The overvaluation of surprise by some analysts of intelligence failure stems from an exaggerated picture of what intelligence is and can be. By implication, at any rate, many of them would appear to conceive of it as an ability to see into the future, to know today the likely outcome of the interactions of military forces locked in combat a week, a month, or a year from now. In truth, however, military intelligence can do two more limited, if still necessary, things: it can try to answer the question, Where is the enemy now? and, equally important, What is the enemy like? In some cases it can even suggest answers to the question, What is the enemy likely to do? At its best, intelligence can provide the bounds for strategic calculation, but it is asking too much to expect it to look into the future.
In addition—and this is the most serious deficiency in their arguments—the theorists of surprise treat failure as a homogeneous entity. They do so because they do not explore the operational consequences of surprise, that is, the battlefield outcomes of the intelligence failures whose genesis they have traced with such care. As we shall see in many of the following case studies, however, failure is rarely if ever homogeneous. When the Chinese intervened in force in Korea in late November 1950, they routed some American forces but not others: where the Second Division of the United States Army soon crumbled into small groups of desperate men, the First Marine Division conducted an orderly retreat, inflicting extremely heavy losses on its opponents and remaining intact to the end as an effective fighting force. If all American units had suffered the fate of the Second Division, the UN Command might well have had to evacuate the Korean Peninsula; if all had fought and endured as hardily as the First Marine Division, the rebound might have come well before UN forces had fallen back behind the 38th Parallel. When the Japanese lashed out at American and British forces in the Pacific in 1942 they achieved partial surprise in both the Philippines and the Malay Peninsula, and in the end forced garrisons in both areas to capitulate. But whereas the British forces collapsed quickly—by February 1942—the Americans were able to hold out until April; one defeat was a humiliation with dangerous political (and hence strategic) consequences at home and in the theater, the other was a “forlorn hope” that became an inspiration, not a disgrace. When Egyptian and Syrian forces attacked Israel in 1973 the campaigns went quite differently on the southern and the northern fronts. In the south the Egyptians managed to overpower a fortified line named for an Israeli chief of staff, seize terrain from which they were never dislodged and beat back a major Israeli counterattack. In the north, with one minor and temporary exception, the Syrians achieved no such gains and were soon repelled, albeit with much hard fighting. Once again, the psychological and political repercussions—particularly the consequences for peacemaking—were immense.
Like academic military historians, surprise attack theorists have fallen into the habit of ignoring the central element of war—the fighting. Like some of the utilitarian historians, and many contemporary observers, they tend to focus on only one level of command, usually the very highest civilian authority, such as a president or prime minister. It is therefore to other analytic traditions or approaches that we must turn in order to learn how to dissect military misfortune.
IN SEARCH OF METHOD: CLAUSEWITZIAN KRITIK
Let it be clear at the outset that the analytic task faced by the student of military misfortune is formidable in the extreme. He or she faces the usual difficulty of military history, rendering some sense out of the chaos that is a battlefield. There is an addition the problem one astute general called
the tendency of all ranks to combine and recast the story of their achievements into a shape which shall satisfy the susceptibilities of national and regimental vain-glory. . . . On the actual day of battle naked truths may be picked up for the asking; by the following morning they have already begun to get into their uniforms.35
Despite the plethora of documentation generated by soldiers and their organizations—memoirs, regimental histories, not to mention war diaries and after-action reports—the reality of battle is often obscure, and the forces for dissimulation, be they conscious or unintended, potent. This is, of course, trebly true when speaking of disaster, when the urge for bureaucratic self-protection by means of the creation of spurious or misleading documents can be overwhelming.
But quite apart from the problem of evidence—eyewitnesses who either forget spontaneously or choose to do so, war diaries written months after the event by harried junior officers, reports concealed for reasons of security—is the problem of procedure. Even in cases where the historian’s normal methods of evaluating and cross-checking sources can work, how should we set about thinking through particular military failures? Perhaps the best guide for the analysis of military misfortune comes from the greatest of all students of war, Carl von Clausewitz, and particularly from book 2 of his masterwork, On War. In this section of On War, Clausewitz discusses his concept of “critical analysis,” or Kritik, which forms the basis for his approach to the study of war. Kritik supports the development of military theory, which is the subject of his book.
