Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War

The most common cause of failure in leadership is produced by treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems.

“No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance,” Clausewitz writes of war in On War. It’s a “paradoxical trinity,” composed of the passions that cause combatants to risk their lives, the skill of their commanders, and the coherence of the political objectives for which the war is being fought. Only the last is fully

To understand how the U.S. could face defeat at the hands of a weaker insurgent enemy for the second time in a generation, we must look at the structural influences that produce our general officer corps.1 —Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling

Military contexts, perhaps because they have long struggled with the need for distributed authority and responsiveness, abound with examples of heuristics. Napoleon, for example, told his armies to ‘march to the sound of the guns’ instead of waiting for orders. Another example: when the battle plan falls apart – capture the high ground, stay in tou