Finally, and perhaps most seriously of all, the strategic environment in which Ford operated had changed. One environmental change was the recession of 1958, which temporarily depressed the demand for cars. More important, however, was a change in the very understanding of what cars were. Ford, like most of the American public, had hitherto thought of cars in terms of price (low, medium, and high), and the Edsel was Ford’s opportunity to break into the medium-price bracket. Until then Ford managers had complained that they were simply grooming customers for General Motors, the assumption being that customers went from low-priced Fords to the more expensive models offered by GM. In fact, the car industry was in the middle of a shift to categories defined more by “life-style” than by price—and the Thunderbird would capture the “life-style” aspirations of many Americans quite nicely.
This thumbnail sketch of a “business misfortune” has a number of instructive points. First, it is striking that no one attributes the Edsel fiasco exclusively or even primarily to the decisions of the president of Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford II. As important as Ford was in the history of the company, the responsibility for failure was shared by a number of the members of the management team at Ford: There is, in other words, no “man in the dock.” Instead, students of the Edsel failure focus on particular components of the Ford organization, and in particular the Special Products Division, which later took over the Edsel operation. Second, it becomes clear from the Edsel story that three kinds of forces produced failure: what one might call “command decisions” by particular managers (on, for example, the peculiar grille of the car), organizational deficiencies (the quality control problems referred to above), and changes in the environment. The first could easily have been changed; the second might have been corrected but with great difficulty; the last was virtually unalterable. This tripartite division of cause is useful as well in understanding military failure, in which all three kinds of forces are often lumped together. Finally, the story of the Edsel reminds us of the importance of the political psychology of failure—the role of the expectations built up by those undertaking a venture. Numerous models of new cars fail to make it in the marketplace; not all reverberate as widely as the Edsel. Had Ford not convinced itself and the attentive public (particularly automotive journalists) that the Edsel would be an extraordinary success, its failure, though still painful, would have been far less of a humiliation.
Students of corporate failure point out that when it is triggered by normal business hazards, such as recession, the critical question becomes how a corporation found itself in an inherently fragile position.45 Rather than suggesting that a business organization can foresee environmental change or predict the precise actions of its competitors—the equivalent of surprise attack theory—they concentrate on the ability of corporations to adapt to change and uncertainty. And when they do this they frequently turn to a study of corporate culture—the norms and “way of life” of an organization. This in turn leads to an understanding that failure is frequently directly and paradoxically connected with success, in the same way that a species’ biological adaptation to one set of circumstances can leave it acutely vulnerable in others.46
Men, Organizations, and Systems
Although it has been brief, our inspection of the world of civil disasters and business failures has something important to tell us. Apart from proving that putting the operator in the dock—the equivalent of blaming the commander—is often quite valueless as a way of discovering what went wrong in a particular operation, it also suggests that we need to look at the military world in a new way. 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.
Wherever people come together to carry out purposeful activity, organizations spring into being. The more complex and demanding the task, the more ordered and integrated the organization. How organizations work is a complicated and difficult matter, and different schools of thought put different emphasis on the roles of leadership and motivation, the significance of information inputs and decision making, and the degree to which function shapes and influences structure. Without entering into these disputes, we should note an important assumption all organization theory holds in common. In Charles Perrow’s words: “One cannot explain organizations by explaining the attitudes and behavior of individuals or even small groups within them. We learn a great deal about psychology and social psychology but little about organizations per se in this fashion.”47
As an antidote to Dixon’s psychoanalytical theories of individual responsibility, this is both refreshing and analytically valuable. We cannot and should not push the individual into the wings in our analysis of the causes of military misfortune; but we must take account of the fact that all organizations—not least military organizations—have characteristics that can determine how tasks are approached, shape decisions, and affect the management of disaster.
Military organizations present us with special problems, for while on the one hand they are especially rigidly ordered and hierarchical, they are also designed to function in situations where chains of authority may break down or where higher direction may be temporarily intermittent or nonexistent. There may be something about all military organizations that makes them behave in a similar fashion in some situations regardless of their nationality: For example, they have been regarded as being particularly prone to resist innovation.48 However, it is probably more important to take account of the fact that a particular organization may function in a special way at a particular moment in its history. We have already seen that this was the case with Douglas Haig’s headquarters in France during the First World War. Later we shall examine particular military organizations in more detail as part of our explanation of different types of military misfortune. For now we need note only the general point that some military organizations may be more susceptible to misfortune than others, regardless of whether or not they are led by anal-retentive commanders, simply because they are the kind of organizations that they are.