Clausewitz begins with a notion of theory quite different from that of the contemporary social sciences. Rather than seeking to develop an axiomatic set of hypotheses to reduce the world to formulas—an enterprise Clausewitz views as futile at best, pernicious at worst—the critic attempts to develop his understanding of “the relationship between phenomena,” a sense of how wars unfold, and an ability to judge. It is “a guide to anyone who wants to learn about war from books. . . . It is meant to guide him in his self-education, not to accompany him to the battlefield.”36 His approach has more in common with that of the well-schooled art critic than with that of the physical scientist, for where the scientist seeks to set forth propositions verifiable by experiments that can be duplicated, the critic seeks to understand unique events. “Just as some plants bear fruit only if they don’t shoot up too high, so in the practical arts the leaves and flowers of theory must be pruned and the plant kept close to its proper soil—experience.”37
Kritik has three steps: the discovery of facts, the tracing of effects to causes, and the investigation and evaluation of means.38 Clausewitz argued against what we have called horizontal history—the study of war at only one level, be it that of tactics, strategy, technology, or whatever. Rather, he believed that military questions must be studied at all levels because of the interaction among them. Thus, “a means may be evaluated not merely with respect to its immediate end: that end itself should be appraised as a means for the next and highest one. . . . Every stage in this progression obviously implies a new basis for judgment. That which seems correct when looked at from one level may, when viewed from a higher one, appear objectionable.”39
Clausewitz advocated the study of military history in support of the study of war, and indeed, some three-quarters of his writings dealt directly with military history, not theory. Yet his approach diverged from that of the academic historian as well. He believed in the systematic study not only of what actually occurred in a battle or a war, but in the investigation of what might have happened, the study not only of the means that were used, but the means that might have been used. In addition, he accepted some of the premises of applicatory history. For the most part, the critic should look at war from the point of view of the commander. Clausewitz rejected, however, the rigid adherence to this method that characterized the utilitarian historians we discussed earlier.40
Finally, Clausewitz believed in the utility of studying a few relatively recent military episodes in detail rather than studying dozens in a more superficial way. In war facts and motives “may be intentionally concealed by those in command, or, if they happen to be transitory and accidental, history may not have recorded them at all. That is why critical narrative must usually go hand in hand with historical research.”41 Moreover, in war effects “seldom result from a single cause; there are usual several concurrent causes,” each of which must be pursued to the end.42 Only by
a close study of relatively few cases can one hope to get to the truth of what war is about.
Clausewitz suggested a method: intensive historical case study, a willingness to think through hypothetical actions systematically and multilevel analysis. Equally, and perhaps more important, he offered a mental approach, a cast of mind conducive to the study of military misfortune. In war, he wrote, “criticism exists only to recognize the truth, not to act as judge.”43 We may legitimately criticize a general’s decision without implying that we ourselves would have done better in the same way that an art critic can point to a flaw in a sculpture without meaning to suggest that the artist was anything other than a skilled craftsman.44 Thus, although On War is written for future commanders, it succeeds in avoiding the pitfalls of what we have called “the dogma of responsibility.” Clausewitz helps us realize that our chief concern is not the awarding of demerits or prizes to defeated or successful commanders, not deciding whether a decision to relieve them from or retain them in their positions was just, but to discover why events took the turn they did.
MAPPING OUT MILITARY MISFORTUNE
Having seen how failure may be misunderstood, and having looked at approaches that may help us in uncovering its sources, we turn to the method of studying military misfortune we will use in the cases studied below. It involves five steps. First we must ask, What was the failure? To do this we must be willing to make a serious use of counterfactual analysis. More simply put, we must ask, What would have been required to transform failure into something less, a mere setback perhaps? Proceeding from this, our second question is, What were the critical tasks that went incomplete or unfulfilled? We look, in other words, at the key failures that determined the eventual outcome. Third, we conduct “layered analysis,” examining the behavior of different levels of organization and their relative contributions to military misfortune. This procedure culminates in the fourth step, the drawing of an “analytical matrix,” a simplified chart of failures that presents graphically the key problems leading to military misfortune. From this chart, finally, we derive our “pathways to misfortune”—the larger cause of the failure in question.
To illustrate how this process works, we return to the story of Pearl Harbor, already noting one very large difference between our approach and that of most of the literature on it. Most writers—from the authors of the congressional report on the attack to historians and social scientists discussing it a generation later—have concentrated on the question, Who was to blame? Various men have paraded through our imaginary dock, including the local commanders (Kimmel and Short), the professional heads of the armed services (Stark and Marshall), their civilian superiors (Knox and Stimson), and even the president himself. Some have argued that the dock should be empty, or that all Americans should be in it. Without denying the practical importance of allocating responsibility and blame—a task both distasteful and essential during the war—we leave it aside entirely. Having satisfied ourselves that none of the principals were outright incompetents (and no one, including the harshest critics of Kimmel and Short, has said that), we turn to a study of the failure proper.
WHAT WAS THE FAILURE?
The first and most important task confronting the student of military misfortune is figuring out what, precisely, constitutes the failure under discussion. A satisfactory answer to this question requires more thought than may be apparent. As the case of Pearl Harbor illustrates, it is not simply the fact of being attacked and suffering heavy losses: The same occurred in the Philippines, yet the Japanese onslaught there had nothing like the psychological or indeed the material impact of the assault on Hawaii. Some (particularly Kimmel’s partisans) ascribe this to the superior capacities of General MacArthur for self-promotion and concealment of mistakes, as well as civilian inclination to pillory the navy rather than the army for the failure. But there are simpler and more powerful reasons for Pearl Harbor’s peculiar status as a failure.
