Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War

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.

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.”

The submissive obedience of Haig’s subordinates, which Forester took for blinkered ignorance and whole-hearted support, was in reality the unavoidable consequence of the way in which the army high command functioned as an organization under its commander in chief. A personalized promotion system, built on the bedrock of favoritism and personal riva

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

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

One of the things that best helps to explain how such untrained and inexpert amateurs can function so well and cope so effectively in these circumstances is the fact that their goals are often very clear—even, indeed, self-evident. Social ties that usually go unexamined emerge in testing circumstances and offer a clear guide to action, and often a

the essence of a failure to anticipate is not ignorance of the future, for that is inherently unknowable. It is, rather, the failure to take reasonable precautions against a known hazard.

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.