Military Misfortunes

by Eliot A Cohen

  This plethora of purposes and forms has had a deleterious effect on the analysis of campaigns, and particularly those campaigns involving failure. This is most notable in the case of utilitarian military history—that is, the kind of history by and for military organizations desiring to train men, and officers in particular, for war. A belief in the utility of historical study for this purpose first took root in the same country that provided many of the pioneers of historical method—Germany.10 In the view of the German General Staff, and particularly its greatest chief, Helmuth von Moltke, a rigorous study of military history offered one of the best substitutes for direct experience of war available to a peacetime army.11 Moltke himself, a writer of some note and ability, wrote a number of campaign studies, and personally supervised the production of the General Staff’s histories of the campaigns of 1864, 1866, and 1870, which led directly to the unification of Germany under Prussian hegemony. The General Staffs historical section invariably included officers of high intellectual and leadership quality; where an assignment to serve as an official historian in the United States military today usually signifies a career coming to an end, it meant just the reverse in the German Army.

  At the heart of the German army lay its General Staff, at the heart of the General Staff the Kriegsakademie, or War College; and at the heart of the curriculum there lay military history, which absorbed as much time as tactics.12 History was taught according to the applicatory method, first introduced in the 1820s. This method of historical study involved the extremely detailed study of a battle from the point of view of the commander. It required the preparation of special narratives interrupted periodically by questions to the reader asking him to judge whether the commander’s action was the correct one, given what he knew at the time.13 As one practitioner of the method put it, the student’s

  study of the campaigns of his famous predecessors must be active and not passive; he must put himself in their place, not content with merely reading a lively narrative, but working out every step of the operation with map and compass; investigating the reasons of each movement; tracing cause and effect, ascertaining the relative importance of the moral and the physical, and deducing for himself the principles on which the generals acted.14

  The applicatory method was not confined to Germany: G. F. R. Henderson, a British colonel and a writer of great skill applied it at the turn of the century to his biography of Stonewall Jackson, a far livelier and more rewarding tome than the scores of studies cranked out by the laborious methods of the German General Staff. But whether their works were dry or vivid, the authors of applicatory history could not but distort reality, for they focused all their attention on the commander. Given what we have said above concerning “the dogma of responsibility,” this comes as no surprise.

  Formal applicatory history faded in the early twentieth century, although it continued to do well in the field of small-unit tactics.15 But the legacy of applicatory history remains in the tendency of readers of military history, and particularly military students of the subject, to see battles and campaigns as a clash between two commanders—a duel in which the wits and moral qualities of a single leader determine the outcome of battle. While there is some accuracy in this view, it lends credence to the fallacy of homogeneity—the habit of speaking of a large organization as a unitary whole rather than as a collection of suborganizations with definable subcultures, routines, and modes of operation.

  A second type of utilitarian military history, related to the first, is that which seeks to use experience to demonstrate or validate certain principles or procedures. As even Admiral Herbert Richmond, a thoughtful writer and capable naval war planner, wrote:

  War consists of several elements, and into all of these enter principles. Those principles are permanent, and those who study history find a wealth of instruction in the application of those principles.16

  Frequently, however, the search for immutable principles of war is but a lazy approach to the applicatory method. Where the latter attempts to train a commander’s judgment by giving him vicarious experience, the former leads to a reckless ransacking of history for evidence to support a priori positions.17 At best, the attempt to write or read military history as a vindication of principles leads to mechanistic and rigid simplification.

  The final utilitarian purpose of military history inheres in its myth-making and morale-building functions. These are, one hastens to point out, necessary functions. Pride in one’s service or one’s regiment contribute to military effectiveness, and help integrate officers, particularly new officers, into their organizations. Particularly important—and dangerous—in this regard is what one might call “monumental history,” official history written to record for posterity the armed forces’ achievements in a particular war. Even official history written with the most honest of intentions can fall into the trap of being overly solicitous of reputations, excessively unwilling to criticize high-level decisions and policies.18

  This is not to suggest that official history is necessarily biased or dishonest, that it shuns a critical examination of failure in order to celebrate success. Much official history has won high praise even from private scholars inclined to suspect its quality. The remarkably candid British official history of the strategic bombing offensive against Germany comes to mind, as does virtually the whole of the United States Army’s history of World War II and the recently published German history of the same conflict. The danger resides more in the uses of officially produced history, in an unwillingness to go beyond it, than in official history itself. Indeed, from time to time military organizations have looked to official history to rescue themselves from the artificial optimism of most war games and exercises. A U.S. army educational review in 1971 commented:

  One of the most consistent student comments about curriculum content is that the synthetic operational problems are generally euphoric in nature-the U.S. Army always wins with relative ease. . . . A strong element of every curriculum should be historical studies which frankly analyze unsuccessful American military efforts. This should not be a “head-hunting expedition” or invidious to any individual, but it should involve an objective discussion of what we did, what went wrong, and why. This single action would do more to establish credibility for our instruction than any other known to me.19

  The three varieties of utilitarian military history—applicatory history, history in support of principles, and history as monument—all have justifiable if sometimes unattainable purposes. The point is that all three kinds of history turn one’s attention away from the dissection of military misfortune, and particularly from its study as organizational rather than individual failure.

