Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War

The requirements to adapt to unexpected circumstances tests both organization and system, revealing weaknesses that are partly structural and partly functional, whose full potential for disaster may not previously have been noticed.

This sort of system magnified the problems associated with Suvla Bay—and may even be said to have created many of them—by forcing the task into the framework of the organization rather than readjusting the organization to meet the needs of the job at hand.

The difficulties this produced were magnified by the system through which the command structure functioned. Two aspects of this system helped produce a failure to adapt by enfeebling command. One was the compartmentalization of the planning process, which isolated parts of the organization when they should have been communicating with one another.

Students and even practitioners of intelligence often suggest that it has two chief functions: warning (predicting what an opponent is about to do) and order of battle (information about the who, what, and where of an enemy’s forces).

Yet as Pearl Harbor and other cases suggest, it is in the deficiency of organizations that the embryo of misfortune develops.

One partial answer has to do with what one might call the “55/95 problem”—the tendency to see that element of military difficulty that bulks largest (55 percent of your problem) as the whole of it (95 percent). In this case the initial shortages of escort vessels and aircraft made such an impression that they made it difficult to understand the nat

By dissecting military misfortune in the way demonstrated in this chapter, we find our attention drawn repeatedly to what one might call “the organizational dimension of strategy.”

Two explanations help explain why Israel failed, in several ways, to anticipate the Yom Kippur War. One reason lies not in the analysis of intelligence but in its sources. Studies of intelligence failure often look exclusively at the analytical problem, at the products of intelligence analysis rather than its sources. Yet in many cases one cannot u

We have seen, moreover, that the United States Navy made a serious and protracted effort to learn from British experience. Why did they fail in such a striking way? The answer seems to lie in how the United States Navy defined learning, particularly in the context of preparation for war. In a nutshell, the navy’s leadership defined its problem as t