First and foremost is the discrepancy between the losses suffered by the United States and those experienced by the Japanese. At the cost of only twenty-nine aircraft the Japanese had managed not only to virtually eliminate American airpower in Hawaii but to sink most of the battle fleet and to inflict losses that would have been heavy for a nation accustomed to war and that were stunning for a nation thinking itself at peace. At Pearl Harbor 2,400 men died, a number only somewhat smaller than those who fell on the first day of the invasion of Europe in 1944.45 Second, the Pearl Harbor attack clearly came as a surprise to all concerned—a fact immediately noted with dismay not only by the newspapers but by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox (who arrived in Hawaii two days after the attack) and by an investigatory committee that arrived a few weeks later. Even at the time this jarred sharply with the sense that American authorities knew very well that war with Japan was imminent; after the war was over, and the fact of the decryption of some Japanese ciphers could be revealed, the element of surprise seemed even more astonishing. In the words of the Joint Congressional Committee that investigated the attack: “The Committee has been intrigued throughout the Pearl Harbor proceedings by one enigmatical and paramount question: Why, with some of the finest intelligence available in our history, with the almost certain knowledge that war was at hand, with plans that contemplated the precise type of attack that was executed by Japan on the morning of December 7—Why was it possible for a Pearl Harbor to occur?”46
The failure was not that American soil had been attacked—that was an eventuality expected by many Americans including the armed forces; the failure was not that American forces were roughly handled—that happened in the Philippines, at Wake, and at Guam and would happen again at the Kasserine Pass in North Africa. The failure was not even that the Japanese achieved a certain amount of operational surprise—that their ships and planes were not detected until they were an hour or two from Hawaii. Surprise is endemic in all warfare, and American intelligence was not, in fact, effective. It had temporarily lost its insight into Japanese movements by virtue of improved Japanese communications security, and that too was reasonable to expect.47 No, the shock of Pearl Harbor lay in the failure to inflict heavy losses on, or simply put up a stiff resistance to, an enemy who was expected to get in the first blow. Had the Kido Butai (the Japanese task force) lost a hundred airplanes and perhaps one or two ships, and had American losses been smaller—say, the loss of only one or two battleships rather than eight—the Pearl Harbor attack would have no greater status as a military failure than the attack on the Philippines.
There was, in addition, a latent failure more perilous than that which occurred. The sunken and battered battleships of the Pacific Fleet would soon prove largely irrelevant to the strategic balance in the Pacific Fleet would soon prove largely irrelevant to the strategic balance in the Pacific: The age of the aircraft carrier had arrived, and the battleship soon found itself relegated to a secondary (if still important) role in shore bombardment, antiaircraft protection, and limited surface engagements. The extraordinary operational and tactical success of the Japanese had, in the end, virtually no strategic significance, save insofar as it enraged the American people and strengthened their will to win. But the Japanese could have changed the conduct of the Pacific war very greatly by attacking not the battleships but the supporting facilities at Pearl Harbor, particularly the Pacific Fleet’s vulnerable oil supplies. As Admiral Nimitz remarked after the war: “All of the oil for the Fleet was in surface tanks at the time of Pearl Harbor. We had about four and a half million barrels of oil out there and all of it was vulnerable to 50 caliber bullets. Had the Japanese destroyed the oil it would have prolonged the war another two years.”48 In point of fact the Japanese commander, Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, urged by his subordinates, considered a third air attack on Pearl Harbor aimed against just these targets but decided against it.
The failure at Pearl Harbor was a failure of vulnerabilities and an absence of precautions, an operational failure, not solely or even primarily an intelligence fa
ilure. “The disaster of Pearl Harbor lies in the failure of the Army and Navy in Hawaii to make their fight with the equipment at hand—it was not that they had no equipment, for they did, but they did not utilize what they had.”49 That a marginally higher level of alertness, an ability to take advantage of the tactical warning provided by radar or improved patrolling would have made a difference can be seen by comparing the impact of the two waves of Japanese aircraft, which hit Pearl Harbor a bit less than an hour apart, at 0755 and 0850 respectively. The greatest damage—including the mortal blows to the battleships Oklahoma and Arizona—was done by the first wave, which launched its torpedoes, dropped its bombs, and strafed with its machine guns for a precious five minutes before return fire was encountered in quantity. The second wave came in for much rougher treatment, even though American sailors, marines, and soldiers were frantically busy succoring the wounded and battling the blazes set by the first attacks. This second wave lost twenty planes (versus nine from the first), and its participants reported a far heavier volume of fire directed against them.50
CRITICAL TASKS, CRITICAL LAPSES
Having established the nature of a failure—in this case, the absence of a stout defense—we begin to look for the critical tasks that were not fulfilled, the critical lapses or mistaken assumptions that led to that failure. After Pearl Harbor, everything from American immigration legislation to the attitude of professional soldiers to national guardsmen came under review as “causes” of the failure. Accompanying this tendency to find a plethora of weaknesses on the defeated side was, as always, an inclination to overlook fragilities on that of the victors. To overcome these natural predispositions we must define the critical junctures at which a scheme of attack or defense broke down.
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