  Academic historians have done little better in this regard, largely because military history has, even to the present day, gained little respectability in academic circles. Even in Wilhelmine Germany military history was never a well-established branch of the discipline, being viewed instead as a subject suitable only for the technical experts of the Great General Staff. Thus, in the 1880s, the faculty of the University of Berlin stoutly opposed the appointment of the greatest nineteenth-century military historian, Hans Delbrück, to a chair of military history.20 Similarly, the handful of British nineteenth and early-twentieth-century military historians, chiefly at Oxford, found themselves contending with a widespread prejudice against their subject matter. This took a variety of forms: In part, it came as a reaction against what has come to be known as “the drum and trumpet” school of military history—the flashy and stereotyped battle pieces of popular military historians. In some cases (in England, at any rate) it reflected a simple disbelief in the importance of war itself; in others a suspicion (not altogether gone on today’s American campuses either) that an interest in military history indicated an unhealthy bellicosity out of keeping with the pacific traditions of scholarship. This last complaint led the holder of the Chichele Professorship at Oxford (until recently the only endowed chair devoted to the study of war) to remark t
o his colleagues, “You are no more likely to become a militarist or a jingo through addiction to military history than an ornithologist is likely to feed his children on gobbets of raw flesh, still warm, because he has become fascinated by the behavior of birds of prey.”21

  The suspicions with which academic historians have viewed military history is, however, a chronic source of resentment, not necessarily a block to creative scholarship. More serious for the writing of military history since World War II have been the critiques offered by military historians themselves, or at any rate those sympathetic to them. By the 1950s, Walter Millis, an American military historian of some note, was writing that “military history as a specialty has largely lost its function. There is a panache about military history which has kept it alive since the days of Homer and presumably will always do so,” but, he continued, it had become irrelevant to modern war: Its only hope is to become “less military and more civilian,” to merge itself into the general study of social history.22 Many other military historians, including some of the most talented practitioners of what had until the 1960s been conventional military history (narrative accounts of campaigns, in particular) took up this refrain. Peter Paret declared in the early 1970s, “Far too much military history is being written in America,” most of it “descriptive history, centering on leading figures, campaigns, and climactic battles.”23 Agreeing with this criticism, many military historians turned instead to the study of “War and Society,” a resolute attempt to place military institutions and events in ever broadening contexts. Instead of studying battles, historians (often equipped with the latest statistical techniques and computer databases) examined patterns of recruitment, the relationship between arms industries and economic development, the daily life of soldiers, or the relationship between group interests and the emergence of military doctrines.24 This new kind of military history gained impetus from the more general rise and dominance of social history in the post-1945 period, and in particular the so-called annales school of social history.

  What all this did was to leave the original, core subject of military history—war itself—in a state of extraordinary neglect. John Keegan’s remarkable book, The Face of Battle did a brilliant job of resurrecting “the battle piece,” showing just how well a historian could do in recreating the facts of battle.25 Keegan opened a door onto the academic study of combat—but no one followed him through. This is all the more astonishing in view of the fact that one of the most striking methodological innovations in the study of military history—S. L. A. Marshall’s system for the collective interviewing of units immediately after battle—offered an opportunity to capture the essence of contemporary warfare in a way not possible by more conventional methods.26

  Although by the 1980s signs of a return swing of the pendulum had become visible, it was nonetheless the case that many academic historians had allowed themselves to become curiously remote from the central fact of war—combat.27 Whatever the merits of the “War and Society” approach, it steered attention toward one explanation of victory and defeat (insofar as one was interested in such questions at all): the view that war was a test of a whole society’s resources and abilities, and that success in battle stemmed directly therefrom. This view shunned a close analysis of military organizations in war; it inhibited the writing of a military history relevant to the concerns of professional soldiers; and, above all, it drew interest away from the close study of battle necessary to understand failure in war.

