor setback, as with the abortive Dakar expedition undertaken by de Gaulle’s Free French forces in 1940. On the other hand, an operation may fail with relatively small loss and yet represent a major setback, as happened in the summer of 1940 when Britain lost the campaign in Norway. At a higher level of magnitude, the surrender of Singapore in February 1942 was both a big loss and a major setback—as was General Friedrich von Paulus’s surrender of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad a year later. And, on an altogether different plane, the fall of France in June 1940 was nothing less than a catastrophe.

Thinking this way, it is all too easy to perceive military setbacks as part of a progression from minor embarrassment to mortal failure. However, regarding the problem as a matter of degree is of no help in explaining why these setbacks occur. It could be that the size of the setback is a function of the aggregation of adverse factors: The more that goes wrong, the greater the degree of failure. But we could just as well assume that major failures are born of major errors: The bigger the stumble, the harder the fall. Rough-and-ready categorizing of this sort, which differentiates defeats according to their magnitude, reflects their consequences but does nothing to explain their causes.

The very notion of defeat—ostensibly the touchstone of failure—can be just as big an obstacle to understanding as disaster. For one thing, as the above examples suggest, the only feature many defeats have in common is their outcome. Also, defeat is not the only alternative to victory. Between these two poles lies the middle ground of missed opportunity—what Field Marshal Erich von Manstein called the “lost victories.”3 By making the concept of failure our central concern, we can incorporate into our analysis not merely battles lost but also battles that were not won. Understanding these is every bit as important to any military organization as understanding its defeats.

Although military failure commonly results in defeat, not all defeats are equally worthy of study. Some are evidently the consequence of facing overwhelming odds; in such circumstances the only thing to be done is to try to exercise some form of damage limitation. Others can be the result of a stroke of blind chance. Carl von Clausewitz acknowledged this possibility in his classic work On War. “No other human activity,” he declared, “is so continuously or universally bound up with chance.”4 Others again may be the inescapable consequence of straightforward incompetence. The historian Guy Chapman found plenty of that in his inquiry into the causes of the fall of France in 1940: “There was hesitation, there was indecision, there was sheer bloody funk at the highest level, among ministers, politicians, generals, civil service chiefs.”5 Once we have identified the battles that fall into these categories, little benefit is to be gained from further study—they have yielded up their secret, such as it is.

However, not all military failures fall into these convenient categories. Some are defeats, and others are the “lost victories” to which we have referred. They seem to share certain common characteristics that raise important questions about the nature and causes of military failure. Most striking is the fact that when they occur, no one individual is obviously to blame. Field Marshal Joseph Joffre was fond of saying that he did not know whether he was responsible for the victory on the Marne in September 1914, but he knew one thing—if the battle had been lost, it would have been he who lost it.6 True military “misfortunes”—as we define them—can never be justly laid at the door of any one commander. They are failures of the organization, not of the individual.

The other thing the failures we shall examine have in common is their apparently puzzling nature. Although something has clearly gone wrong, it is hard to see what; rather, it seems that fortune—evenly balanced between both sides at the outset—has turned against one side and favored the other. These are the occasions when it seems that the outcome of the battle depended at least as much on one side’s mishandling of the situation as on the other’s skill in exploiting a position of superiority. Competent professionals have failed in their task, for reasons that are not immediately apparent. In truth, this is another side of the same coin: The causes of organizational failure in the military world are not easy to discern.

Our choice of terminology, then, is both an indication of the complexity of military failure and an echo of the cry of bewilderment that so often greets it. It is a cry uttered as often by civilians as by soldiers. “What has happened at Chernobyl,” Pravda remarked three weeks after the double steam-hydrogen explosion at the Soviet nuclear reactor in May 1986, “is of course a great misfortune.”7

Understanding Disaster

INTRODUCTION

WE SHALL BEGIN OUR EXPLORATION of military misfortune by looking at the five explanations most commonly offered by historians trying to account for defeat and disaster on the field of battle. As we look at each one in turn, we shall see that its deficiencies outweigh its merits—often considerably. First, to illustrate the difficulties that have beset attempts to find convincing general explanations for major setbacks in the world of arms, we shall look at one of the greatest military conundrums of the twentieth century: the failure of Allied—especially British—commanders to achieve victory on the Western Front between 1915 and 1917, despite their prodigal expenditure of manpower and munitions.

Following this, we shall turn aside briefly from battles and battlefields to look at general explanations that have been offered to account for civil disasters and business failures. Analysts of civil—as opposed to military—failures have recently begun to look at their subject from a new perspective: how organizations can misfunction in unintended and unexpected ways. With this new perspective in mind, the final section of this chapter will develop a general theory of military misfortune and lay out a taxonomy of five types of military failure.

EXPLANATIONS AND MISAPPREHENSIONS

“The Man in the Dock”

The temptation to explain military failure in terms of human error is a characteristic feature of much of the literature of defeat in battle. According to this view, catastrophe occurs because one man—almost invariably the commander—commits unpardonable errors of judgment. At first sight, the idea that a solitary, highly placed individual can, by his own incompetence and stupidity, create a military disaster is deceptively attractive. It is at one with the traditional idea that a commander carries the responsibility for everything that happens in—and therefore to—his command; it is the counterpart to the picture of the heroic leader, handsomely rewarded for ushering his forces to victory; and it can be legitimated by appealing to history. The most superficial acquaintance with the past quickly yields a rich crop of professional incompetents who led or ordered their followers into the jaws of disaster in pursuit of what hindsight shows to have been an unlikely success, or who simply lacked the intellectual grasp to understand the true nature of their situation.