Men form organizations, but they also work with systems. Whenever technological components are linked together in order to carry out a particular scientific or technological activity, the possibility exists that the normal sequence of events the system has been designed to carry out may go awry when failures in two or more components interact in an unexpected way. Once this begins to happen—as it did at Three Mile Island—the operators lose control of the system. Charles Perrow has christened such incidents “normal accidents,” to distinguish them from “true” or “random” ones. These are the disasters that lurk within all complex systems, simply waiting to happen and beyond the control of man. “The odd term normal accident,” writes Perrow, “is meant to signal that, given the system characteristics, multiple and unexpected interactions of failures are inevitable.”49
According to Perrow, systems are characterized by linear or complex interaction and by tight or loose coupling. Linear interaction connects the links in a system along a single invariable path, whereas complex interactions “are those of unfamiliar sequences, or unplanned and unexpected sequences, and either not visible or not immediately comprehensible.”50 Loose coupling allows the sequence of a set of components to be changed, making alternatives available; while tight coupling connects a sequence that is fast moving, allows no by-passes or alternative channels, and will only work in one fixed order. Armed with these important conceptual distinctions, Perrow distinguishes between component accident failures in which one or more things go wrong and are linked in an anticipated sequence (as when a wing comes off an airplane) and systems accidents. Such systems accidents occur in tight-coupled, complex systems such as petrochemical plants, space rockets, and nuclear reactors.
Perrow specifically excludes what he calls “military adventures” from the category of disasters that can be explained by using his theory.51 But nonetheless we shall gain much from thinking in terms of sys
tems as well as organizations. For Perrow tells us that some events can be connected in unexpected and even unforeseeable ways to create the conditions in which disaster can occur and that failure at one level can have immediate and adverse repercussions at another. Tracing these interconnections, which we shall call “Pathways to Misfortune,” will be the task of our detailed case analyses. For now we need to note only that they exist, that they help to explain how military misfortune comes about, and that—if we look carefully enough—they can always be found.
A THEORY OF MILITARY MISFORTUNE
Simplicity and Complexity
In the age of the heroic leader, a lone individual could justly be awarded the victor’s trophies or suffer the ignominy of defeat. But modern war—like modern life—is a complex business. The commander no longer has a free hand to do whatever he likes. How soldiers fight is their business, and they may be either good or bad at it. Why they fight, when they fight, and very often where they fight are the decisions over which they usually have little control, for they lie in the province of politics. The modern general is the servant of his government, and its decisions may present the most able commander with an incipient disaster; or such a general may find himself the heir of decisions taken by politicians now out of office or predecessors presently basking in retirement, which threaten to pull misfortune down about his ears.
Because strategic decision making is a fusionist process that involves a variety of groups and individuals, it has been suggested that military incompetence “is no longer the sole property of generals, but results from the combined efforts of inept strategists, in and out of uniform.”52 Attractive as this explanation of military misfortune may be, a closer inspection reveals that it does not provide us with the comprehensive answer we seek. For although soldiers may be bound by decisions over which they are unable to exercise any control, they are not bound hand and foot. Their options may be limited, but opportunities still remain for them to outthink, outsmart, or outfight their opponent—or at least to put up a good enough show to salvage honor and reputation. In other words, failure lurks at many levels. It will be our task to locate and identify those levels, and to explore the links that can bind together actions and decisions taken at different times and in different places that, considered individually, do not seem to invite disaster but interreact to generate military misfortune.
Military misfortunes—like natural or human-made disasters—come in many different kinds. Any explanation of their causes must find a balance between the emotional urge to simplify and the intellectual acknowledgement of complexity. Even Clausewitz failed to resolve this problem. In his classic work On War he argued that the balance between opponents in battle usually shifts slowly and inexorably, establishing a trend that can rarely be reversed. “Battles in which one unexpected factor has a major effect on the course of the whole,” he wrote, “usually exist only in the stories told by people who want to explain away their defeats.”53 In wars, however, he thought that a single accident might produce quite different results, and whole campaigns might be changed if a victory were won here or a different kind of defeat sustained there. He took this as proof that success in war was not simply due to general causes, and that particular factors could be decisive.54
Instead of thinking in aggregate terms and adding up causes to explain major setbacks, or—following Clausewitz—looking for one cardinal factor that is “really” responsible for disaster, we shall identify different types of military failure. Some result from falling victim to one type of error or short-coming. As a matter of convenience these can be termed “simple failure,” although this does not mean that they are easy to foretell or to avoid. This allows us to postulate the existence of “complex failures,” in which more than one kind of error is involved. Only by thinking in these terms can we explain different degrees of military disaster satisfactorily. And this will also enable us to present a typology of military misfortune that can be used to explain many different individual examples of failure.
