One reason why it has proved difficult to explain the fall of France in terms neither too simple nor impossibly complex is that the different types of failure that occurred shaded into one another. Learning failure was not a failure to identify and comprehend the essence of the German war machine; it was a failure to act speedily and effectively enough on that information. That in its turn can be explained, as we have seen, by the very force of the predictions made during most of the interwar period about the shape of future combat and how France should conduct its share. In turn, adaptive failure rested to a considerable degree on the shoulders of its two “partners in crime” and was magnified by earlier errors that were difficult—if not impossible—to put right at the last moment. But the individual failures themselves are every bit as important as the connections between them.
The failure to anticipate which occurred between 1939 and 1940 took place because new information that should have prompted a reconsideration of methods was not strong enough to break down existing preconceptions and presuppositions. Instead, perhaps because of the very shock of the rapid German victory over Poland, many generals clung to their faith in their established systems and anchored themselves to the rock of past experience. On May 3, 1940, Lord Gort believed that the German army was not in good fighting shape because its soldiers, although young and enthusiastic, were unsteady; eight days later the British chief of staff, General Lord Ironside, was expecting a long battle with “all the German heavy artillery coming in and pounding us.”89 Alexis Léger, secretary general of the French Foreign Office, reportedly believed in April 1940 that the German game was obvious: “They are going to await the French attack in the positions which they hold on their own soil along the Belgian frontier.”90 All these views were wrong; none accorded with the events of September 1939. But they are representative of a widespread inability to reinterpret accepted beliefs in the light of events. Perhaps the psychological cost of rising to such a challenge was too great for anyone except a de Gaulle.
To turn long-term predictive failure—the failure to anticipate the shape of the next war—into success would have required both a recognition of the new factors being introduced into warfare by the Germans, and a reorientation of doctrine to accommodate them. Clearly there was considerable knowledge of the general trend of German developments in pre-1940 France: In 1929, to take only one example, Edouard Daladier expressed concern in parliament about Germany’s motorization, mobility, and commercial aircraft.91 And, as we have seen, changes were slowly being introduced into the French army and air force at the eleventh hour: New manuals on mechanized forces and the identification of novel tasks such as dive-bombing are examples of this. But other obstacles had to be overcome in addition to mental resistance to new ideas; an important constraint on Gamelin’s capacity to update his army was the shortage of weapons-producing plants. Nonetheless, it now seems as though 1940 was a special kind of anticipatory failure. Change was afoot but unfortunately it had not had much time to take hold before the machine was put to the test.
The short-term failure of French intelligence to identify accurately the time and place of the German attack and to convince the high command that its prognostications were correct was essentially due to three factors: the ambiguity of the evidence, the lack of an established system by which to pass vital intelligence up to the top of the command chain, and the lack of readiness of commanders to take account of it. Given the reluctance of many experienced Allied field commanders to listen to their intelligence staffs in the closing stages of the Second World War, when they often had Enigma material at their disposal almost as soon as the Germans had transmitted it, Gamelin’s failure to be more alert in this regard is perhaps scarcely surprising.92
The failure of the French army and air force to adapt to the circumstances of 1940 was largely due to lack of training, preparation, and equipment. Also, as we have seen, the rapid breakdown in the command structure and command system—which was partly self-created—added a burden of responsibility the troops in the field were unable to bear. There is, however, a special factor in this case—a particular problem in coping with Blitzkrieg that could turn small failures into large ones. In this campaign, due to the speed with which the Germans were able to follow up success, tactical mishaps very rapidly created the possibility for major strategic setbacks. We have seen this phenomenon occur in such incidents as Rommel’s crossing of the Meuse at Houx and Guderian’s forcing of the same river further south at Sedan. There are many other instances in which the same thing happened. The French had a solution to the problem, but they were unable to put it into effect because in 1940—unlike 1914—the force of the German attack did not diminish as the days went by. Failure to learn and to anticipate put a heavy premium on the need to adapt rapidly to novel circumstances in order to cope with the German attack. To do this the French needed time—the very factor denied to them by the operational virtuosity of the German Wehrmacht.
What Can Be Done?
THE ORGANIZATIONAL DIMENSION OF STRATEGY
MICHAEL HOWARD HAS POINTED OUT that over the last century and a half different dimensions of strategy—the operational, the logistic, the technological, and today the social—have in turn come to the fore in warfare and in the minds of those who study it.1 To his list we would add the dimension most closely connected to military misfortune: the organizational dimension. Only through an appreciation of the ways in which military organizations work can we understand failures which have puzzled those who experience them, those who observe them, and those who try to explain them.
As we argued in chapter 3, this runs against the grain of many accounts of military failure.2 Because military organizations are built on a strict hierarchy of rank and authority, it is entirely natural that many studies of war focus on generals and on the nature of command. Such studies are neither irrelevant or wrong-headed, for in every age, success in battle goes to the side which is well led.3 To be sure, some military systems (the German and the Soviets most notably) have attempted to supplement or even supplant individual genius by the development of elaborate general staff systems; yet even those countries have sought military success in the prowess of a great captain, a Ludendorff or a Zhukov.
