A military institution may have learned what it can reasonably be expected to have learned, and anticipated what it could reasonably be expected to anticipate, and yet still suffer a misfortune. This happens because of an inability to cope with unfolding events. Where learning failures have their roots in the past, and anticipatory failures look to the future, adaptive failures suggest an inability to handle the changing present. Every campaign presents some unforeseen challenge or circumstance. Not all military organizations find themselves able to adjust in a timely and effective fashion to those challenges. The escape of the Scharnborst and the Gneisenau from Brest on February 12,1942, and their successful passage up the Channel and into the North Sea produced exactly that sense of shock and bewilderment that denotes true misfortune. Although the Royal Navy had been able to predict that such a move was likely, neither it nor the Royal Air Force was able to prevent it.
When two kinds of misfortune occur together we are in the presence of aggregate failure. Examples of such failure include the second American air attack on Schweinfurt in October 1943, and the Anglo-French Suez expedition, Operation MUSKETEER, in 1956. Aggregate failures most commonly combine learning failure and anticipatory failure. They are not necessarily likely to be mortal, since an ability to cope can make it possible to redeem error.
When all three kinds of failure occur together, catastrophe results. Such a compound failure carries with it the risk of bringing about a complete national collapse. This is not necessarily the inevitable result of such a failure: it is possible to identify cases of catastrophic failure from which a country has subsequently recovered—the Italian defeat at Caporetto in 1917 for example, or the British antisubmarine campaign between January and April of the same year—but in such cases escape from disaster will be only by a narrow margin. Unless outside forces come to the aid of the sufferer, or unless the ability to cope can be rekindled or reawakened, recovery will be impossible.
In the pages that follow, we shall explore in more detail some components of our theory, before using the theory itself to analyze five case studies that illustrate the different causes of military misfortune we have identified.
Analyzing Failure
INTRODUCTION
THIS CHAPTER EXAMINES the ways in which contemporaries and historians misdiagnose military misfortunes, the former because of political and institutional imperatives, the latter because of scholarly traditions and habits of mind. For a variety of reasons military failure does not often receive sound analytical treatment from contemporaries; what is more striking and more perverse is the absence of sound analysis by military historians and one of the chief consumers of military history—military organizations themselves. Only by clearing away this undergrowth of a priori misconceptions about military failure can we begin a useful study of it.
Following this discussion we turn to an analytic approach that offers some guidelines for the investigation of military misfortune, Clausewitz’s concept of Kritik, or critical analysis. Although the great Prussian theorist of war offered no formulas for diagnosing all failures, let alone preventing them, he spoke to our central analytic problem. In the final section of the chapter we will lay out our method for studying failure—one we will follow in five succeeding cases. To illustrate some basic points we will look at perhaps the most famous of American military misfortunes, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
WHY MILITARY MISFORTUNE
IS MISUNDERSTOOD CLOSE-UP
The Politics of Failure
No defeat in American History has had quite the impact of the Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Within two hours eight American battleships had been sunk or badly damaged, nearly 2,400 men had perished or received mortal wounds, and the opponent had escaped virtually untouched. The commanders on the spot—Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander of the Pacific Fleet, and Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, commander of U.S. Army forces on Hawaii, were relieved of their commands within a fortnight. The justice of those decisions remains hotly disputed, and a vocal community of historians and officers insists that Kimmel in particular was made the scapegoat for the successful Japanese surprise attack.1
By all accounts Kimmel was an able and industrious officer who helped ready the Pacific Fleet for the challenges of the war that soon emerged; by all accounts, too, his command had suffered from having been denied access to certain critical cryptological sources of intelligence (in particular, decrypted messages to and from the Japanese consulate in Honolulu asking for precise information concerning the location of American naval shipping in Pearl Harbor). Kimmel and his apologists insist that, had he received such messages, he would have taken measures that could have averted the worst of the damage. Moreover, as naval officers in particular have pointed out, whereas the government quickly cashiered Kimmel, it did no such thing to General Douglas MacArthur, whose air force was smashed on the ground by the Japanese attack a good eight hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The result, many have claimed, was political scapegoating pure and simple.
Now, interestingly enough, although scapegoating sometimes occurs in the wake of natural or even man-made disasters, it is less widespread than one might think.2 A diffuse cloud of suspicion may settle over an organization (NASA in the wake of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, for example, or Union Carbide in the aftermath of the poison gas accident in Bhopal, India), but rarely do particular individuals come in for minute scrutiny and public disgrace in quite this way. When they do, middle managers or operators are criticized more often than chief executives. In the case of military failure, the tendency is for criticism and responsibility to fall most heavily on the highest level of management and to be less forgiving. A chief executive of a railroad, for example, rarely loses his job over a train derailment, although the operator of the train involved most probably will. Moreover, as the case of MacArthur suggests, the spotlight will frequently miss other commanders at fault.
