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

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

Kritik has three steps: the discovery of facts, the tracing of effects to causes, and the investigation and evaluation of means.38 Clausewitz argued against what we have called horizontal history—the study of war at only one level, be it that of tactics, strategy, technology, or whatever. Rather, he believed that military questions must be studied

President Roosevelt remarked that King was so tough that he shaved with a blowtorch and trimmed his toenails with torpedo net cutters.10 His intelligence, energy, and organizational abilities won the respect of all those who worked with him; unlike his Army counterpart, George C. Marshall, however, he never gained their reverence or affection.

I concerned myself with petty matters too, some of which may seem at a distance to be trifling in the extreme but all of which have a cumulative value in building esprit. For instance, when I first took a meal at the Eighth Army Main, I was shocked at the state of the linen and tableware—bedsheet muslin on the tables, cheap ten-cent-store crockery

The urge to blame military misfortunes on individuals runs as deep as the inclination to blame human error for civil disasters.

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.

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.

In military terms, “adapting” can be defined as identifying and taking full advantage of the opportunities offered by enemy actions or by chance combinations of circumstances to win success or to stave off failure.