In 1944 Field Marshal Erwin Rommel observed that on the whole American forces had shown themselves to be extraordinarily fast learners:
In this they were assisted by their extraordinary sense for the practical and material and by their complete lack of regard for tradition and worthless theories. . . . The Americans, it is fair to say, profited far more than the British from their experience in Africa, thus confirming the axiom that education is easier than reeducation.20
Military organizations should inculcate in their members a relentless empiricism, a disdain for a priori theorizing if they are to succeed. The “learners” in military organizations must cultivate the temperament of the historian, the detective, or the journalist, rather than the theoretical bent of the social scientist or philosopher.
Anticipation
The job of anticipation is often thought of as one of the chief functions of Intelligence, which is thought to have the task of foretelling an enemy’s actions. As we have seen, and as common sense would indicate, it is difficult enough for an intelligence organization to grasp the enemy’s current state, to include his methods of operation and tactical preferences.21 The task of predicting the future—as opposed to issuing a warning—is a wholly unreasonable one. Moreover, effective anticipation involves not only estimating the enemy’s likely actions but comparing them to one’s own ways of war. In the case of the Yom Kippur War, for example, the misfortune we studied was only partly driven by the stubborn refusal of Israeli military intelligence to read correctly the signs of an impending war. It went further, to the operational level of war.
Before October 1973 the IDF appears to have fought as a collection of branches rather than a coordinated, combined arms force. Shortly before the war Chief of Staff Elazar told an interviewer that:
Israel’s tankers, paratroopers and airmen share a common faith: each group is convinced it can win the next war without the help of the other . . . What results from that spirit, Lieutenant General Dado Elazar told the Armed Forces Journal, is that each arm develops its own ‘philosophy of battle’—and he encourages the rivalry . . . ‘There’s no such thing as the same strategic or tactical approach between different arms of the IDF,’ Elazar says.22
Shortly after the war, however, a chastened Elazar declared: “Combined operations and the combined task force present what I consider to be one of the major lessons to be learned on the tactical and operational level.” The IDF had learned that combined arms had become “a crucial factor for success in every single battle, in every campaign, and in every war.”23
The post-mortem analyses carried out by some Israeli officers in the aftermath of the 1973 war demonstrate the close link between the outcome of battle and the kind of internalized assumptions Elazar announced so confidently before the Yom Kippur War. In their view the IDF adhered to a rigid strategy which prevented it from yielding any ground in the Sinai, and instead committed itself to wasteful and needless counterattacks: in this view, the unsuccessful counterattacks of October 7–9 had their roots in prewar thinking. The overwhelming commitment to offensive operations not only led to inappropriate operations, but to gross overconfidence. Ya’akov Chasdai recalls one exercise before 1973 at the Israeli staff college, in which an ugda commander successfully pushed five Egyptian divisions back to the canal—noting bitterly that the same commander met with no such success during the 1973 war.24 Thus, the misfortune of the Suez Front in October 1973 reflected not so much a failure to predict enemy moves—in some ways the Israelis did that quite well—as a failure mentally to match likely enemy action with the range of likely Israeli reactions. Israeli understanding of what would work and what would not, what kinds of interaction would occur between, for example, surface-to-air missiles and jet aircraft, between Israeli tank and Egyptian antitank tactics, diverged sharply from the reality of the battlefield.