This phenomenon of the erratic spotlight is less arbitrary than it might appear, for two reasons. First, the politics of military failure are quite different from the politics of disaster. Military failures often cost more in terms of human life (at least in advanced countries) than do civil disasters. Moreover, except in rare cases natural and even manmade disasters rarely threaten national self-esteem or core values. Whereas a Pearl Harbor calls into question the efficiency of the most essential institutions of government, a landslide, an earthquake, or even an airplane crash rarely does so. The explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 is the exception that proves the rule: Americans had viewed their prowess in space exploration as a demonstration of unique American capabilities, and the conquest of space as a national adventure. That NASA, the organization that had put men on the moon, could have allowed such a seemingly routine event to fail so catastrophically shook Americans far more deeply than the failure of, for example, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to prevent the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor failure.
Of course, the launch of a space shuttle was only apparently a routine kind of event—in point of fact, it remained a hazardous undertaking, as those within NASA knew very well. In a variety of ways, however, NASA officials had given precisely the opposite impression to the American public by putting nonprofessionals (from a U.S. senator to a high school science teacher) on spacecraft. This misleading appearance of security and safety contributed to the public reaction to the disaster. It should additionally be noted that those in charge also, to some extent, deceived themselves (“NASA and Thiokol accepted escalating risk apparently because they ‘got away with it last time’”).3 The same holds true for many military misfortunes as well. The inflated reputation of the fortress of Singapore in 1942 contributed to the calamity of its fall—not only to public distress, but to the reactions of statesmen and commanders groping for strategic responses to the Japanese onslaught. The confidence of the American government and Far East Command in November 1950 that Chinese C
ommunist forces would not oppose in strength a U.S.-Republic of Korea advance to the Yalu contributed not only to public disbelief over the rout of the Eighth Army in the hills of North Korea, but to the collapse itself.
Military organizations overall, and even particular installations, embody national pride and self-esteem. When they fail, and in particular when they fail catastrophically, confidence in government itself is shaken, for the first duty of government is national defense. In some cases, moreover, the blow lands not only on a nation’s self-esteem but on its cities and population. As a direct consequence of Pearl Harbor, American residents on the West Coast believed themselves in imminent danger of enemy attack, perhaps even invasion. Similarly, the sight of blazing shipping up and down the East and Gulf coasts in 1942 stimulated fears of sabotage and even air attacks by the German enemy. Military misfortune, then, because of its scope, its practical implications, and even more deeply felt threats to national self-esteem, evokes a far different response than does a “normal” disaster. Political authorities often have no choice but to respond by dismissing a senior military commander and replacing him with another, in effect creating a scapegoat. They do this not out of pusillanimity, but because the aftermath of military misfortunes differs from other disasters. Once a natural or man-made disaster has occurred, it is over; a time of recovery begins. In the case of military failure, however, the crisis has only begun, and recuperation from the immediate consequences of defeat—in the case of Pearl Harbor, tending to the wounded and salvaging the blasted hulks littering the bay—can be less important than coping with its larger consequences, namely a loss of confidence in and of the armed forces. To indulge in the kinds of complicated explanations of failure that we essay in this book runs counter to the immediate and pressing requirements of national emergency: Public men immersed in the here and now may well judge that such efforts, which require introspection and intricate argumentation, will do more damage than good.
The Dogma of Responsibility
Political necessity, therefore, impels contemporaries, particularly politicians, to focus on the senior commander. So too does what one might call “the dogma of responsibility,” the tradition, dominant in virtually all military organizations, that the commander bears full responsibility for all that happens to his command. This is expressed perhaps most powerfully in the naval semitradition of a captain going down with his ship; it is seen more frequently in the practice of sacking captains whose ships run aground or into other ships, even if the proximate cause of the failure is the error of a junior officer. Thus, one of the intelligence officers at Pearl Harbor who believed (together with many officers) that Admiral Kimmel was badly, indeed shamefully, treated reluctantly agreed with the imperative that he be relieved:
A decision to relieve a defeated commander is not a question of justice. There is no justice in a war that sends one man to safe duty in a basement while thousands of his comrades are dying in desperate battle within a mile of where he sits. Kimmel should have been relieved, but not in disgrace.4
The decision to relieve a defeated commander, even if the fault is not his in a narrow historical or legal sense, rests on a number of grounds. One is that a military commander’s responsibility far exceeds that of an executive in business or other government agencies because his power and authority equally exceed theirs. He can order men to their deaths; he can control their activities twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week; he can and must insist on obedience and formal deference incomparable with those in the civilian world. The code of responsibility is drummed into officers from their first days as subalterns. Their right to command rests, ultimately, not only on their acceptance of greater risk and hardship than those under their command but on their willingness to accept responsibility. To say that a spectacular failure is either nobody’s fault, or everybody’s, or indeed the consequence of a complicated chain of events and decisions, is to undermine the moral order an army requires in order to be able to fight.