And good generals most certainly do make a difference. We have seen already that the recovery of the Eighth Army in Korea during the winter of 1951 owed much to the inspired generalship of Matthew B. Ridgway. Without his efforts it is quite conceivable that the United States would have withdrawn from the Korean Peninsula, accepting defeat in hopes of avoiding a larger calamity. But, as we have also seen, simply to turn the coin and explain defeats as the fault of individual commanders will not do. For although in some cases the failures of a commander are manifest, in others they are either difficult to discern or impossible to explain simply by reference to flaws of character or intellect.
The catastrophe at Pearl Harbor, as we noted at the beginning of this book, stemmed in part from the failings of several men, General Short and Admiral Kimmel among them. But neither then nor earlier in their careers did they demonstrate any particular divergence from the norms of the organizations that had educated and promoted them. Indeed, their contemporaries and superiors appear to have regarded them as exemplary officers.4 Their failure lay not, as some have seen it, in a tragic flaw in American intelligence, or in the intelligence problem more broadly, but in their inability to weave their forces together for joint air defense of Oahu. Insofar as Short and Kimmel bear the responsibility for resisting the kinds of measures (for example, the creation of a joint air operations command post in Hawaii) that might have made the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor a mere setback or even a draw, however, they reflected institutional proclivities and inclinations embedded in the United States Army and Navy. At Pearl Harbor, and in several of the other cases we have examined, the organizational structures and habits that commanders created, accepted, or simply could not transform failed to match immediate or expected challenges.
One can gain some perspective on military failures by comparing them to industrial accidents. The view that ascribes all fault or praise to a commander is the equivalent of concentrating only on operator error when highly complicated machines malfunction. Even if one looks beyond the individual operator to explain military misfortunes, one can conceive of broader explanations of a similar type. For example, one might argue that the fault lies in operators as a class or, in the case of military failures, the entire officer corps of a country.5 While such a mass indictment may hold true for certain countries at certain times, it offers a greatly oversimplified view of most military calamities. We have seen that failure and success often walk side by side. The same Israeli officers corps that, through its unwarranted self-confidence, paved the way for the surprise of October 6 achieved dazzling operational successes only two weeks later. The same American naval bureaucracy—in many cases, precisely the same people—that failed to implement an effective and coordinated antisubmarine doctrine in 1942 was enormously successful in so doing in 1943.
To continue our metaphor, one might explain failure by suggesting that highly complicated machines, even when well-designed and competently operated, require universal habits or practices to make them run smoothly. Favored all-purpose lubricants for the machinery of military organizations include such measures as forcing decision making lower down the hierarchy rather than at its summit, ensuring that information is transmitted up as well as down the chain of command, and maintaining the best communications between different components.6 Yet it would be foolish to fall back on such axiomatic solutions—that a military organization should decentralize as much as possible, for instance. In key respects, for example, the solution to the American antisubmarine problem in 1942–43 lay in greater centralization. Likewise, the ultimate failure of Germany’s offensives on the Western Front in the spring of 1918 stemmed from excessive decentralization, from a subordination of strategic considerations to purely tactical ones. The unresolved debate about whether business strategy should be created at the top or “blended incrementally and opportunistically” by suborganizations suggests that there is no universal remedy for the core problems of any complex organization.7
To understand why and how military organizations fail, we must abandon the temptation to focus a spotlight on any particular component to the exclusion of the rest, or to seek universal causes of failure. To understand military misfortune it is necessary first of all to understand the nature not of all organizations, but of the particular organization and above all, its critical tasks.8 Then, and only then, we can begin to think of warding off failure. As all of our cases suggest—and as Pearl Harbor demonstrates so clearly—it is in the deficiencies of particular organizations confronted with particular tasks that the embryo of misfortune develops.
IN LIEU OF REMEDIES
Learning
One of the most obvious ways to improve performance is by learning, but failure to learn is due to far wider causes than the shortcomings of individuals who happen to find themselves in positions of command at critical moments. Part of the problem lies with the absence in many Western armed forces of an institutional locus for applied historical study. In a way, the operations research groups of World War II came into existence to fill just such a need, but their function was to look at the most recent, hence presumably the most relevant, history. Enormously useful as operations research was, it could not provide the long-term perspective required by the United States Navy in 1941, for example. Moreover, because the origins of operations research lie in the physical sciences, its practitioners have tended to look at material and procedural problems rather than managerial and organizational ones. The operations researcher instinctively looks for quantifiable data—which, as we have seen, do not always tell the full story.
