Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War

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

Casting his eye over a formidable collection of military incompetents, Dixon finds that the generals who fail all exhibit the same psychological characteristics. They are passive and courteous, obstinate and rigid, ambitious and insensitive. In short, they are all psychological cripples—walking wounded who bear no visible scars.

Perhaps more than any of the other types of failure we are examining, adaptive failure is susceptible to the belief that success was denied by only a small margin. A few more resources, a single change in the chain of cause and effect that apparently led directly to disaster, and the outcome would have been entirely different.

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.

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

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.

An efficient communications system is of the greatest importance in directing and controlling raw or inexperienced troops in combat.

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

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