Because of the grip of the dogma of responsibility, a defeat, even if not a commander’s fault, can shatter his nerve, and a commander whose will has been shaken is worse than useless. This can be true of the most experienced and successful of military leaders as well as those not previously tested in war. When the Egyptian-Syrian onslaught against Israel began on Yom Kippur (October 6) 1973, the Israeli Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan, suffered a collapse in confidence that rendered him ineffectual throughout much of the war.5 Even if a leader’s self-confidence remains intact, the psychological scar tissue resulting from having presided over disaster may deprive him of good judgment. Admiral Kimmel’s obsessive refusal to admit oversights and errors in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack indicates that defeat had precisely that effect on him.
One final reason peculiar to military organizations contributes to the dogma of responsibility: the apparently vast ability of commanders to influence the forces under them. A general or admiral can, if he chooses, control certain kinds of events far more easily than can executives in other organizations. Should he order an army to attack or a fleet to sail, it will happen, and fairly quickly, if physically possible. In business, by way of contrast, except in the most autocratic of corporations, decisions are taken in a far slower and more collective fashion. To be sure, operational military decisions are often far more constrained by a host of considerations-enemy abilities and actions, logistics, political directives, and so on—than they appear outwardly. Nonetheless, what counts is the appearance, and frequently the reality, of enormous abilities to influence events. In addition, a senior commander can radically change everyday matters, which, though seemingly petty, can drastically alter the lives of those under him. By doubling the amount of physical training required every morning, for example, or by reducing or increasing parade ground drill, a commander can change the tone and morale of hundreds of thousands of men. Thus, General Matthew Ridgway, on assuming command of the Eighth Army in Korea in 1950, recalls not only his attempts to improve the tactics and training of his beaten command, but minor details of how it lived:
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 to serve the food in. Not that I personally fretted over whether I ate off linen or linoleum. But this sort of thing, at the mess where VIPs from all over the world were sure to visit, struck me as reflecting a total lack of pride in the whole operation—a confirmation that this was indeed what it was sometimes called at home: the Forgotten War. I promptly got that dreary muslin swapped for serviceable linen and that crockery changed for presentable chinaware.6
Ridgway, it should be noted, was widely and correctly known as a fighting man’s general, indifferent to his personal comforts.
This concentration of despotic power in a single individual, however, is often deceptive. Obviously, what the enemy can and does do forms the greatest constraint on a military leader—one which he cannot ignore. But a commander can be, and often is, also at the mercy of organizations not under his control, of organizational subcultures so deeply ingrained that they are oblivious to his influence, of political pressures he cannot counteract, of military technologies he cannot change, of allocations of human and material resources he cannot affect. He can be a prisoner of assumptions he shares and of earlier decisions he cannot unmake. Kimmel made his defense on just these grounds, and they have some, though not exclusive merit. It is precisely in these gray regions that a commander cannot control (or can do so only with great difficulty) that military misfortune develops.
WHY MILITARY MISFORTUNE IS MISUNDERSTOOD
FROM A DISTANCE
Military History and the Study of Defeat
The politics of failure and the dogma of responsibility combine to focus attention on the commande
r, for understandable and indeed often laudable reasons. It is harder to understand, perhaps, why those who study military history—including the armed forces themselves—have not come up with satisfactory methods for analyzing it. In fact, military historians, amateur and professional, have probably done more to obscure than to reveal the reasons for military misfortune. In order to develop a useful method for analyzing military misfortune—a method that must perforce be historical—we have to look at how the peculiarities of military history, as it has been written for the past century, have obstructed a coherent study of military failure. Two particularly striking paradoxes immediately confront the student of military historiography. The first is that although military history is one of the oldest branches of history (think back on Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War), and perhaps the most popular with the literate public, it is one of the least respectable among academic historians. The second is that although the military profession has few of the intellectual pretensions of, say, law and medicine, it is far more disposed than are those professions to turn to historical study, albeit in odd ways.
This latter fact helps account for the variety of purposes military history can serve. All history, of course, plays a role in sustaining a community’s sense of purpose; all individuals, consciously or not, make use of history.7 In the case of military organizations, however, this is more true than others: History serves as a monument to past achievements, an inspiration to newly inducted members, a database for operational analysis, a training ground for prospective commanders, an institutional memory, and as a source of recreation.8 In few other areas (diplomatic history may be one) do governments make such efforts to produce official histories, which influence historical writing and reasoning for decades thereafter. At the same time, the historical writings of scholars in this field compete with the writings of popular historians, journalists, serving and retired officers, and the occasional autodidact. Military history is often written in horizontal layers: either as battle history, campaign history, or the history of strategy making. Sometimes (Pearl Harbor is a case in point) it is written about everything leading up to the clash of arms, and sometimes about nothing but. In the words of one distinguished military historian, “Military history is prey to problems and pressures that are involved far less often in the writing of other kinds of history.”9
Military Misfortunes Page 5
