Understanding Disaster
INTRODUCTION
WE SHALL BEGIN OUR EXPLORATION of military misfortune by looking at the five explanations most commonly offered by historians trying to account for defeat and disaster on the field of battle. As we look at each one in turn, we shall see that its deficiencies outweigh its merits—often considerably. First, to illustrate the difficulties that have beset attempts to find convincing general explanations for major setbacks in the world of arms, we shall look at one of the greatest military conundrums of the twentieth century: the failure of Allied—especially British—commanders to achieve victory on the Western Front between 1915 and 1917, despite their prodigal expenditure of manpower and munitions.
Following this, we shall turn aside briefly from battles and battlefields to look at general explanations that have been offered to account for civil disasters and business failures. Analysts of civil—as opposed to military—failures have recently begun to look at their subject from a new perspective: how organizations can misfunction in unintended and unexpected ways. With this new perspective in mind, the final section of this chapter will develop a general theory of military misfortune and lay out a taxonomy of five types of military failure.
EXPLANATIONS AND MISAPPREHENSIONS
“The Man in the Dock”
The temptation to explain military failure in terms of human error is a characteristic feature of much of the literature of defeat in battle. According to this view, catastrophe occurs because one man—almost invariably the commander—commits unpardonable errors of judgment. At first sight, the idea that a solitary, highly placed individual can, by his own incompetence and stupidity, create a military disaster is deceptively attractive. It is at one with the traditional idea that a commander carries the responsibility for everything that happens in—and therefore to—his command; it is the counterpart to the picture of the heroic leader, handsomely rewarded for ushering his forces to victory; and it can be legitimated by appealing to history. The most superficial acquaintance with the past quickly yields a rich crop of professional incompetents who led or ordered their followers into the jaws of disaster in pursuit of what hindsight shows to have been an unlikely success, or who simply lacked the intellectual grasp to understand the true nature of their situation.
In the age of heroic leaders, any individual commander—combining, as he often did, both military and political authority—was in an ideal position to bring about a military disaster entirely unaided. In 1302 Robert of Courtrai’s stupidity in ordering a cavalry charge across entirely unsuitable ground at the Battle of Courtrai met the fate it richly deserved; and when King Henry VI of France, lured into attacking the English at Agincourt in 1415, launched his heavily armored men-at-arms in tight-packed formations, they were unable to fight properly and fell easy victims to their more mobile opponents.1 Later leaders failed just as dismally. When Doctor William Brydon rode into Jalalabad in 1842, the lone survivor of a force of 4,500 fighting men and 12,000 camp followers who had begun the retreat from Kabul in Afghanistan, his lucky escape simply magnified the extent of General John Elphinstone’s inadequacies.2 Major General Sir Hugh Wheeler, cautiously trying not to provoke sepoy mutineers who had occupied Cawnpore in 1857, gave them time and opportunity to massacre the white women and children they held captive; and in 1879 General Lord Chelmsford, rather too casual in his attitude to the Zulus, crashed to defeat at Isandhlwana.3 Only three years earlier, George Armstrong Custer’s decision to attack the Sioux encampment on the Little Big Horn had induced a disaster of cinematic proportions.
Misfortunes of this kind, which occur at the tactical level and are localized in scope, may often properly be laid at the door of individuals. But there is a very great difference between the degree of control exercised by a Napoleon, who could oversee a whole battlefield and directly influence what was happening on it, and a modern military leader in charge of a campaign, much farther from events and vulnerable to more varied forces as his command undertakes a great and protracted effort. In a word, the modern commander’s world is far more complex than that of his dashing predecessor. His decisions are affected by the perceptions, demands, and requirements of others, and his actions do little more than shape the tasks to be carried out by his many subordinates.4
Since 1870 a commander has seldom if ever been able to survey a whole battlefield from a single spot; and in any case he has had little opportunity—although sometimes a considerable inclination—to try. For the modern commander is much more akin to the managing director of a large conglomerate enterprise than ever he is to the warrior chief of old. He has become the head of a complex military organization, whose many branches he must oversee and on whose cooperation, assistance, and support he depends for his success. As the size and complexity of military forces have increased, the business of war has developed an organizational dimension that can make a mighty contribution to triumph—or to tragedy. Hitherto, the role of this organizational dimension of war in explaining military performance has been strangely neglected. We shall return to it later—indeed, it will form one of the major themes of this book. For now we simply need to note its looming presence.
And yet the urge to find, excoriate, judge, and sentence culpable individuals has led contemporaries as well as historians to blame men for very much more than the loss of a battle over which they exercised a tolerable degree of control. When a royal commission was convened in 1917 to explain the failure of the Gallipoli campaign two years earlier, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, who had been secretary of state for war at the time, was dead. A bevy of soldiers and politicians appeared for questioning, and almost to a man they blamed Kitchener for having made the decision to undertake the campaign in the first place—thereby conveniently forgetting that it had been a communal choice.5 Some years later, the congressional inquiry into the disaster at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 put the men on the spot—Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter C. Short—in the dock. Recently an attempt has been made to get both men off the hook by hanging two more admirals—Harold R. Stark and Richmond Kelly Turner—on it.6 The urge to blame military misfortunes on individuals runs as deep as the inclination to blame human error for civil disasters.