“Simple” Failures
As everyday life proves over and over again, some people never learn. Having experienced a disaster once, they continue to indulge in exactly the same patterns of foolhardy behavior until they are visited by disaster once more.55 Although we expect individuals to fall ready victims to this syndrome, whether because of mental inadequacy or blind carelessness, we do not expect sophisticated organizations to do the same. For one thing, they have vast intellectual resources at their disposal; for another, we expect them to be aware of the need to amass vicarious experience by observing and analyzing the fate of others in order to maximize their efficiency. And yet this is just what happens. Like people and businesses, armed forces suffer misfortune when they fail to learn obvious lessons.
Some environments are predictably hazardous, and yet disaster strikes them at frequent intervals. Hotels are notoriously liable to fires, and yet they repeatedly fail to implement known safety features in order to diminish the possibility of disaster.56 In such circumstances, disaster is the consequence of a failure to anticipate predictable situations. As far as individuals are concerned, we can offer a convincing psychological explanation of why such short-sighted behavior occurs. Most of us enjoy a strong sense of personal immunity which is seldom if ever rationalized; the threat of a danger hitherto not experienced is simply disbelieved; and we all try to inconvenience ourselves as little as possible.57 All of which is understandable for individuals—even if it may be unwise—but ought not to operate for armed forces facing war, a known “disaster environment.” And yet it does.
The world of civil disaster also provides us with examples of our third type of “simple” failure—failure to adapt to new and unexpected circumstances. Hurricanes and floods can be unpredictable and are effectively unpreventable in many cases; explosions and earthquakes may occur without any warning at all. In such cases, foresight and planning can minimize the degree of damage suffered once disaster has occurred and hasten recovery. Specialist agencies come into action to cope with the aftermath, but the disaster-struck community also has to cope—organizing itself, evolving patterns of cooperation and mutual self-help, sharing out unexpected tasks and resolving competing individual demands. The importance of such activity is so great that Form and Nosow maintain that “organizational integration is the most crucial dimension in disaster performance.”58 The parallels with the military world are obvious. Units which—for whatever reason—are good at responding to unexpected setbacks in a coordinated and effective manner will be more likely to avoid disaster than those that fail to rise to the challenge.
“Complex” Failure
In the military world a failure to learn, anticipate, or adapt will not necessarily bring total defeat in its train. Recovery is possible in theory and occurs in practice. Such a recovery will be more difficult—and perhaps more unlikely—when two failures occur in combination. We call these aggregate failures, for they present complicated characteristics and are therefore somewhat more difficult to explain. Catastrophic failure occurs when a military organization experiences all three kinds of failure simultaneously or consecutively. When this happens, there is often no escape from absolute disaster without outside assistance. Total defeat and political collapse are likely to be the consequences of catastrophic failure.
THE TAXONOMY OF MISFORTUNE
There are three basic kinds of failure: failure to learn, failure to anticipate, and failure to adapt. Each has its own characteristics and consequences, as well as its own parallels in the world of everyday life. Sometimes, two types of failure occur simultaneously; and on occasion all three combine. By separating them out and identifying their essential features, we can provide ourselves with a simple typology with which to distinguish one military failure from another.
The failure to absorb readily accessible lessons from recent history is in many ways the most puzzling of all military misfortunes. There are numerous examples of it in modern military history: the decision to
launch the Passchendaele offensive in 1917 in apparent defiance of the previous two years’ experience of trench warfare; the persistent belief of the United States Air Force in the ability of fighter-bombers to isolate the battlefield, attempted in two operations during the Second World War and the Korean War, both confidently named STRANGLE; and the decision by the United States Army that there were no tactically and operationally relevant lessons to be learned from the French experience in Indochina all fall into this category of military misfortune. There are many others.
The inability to foresee and take appropriate measures to deal with an enemy’s move, or a likely response to a move of one’s own, produces a second type of military misfortune. In some cases, to be sure, an opponent may conceal his intentions and abilities with such skill and success that a failure to predict in the narrow sense is eminently understandable. But this is not always so; and in some cases reasonable precautions are not taken. Among many notable predictive failures we may single out two that illustrate the phenomenon: the failure to predict the Vichy French response to Operation MENACE, the attempted seizure of Dakar; and the extraordinary myopia of Hitler and his generals in assuming that the defeat of Russia could be achieved in a matter of weeks in the summer of 1941.
Military Misfortunes Page 4
