Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War

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

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.

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.

The people who get to the top do so because they possess certain institutionally desirable characteristics: They are cautious, they adhere to rules and regulations, they respect and accept authority, they obey their superiors, and they regard discipline and submission to authority as the highest virtues. Twenty-five or thirty years spent gaining pr

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

Instead of testing men and institutions, we must examine the structures through which they work and explore how those structures stand up to the stresses they encounter.

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

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

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