“Criminalizing” military misfortune in this way by arraigning a guilty party serves an important military function; but as an explanation of failure it is really little more than a concealed confession of perplexity. Yet even those who have perceived its limitations have not been able to replace it with any more sophisticated explanation. Indeed, they have been unable to go much beyond postulating the existence of “a fatal conjunction of circumstances; a devil’s brew of incompetence, unpreparedness, mistaken and inappropriate tactics, a brash underestimating of the enemy, a difficult terrain, raw recruits, treacherous opponents, diplomatic hindrance and bone-headed leadership.”7 This is no more than a cry of despair masquerading as an explanation.
“The Man on the Couch”
Are the grievous faults that soldiers sometimes exhibit due to something more—and more complex—than individual incompetence and dimwittedness? Are the causes of military misfortune to be found in some collective way of thinking, which all generals share and for which they cannot be held to blame? This is certainly the opinion of the psychologist Norman Dixon. “Stupidity does not explain the behavior of these generals,” he writes of Field Marshal Douglas Haig and his subordinates in World War I.
So great was their fear of loss of self-esteem, and so imperative their need for social approval, that they could resort to tactics beyond the reach of any self-respecting “donkey.” From their shameless self-interest, lack of loyalty to their subordinates and apparent indifference to the verdict of posterity, a picture emerges of personalities deficient in something other than intellectual acumen.8
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.
If such men were distributed at random across the command posts of the military world, disaster would be likely enough for us to shudder in apprehension. But things are much worse than that. 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 promotion simply accentuate these characteristics, so that by the time a soldier reaches the top of the tree he lacks the very qualities of flexibility, imaginativeness, and adventurousness he needs in order to exercise command effectively.
Here, then, lies the heart of the problem, the inevitability of disaster: “Authoritarianism, itself so damaging to military endeavour, will actually predispose an individual towards entering upon the very career wherein his restricted personality can wreak the most havoc. [Dixon’s italics].”9 It is, as Dixon says, like learning that only people with Parkinson’s disease decide to become eye surgeons.
It remains only for Dixon to fit the last piece of the jigsaw into place. The soldier who has reached the top is anal-retentive. The evidence for this lies not merely in associated traits of character and their ineluctable consequences, such as slowness to accept unexpected information and difficulty in controlling aggressive impulses, but in the world the anal-obsessive general creates.
Whether by accident or design, the events of Third Ypres [in 1917]—the enormous release of destructive energy, the churning up of ground until the overlapping craters coalesced into one great reeking swamp, and the expulsion into this mass of more and yet more “faecal” bodies—constitutes the acting out of an anal fantasy of impressive proportions.10
It should therefore come as no surprise that the top brass regularly mess things up.
It would be easy to dismiss Dixon’s theorizing as simply the kind of thing that gets psychoanalysis a bad name. In fact, a little reflection on the reality of military history provides ample refutation for his theories. Though many of the personality traits he identifies do seem to be present in some of the more notable cases of failure, it is by no means obvious that, by the same token, they are not also among the mental baggage of history’s successful generals. Many great commanders have had their share of obsessional jealousy, mental rigidity, and authoritarianism; and at least one—Eisenhower—has been accused of having exactly the opposite caste of mind.11
Even more perplexing if we hold to the “man on the couch” theory of military misfortune is the case of the commander who fails at one time but creates a remarkable victory at another. The Douglas MacArthur who so utterly misjudged the likelihood and imminence of China’s entry into the Korean War was, after all, the same Douglas MacArthur who first conceived and then implemented the Inchon landing in the teeth of strong opposition from his subordinates. Was he struck by a sudden attack of anal-retentiveness sometime between June and October 1950? It seems unlikely.
If Dixon’s theory were true, we would see much more evidence of incompetence—and therefore of failure—in the military world than in business, industry, or any other activity that involves controlling substantial numbers of human beings. Observation and experience suggest that competence and incompetence are much more evenly spread among those in and out of uniform than such theories would suggest.
Military disaster would also be much more common than it is, and our problem would lie in explaining military success. Because this is not the case we have to explain why some military actions fail and others do not. The mental characteristics of individual commanders are of only limited use in this.
Collective Incompetence and the “Military Mind”
Somewhere between the “man in the dock” and the “man on the couch” stands the idea of straightforward collective military incompetence. To move from blaming a particular individual for disaster to claiming that all senior soldiers are more or less equally likely to fail the test of professional competence is not to take a big step. According to this theory, any individual could count himself unfortunate to be in the dock when the generally low level of professional ability would permit few of his contemporaries to avoid similar accusations if put to the test. General Ambrose Burnside’s stubborn persistence in attacking the Confederate army at Fredericksburg in 1864, long after it was apparent that the effort was fruitless, has placed him securely within the cohort of military incompetents. But was he any less capable than most of his brother officers? The question is impossible to answer, but the temptation is to guess that he was not. Forced to offer an explanation as to why this should be so, Charles Fair could only claim that “the man who is by temperament and physique close to the going tribal norms tends to rise no matter how stupid he is.”12 At this point we may as well give up all hope, for if Fair is correct mankind is clearly doomed to interminable military disasters!