  Social Science and the Study of Surprise

  As some historians have ruefully noted, in the postwar period social scientists have taken the lead in the study of military matters.28 From sociological studies of the American soldiers in World War II, to general works on civil-military relations, to studies of the theory of strategy, social scientists have set the scholarly agenda. This has included the study of military failure, or rather one kind of failure: surprise attack or, more broadly, intelligence failure.

  Beginning in 1962 with Roberta Wohlsetter’s book Pearl Harbor: Waring and Decision, political scientists have mulled over how it is that large and sophisticated intelligence organizations have missed the clues of an impending attack. The conundrum was particularly acute in the case of Pearl Harbor, because that was one of the first cases in which it was publicly acknowledged how far modern decryption of radio messages had gone. The central puzzle that social scientists found—or set for themselves—recurred in a number of cases, including Pearl Harbor, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Chinese intervention in Korea, and the Egyptian and Syrian attacks on Israel in October 1973.

  According to the social scientists a number of causes accounted for the failure of intelligence. One of these was “noise”—the difficulty of sifting out the correct and important from the irrelevant or the false; the problem was not, as had been thought, that organizations had too little information at their disposal but too much. Others focused on the importance of deception, and of the surprising ease with which one country could mislead another about its intention to attack.29 While some analysts made the case that institutional arrangements such as having competing analytical groups could reduce surprise, the consensus seems to be just the reverse. In the words of the most persuasive student of surprise:

  Intelligence failures are not only inevitable, they are natural. . . . Scholars cannot legitimately view intelligence mistakes as bizarre, because they are no more common and no less excusable than academic errors. . . . My survey of the intractability of the inadequacy of intelligence, and its inseparability from mistakes in decision, suggests one final conclusion that is perhaps most outrageously fatalistic of all: tolerance for disaster.30

  Although the “no-fault” view of intelligence surprise has been challenged, it remains the reigning one among scholars. When surprise does occur, and when culpability can be assigned, it belongs at the level of the highest civilian decision maker: “The principal cause of surprise is not the failure of intelligence but the unwillingness of political leaders to believe intelligence or to react to it with sufficient dispatch.”31 The analysts of failure repeatedly warn their readers about “the silly certainty of hindsight,” saving their criticisms for the political misjudgments at the very top, which either mislead intelligence analysts or cause them to be ignored, usually with dire results.32

  The problem with most studies of intelligence failure stems at once from their excessive claims and from their incompleteness. If every failure—be it of any army, a corporation, or a government—which results from not taking appropriate action based on “clear,” “timely,” “reliable,” “valid,” “adequate,” and “wide-ranging” information,33 is an intelligence failure, the term becomes meaningless. Conversely, if inadequate intelligence is the norm, there can be no standards for judging good or adequate intelligence at all. It is interesting that few of the students of intelligence failure have also discussed at length the nature of successful intelligence work. Part of the reason lies in the fact that sound intelligence (or sound use of it) frequently causes the opponent to change or even cancel the course of action he intended: A study of surprise attacks predicted is usually a study of nonevents. Of course, intelligence has, on a number of occasions (the Battle of Midway, for example, or the Battle of ) enabled one side to anticipate another’s actions. But chiefly it is the narrow definition of intelligence as the foretelling of the future that inhibits a more realistic understanding of the role and limits of intelligence.

  If some students of surprise claim too much, others bound their studies too narrowly. Typically, case studies of intelligence failure look at two different kinds of organization: the organs of supreme command—a president or prime minister and his military advisers, for example—and intelligence organizations. Rarely do surprise attack theorists study the operational commands on whom the blows of a surprise attack fall, and when they do so it is only in order to trace their reactions to warning in the fatal few hours immediately before an onslaught. The rea
son for this self-limiting study is simple: Most investigations of intelligence failure stop their investigations at the point of combat. Their interest lies in why surprise occurred, not in what its consequences were.

  In some cases these consequences may seem self-evident, though even here appearances may be misleading. The Japanese success at Pearl Harbor, for example, had only negligible strategic consequences, since the sunk or damaged battleships would prove irrelevant to the ensuing battles of Coral Sea, Midway, and the Solomons. As we shall see in some of the case studies below, it is an error to think that surprise by itself determines more than the outcome of the first engagement: Thereafter other factors—the quality of command, prewar doctrine, quantitative elements, and others—come into play. In Clausewitz’s words,

  But while the wish to achieve surprise is common, and, indeed, indispensable, and while it is true that it will never be completely ineffective, it is equally true that by its very nature surprise can rarely be outstandingly successful. It would be a mistake, therefore, to regard surprise as a key element of success in war. The principle is highly attractive in theory, but in practice it is often held up by the friction of the whole machine34