In the age of heroic leaders, any individual commander—combining, as he often did, both military and political authority—was in an ideal position to bring about a military disaster entirely unaided. In 1302 Robert of Courtrai’s stupidity in ordering a cavalry charge across entirely unsuitable ground at the Battle of Courtrai met the fate it richly deserved; and when King Henry VI of France, lured into attacking the English at Agincourt in 1415, launched his heavily armored men-at-arms in tight-packed formations, they were unable to fight properly and fell easy victims to their more mobile opponents.1 Later leaders failed just as dismally. When Doctor William Brydon rode into Jalalabad in 1842, the lone survivor of a force of 4,500 fighting men and 12,000 camp followers who had begun the retreat from Kabul in Afghanistan, his lucky escape simply magnified the extent of General John Elphinstone’s inadequacies.2 Major General Sir Hugh Wheeler, cautiously trying not to provoke sepoy mutineers who had occupied Cawnpore in 1857, gave them time and opportunity to massacre the white women and children they held captive; and in 1879 General Lord Chelmsford, rather too casual in his attitude to the Zulus, crashed to defeat at Isandhlwana.3 Only three years earlier, George Armstrong Custer’s decision to attack the Sioux encampment on the Little Big Horn had induced a disaster of cinematic proportions.

Misfortunes of this kind, which occur at the tactical level and are localized in scope, may often properly be laid at the door of individuals. But there is a very great difference between the degree of control exercised by a Napoleon, who could oversee a whole battlefield and directly influence what was happening on it, and a modern military leader in charge of a campaign, much farther from events and vulnerable to more varied forces as his command undertakes a great and protracted effort. In a word, the modern commander’s world is far more complex than that of his dashing predecessor. His decisions are affected by the perceptions, demands, and requirements of others, and his actions do little more than shape the tasks to be carried out by his many subordinates.4

Since 1870 a commander has seldom if ever been able to survey a whole battlefield from a single spot; and in any case he has had little opportunity—although sometimes a considerable inclination—to try. For the modern commander is much more akin to the managing director of a large conglomerate enterprise than ever he is to the warrior chief of old. He has become the head of a complex military organization, whose many branches he must oversee and on whose cooperation, assistance, and support he depends for his success. As the size and complexity of military forces have increased, the business of war has developed an organizational dimension that can make a mighty contribution to triumph—or to tragedy. Hitherto, the role of this organizational dimension of war in explaining military performance has been strangely neglected. We shall return to it later—indeed, it will form one of the major themes of this book. For now we simply need to note its looming presence.

And yet the urge to find, excoriate, judge, and sentence culpable individuals has led contemporaries as well as historians to blame men for very much more than the loss of a battle over which they exercised a tolerable degree of control. When a royal commission was convened in 1917 to explain the failure of the Gallipoli campaign two years earlier, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, who had been secretary of state for war at the time, was dead. A bevy of soldiers and politicians appeared for questioning, and almost to a man they blamed Kitchener for having made the decision to undertake the campaign in the first place—thereby conveniently forgetting that it had been a communal choice.5 Some years later, the congressional inquiry into the disaster at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 put the men on the spot—Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter C. Short—in the dock. Recently an attempt has been made to get both men off the hook by hanging two more admirals—Harold R. Stark and Richmond Kelly Turner—on it.6 The urge to blame military misfortunes on individuals runs as deep as the inclination to blame human error for civil disasters.

“Criminalizing” military misfortune in this way by arraigning a guilty party serves an important military function; but as an explanation of failure it is really little more than a concealed confession of perplexity. Yet even those who have perceived its limitations have not been able to replace it with any more sophisticated explanation. Indeed, they have been unable to go much beyond postulating the existence of “a fatal conjunction of circumstances; a devil’s brew of incompetence, unpreparedness, mistaken and inappropriate tactics, a brash underestimating of the enemy, a difficult terrain, raw recruits, treacherous opponents, diplomatic hindrance and bone-headed leadership.”7 This is no more than a cry of despair masquerading as an explanation.

“The Man on the Couch”

Are the grievous faults that soldiers sometimes exhibit due to something more—and more complex—than individual incompetence and dimwittedness? Are the causes of military misfortune to be found in some collective way of thinking, which all generals share and for which they cannot be held to blame? This is certainly the opinion of the psyc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Why Misfortune?
• Chapter 2: Understanding Disaster
• Chapter 3: Analyzing Failure
• Chapter 4: Failure to Learn American Antisubmarine Warfare in 1942
• Chapter 5: Failure to Anticipate Israel Defense Forces on the Suez Front and the Golan Heights, 1973
• Chapter 6: Failure to Adapt The British at Gallipoli, August 1915
• Chapter 7: Aggregate Failure The Defeat of the American Eighth Army in Korea, November—December 1950
• Chapter 8: Catastrophic Failure The French Army and Air Force, May-June 1940
• Chapter 9: What Can Be Done?
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index