Compared with this theory, the idea that the “military mind” is the cause of all military misfortune seems complex and sophisticated. The idea that simply living in and serving a hierarchical institution such as an army encourages and intensifies potentially disastrous habits of mind, regardless of their supposed psychological origins, has found fertile soil—and nowhere more so than in the history of the First World War. Its generals seem condemned without prospect of reprieve by the hell of the Western Front, where hundreds of thousands of humble combatants were condemned to death by generals who concealed behind luxuriant mustaches and lantern jaws their complete incomprehension of modern war.13
The Conundrum of World War I
By far the most powerful—and most damning—portrait of the military mind is to be found in C.S. Forester’s novel The General. Narrowly schooled, unflinchingly devoted to their duty, and unmoved in the face of difficulty, the generals of the First World War were “single-minded and . . . simple-minded,” as indeed they had to be: “Men without imagination were necessary to execute a military policy devoid of imagination, devised by a man without imagination.”14 In their care, armies died in an uncomplaining spirit of self-sacrifice:
It occurred to no-one that they had to die in that fashion because the men responsible for their training had never learned any lessons from history, had never realized what resources modern invention had opened to them, with the consequence that men had to do at the cost of their lives the work which could have been done with one-quarter the losses and at one-tenth the risk of defeat if they had been adequately armed and equipped.15
Forester’s damning indictment of the military profession was a novelist’s reaction to the enormity of the human price paid in the course of the First World War—a slaughter so unparalleled that it has been termed “the cruelest scourge that Europe had suffered since the Black Death.”16 In all, some ten million fell in battle during the four years it took for all sides to exhaust themselves—and one another. The seemingly endless casualty lists published in British newspapers during the war provided unmistakable evidence of the cost of British strategy on the Western Front. The official justification was that attrition was costing the enemy even more dearly, so that the process of wearing down Germany’s reserves of military manpower would lead inexorably to victory. The publication of the official Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War in 1922 revealed that the strategy of Haig’s campaigns on the Somme in 1916 and at Passchendaele in 1917 had probably cost the Allies more than the Germans. It began a battle of statistics that has continued more or less ever since.
The Great War was not long over before men began to weigh the cost of Haig’s great offensives against the outcomes. In the case of the Somme, a campaign that began on July 1 with sixty thousand British casualties ended with ten times that number, expended for a strip of ground some 30 miles long and 7 miles deep. It was n
ot long before the accusing finger began to point at the leaders. Winston Churchill, with some sense of the complexities of the war and of the advantages of hindsight, pointed out that Haig and Foch “had year after year conducted with obstinacy and serene confidence offensives which we now know to have been as hopeless as they were disastrous.”17 Lloyd George categorized Passchendaele in his Memoirs as a needless bloodbath. But it was H. G. Wells, in his Outline of History, who extended the responsibility for the failure on the Western Front to the military as a whole. The war, he declared, was “a hopelessly professional war; from first to last it was impossible to get it out of the hands of the regular generals.” Herein lay the true cause of disaster, for “the professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind; no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling. . . .”18
During the 1920s and 1930s, Haig was singled out as almost criminally responsible for the apparently meaningless slaughter his strategy had engendered, “an unfeeling, stupid and ignorant blimp who sent men to futile death in fighting conditions he knew nothing of.”19 Narrowly educated, unimaginative, rigid, and remote, he became the exemplar of his profession, a man who both encapsulated and imposed the mental limitations of his kind. His professional mentality was so deeply rooted in the cavalry ethos of the late nineteenth century that he was quite unable to understand the technological revolution in warfare that had taken place by 1916.20 An attempt in 1963 to get Haig out of the dock went too far in the opposite direction by trying to prove that his intellectual powers were far greater than anyone had given him credit for—an argument that failed to convince.21
It is possible, however, to take a more sympathetic view of Haig and his fellow generals, and of the very considerable and perplexing difficulties they found themselves facing, when we acknowledge the frightful novelty of the military situation in which they were called upon to wage successful war. No army was adequately prepared for the trench warfare that became the dominant feature of war on the Western Front and elsewhere after Christmas 1914. The technical problems it presented—chiefly those of achieving surprise, carrying the first line of enemy trenches against the defensive power of rifle and machine gun, and then pushing on into the enemy’s rear across ground churned into an almost impassable morass by heavy artillery—would have taxed the mental resources of Napoleon himself.22 Gradually, as the war went on, a younger generation of middle-ranking commanders applied their minds to the problem, aided by the advent of such new weapons as the tank and the airplane. The answer to the conundrum of the Western Front, in purely military terms, did not lie just with new instruments of war, however; it entailed developing new techniques for combining artillery, infantry, tanks, and airplanes and developing a doctrine that emphasized flexibility over rigidity and innovation over obedience to long-established “principles.”23 For the generals, the First World War was a long and costly learning process.
Military Misfortunes Page 2