Attachés and other intelligence officers might be expected to fill the learning role, but they too suffer from the necessarily narrow definitions of their tasks. Like the operations researchers, they labor under the burden of day-to-day requirements for information. Their superiors rarely want to hear from them reflections on how well their side is doing: their job is to find out what the other side (allied, neutral, or hostile) is up to. As for official historians, they concentrate on the writing of history and reflect only sporadically on its application to contemporary problems.9 Most official history operations are small and underfunded homes for officers of an oddly scholarly bent. Rarely are such offices incorporated into the activities of a war college, much less a general staff. The main historical exceptions to this observation, the Germans and the Soviets, are instructive. In both cases military historical research has been regarded as a foundation for the development of military doctrine, and service in official institutes devoted to such work helps rather than hurts one’s career.
Of course, even when they lack the wherewithal to produce high-quality official history, all military organizations study the lessons of combat to some degree. In doing so, they face the problem of deciding what in past military experience is relevant to their needs and therefore useful to them. Here they may face psychological obstacles to learning the kinds of lessons that we have discussed. It is all too easy to dismiss another decade’s or another nation’s experience by referring to one or two glaring differences from one’s own situation—as the Royal Navy did in the 1930s by comfortably assuming that sonar had eliminated the submarine menace, or the United States Navy did by looking at the sorry state of British shipborne naval aviation.10 This is particularly true when the lessons learned from a foreign power or from one’s own historical experience suggest that one’s own organization has fundamental flaws.
The problem of organizational learning, then, rests only partially on having a suborganization prepared to fulfill that function—although there is much to be said for such a unit, which might bridge the limbo of official history offices and the narrow focus of operational research sections. Equally important is the ability to tread a middle path between slavish acceptance of the superiority of a foreign model or equally unthinking rejection of it. The ill effects of the former can be seen in the United States military during the period before the Civil War, when the Napoleonic legend inspired American officers not only to immerse themselves in French doctrine but to imitate minor details of uniform and outfit as well.11 The latter occurred in the early 1960s, when American statesmen and military leaders entered the Vietnam War in astonishing and deliberate ignorance of the French efforts there. In the words of one four-star general, “The French haven’t won a war since Napoleon. What can we learn from them?”12
We have seen that the easiest lessons to be learned from foreign militaries concern technology and technique—gadgets that can be plugged into one’s usual way of doing business. The most valuable lessons, however, may come from a study of other organizations and how they operate. Yet these are the most difficult lessons to cull, because they are the least tangible. Herbert Rosinski, a shrewd German émigré who had taught at the German Naval War College during the 1930s, recommended to the American government during World War II that the United States undertake a large scale effort to study the German general staff:
The capture of so many German commanders and general staff officers has presented this country with a unique opportunity for the systematic study of the top-level training and organization of the German Army—which would deserve to be exploited to the utmost.
That system of military training and higher organization has been studied by soldiers all over the world with the keenest attention ever since its exceptionally high level of efficiency revealed itself between 1864 and 1871, but so far with only very limited success.
For the real secrets of that system—the things which “made it click”—were not to be found in the external forms of organization where the British, for example, looked for it, nor even in the detailed microscopic analysis of its strategic operations as the French did between 1871 and 1914, but in certain almost intangible qualities of intellectual tr
aining and outlook of which even the members of the German Command and Staff System themselves were only half conscious.13
Military organizations can and in many cases do learn very quickly. Sometimes this happens under the spur of defeat, as Edward Luttwak has observed.14 But in war there is nothing like the hard school of experience, and many lessons can only be learned on the job—even by units that have devoted much care and attention in peacetime to thinking out their particular combat problems. Few organizations can have been half as well prepared for their wartime role as the United States Marine Corps in 1941: By then it had been training continuously for eight years and had put a great deal of intellectual effort into studying and practicing its role.15 It had, in particular, studied but not been overwhelmed by the failure of the Dardanelles operation in 1915. Nonetheless, as late as 1937 its training exercises were severely criticized for having accepted unequivocally the contents of the manual on landing operations—which bore the prefix “Tentative”—and on the every eve of war it still had problems both with its matériel and with its techniques.16 Once the war started the marines’ capacity to learn had to, and on the whole did, keep pace with their mission. Robert Sherrod, a war correspondent who was present at Tarawa, noted that after two years of war they were “learning how to learn faster.”17
What was true of the marines was no less true of some of the more distinguished commanders in World War II. In December 1942 Eisenhower noted reflectively that he was “learning many things,” above all about what kind of qualities went to make a good commander.18 And a year later, General George C. Marshall remarked that after having received an education in the First World War based on roads, rivers, and railroads, he had during the previous two years “been acquiring an education based on oceans and I’ve had to learn all over again.”19 Others too learned on the job. But not all commanders were as far-sighted as Marshall or as open-minded as Eisenhower, nor were all units as learning-oriented as the Marines—often quite the contrary! What both these examples suggest is that some things can be learned in peacetime, and others only in war, and that if the military are to make the most of their opportunities when war comes they must be organizationally prepared to learn.
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