The Israelis recovered magnificently at the tactical and operational levels of war. Yet consideration of their experience in 1973 points to a certain intellectual deficiency in Western military concepts. To overcome problems of anticipation, many Western armed forces have come to rely on their equivalent of “operators’ rules”—manuals of military doctrine which prescribe what action to take in any combat situation. In American usage, at any rate, doctrine has meant “authoritative fundamental principles by which military forces guide their actions.”25 Shortly after the Yom Kippur War the U.S. Army attempted to absorb the doctrinal lessons of the Yom Kippur War, but did so using a stifling—and in the end unworkable—conception of doctrine. General William DePuy, commander of U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command:
considered doctrine as a tool with which to coordinate the myriad activities of a complex organization. . . . Doctrine [in this view] consisted of those tactical techniques necessary for success on the modern battlefield that the schools and training centers taught and published in circulars and manuals. . . .26
It is interesting to contrast the Soviet definition of military doctrine as
a system of scientifically sound guiding views which are officially adopted in one or another state and concern the essence, goals and nature of a war, the preparation of the nation and the armed forces for it and the methods of waging it. The political bases of a military doctrine disclose the sociopolitical essence of modern wars . . . The military-technical bases of the doctrine determine what the strategic nature of a future war can be like and for what sort of war and against what enemy one must be prepared to fight; what Armed Forces are needed for such a war (their effective strength, organization and technical equipping); what the methods could be for carrying out strategic and operational-tactical missions in a future war; what forms and methods can be used to train an army and navy. . . .27
Ironically, despite the difference between a liberal democracy and a party dictatorship, the Soviet view is the less rigid, the richer, the more imaginative. One might say, as a kind of shorthand, that the Soviets conceive of doctrine as a picture of future war, incorporating politics and technology as well as tactics. This far more inclusive picture of war makes a great deal of sense: Failures of anticipation may be best understood as doctrinal failures, using the term in the Soviet sense. Misfortunes of anticipation stem not just—and often not even chiefly—from failing to predict the specific actions of one’s enemy, but from a failure to think through the sensitive issue of how well one’s own forces can react to an opponent’s style of warfare. Such misfortunes result as well from a failure to think as holistically as the Soviet definition of doctrine would suggest. The Israelis, like others who have suffered such misfortunes, did not tie together the strategic (that is, politicomilitary) purposes and conditions of a future war with their understanding of enemy tactics and the interaction of new military technologies (in particular, the antitank missile and the surface-to-air missile). When military organizations look at future war they must think as hard and realistically about the politicomilitary conditions under which it will occur as about the tactics each side will adopt, and they must attempt to see how the one level of warfare will shape or direct the latter. The alternative, too often preferred by civilian policy analysts as well as military officers, is a dangerously misleading and sterile operational study, uninformed by political considerations.28
Adaptation
More than failure to learn or failure to anticipate, failure to adapt can be laid at the feet of command. One of Clausewitz’s most-often-repeated sayings is that war is the province of chance, and chance will throw up opportunities as often as it will present adversity. (In this context it is interesting to note that the Chinese ideograph for “crisis” is made up of two characters, one meaning “catastrophe” and the other “opportunity”.) By encouraging the development of initiative, troops can be trained to make the most of opportunities which present themselves on the ground—this was precisely the basis of the excellence of the German field armies in both World Wars. But in all armies, and especially in those that do not follow the German example in
their training, it is the commanders’ job to spot an opening and then to capitalize on it.
Failure of this type has provided a well-stocked preserve on which to hunt for scapegoats, but in truth the quarry is not merely the commander, but also the conception of command that prevails in a given military organization. Some systems of command made adaptation to unexpected or unforeseen circumstances relatively easy, while others make it virtually impossible. As we have seen in the case of Suvla Bay, senior officers behave in ways the system of the day encourages or expects of them. At the time, the likely consequences—and more especially, the potential drawbacks—of the system may be far from apparent, or else unquestioned because they are unquestionable without the strong possibility of official retribution. But in retrospect the way in which command is perceived in an organization, and the system by which it is exercised, can of itself greatly increase the likelihood of failure. This is especially clear when we look at the British conception of command during the First World War.
By the time World War I began, the British Army was in the grip of a personalized command system in which one or two powerful individuals at the summit of the military hierarchy were able to control selection and promotion. Higher appointments both before and during the war were a playground for favoritism and rivalry; and when Douglas Haig became commander in chief of all British troops in France in December 1915 he continued to work the system in much the same was as before. He chose or retained for his personal staff yes-men who loyally supported his ideas about the possibility of breaking the German lines and who provided him with statistical support in the form of optimistic appreciations that showed that the German army was wearing down at a faster rate than the Allies. Physically isolated at general headquarters, Haig was also intellectually isolated from any unwelcome criticism of his own strategic formula for victory.29
Another facet of the system of command which prevailed in the British armies between 1914 and 1918 was the explicit belief that it was not right to interfere with the initiative of subordinate commanders.30 As a result, GHQ provided subordinate commanders with general directives on when and where to attack the enemy—laying continual stress on aggressiveness at all times—but left those same commanders to work out how to do what they were being ordered to do. Instead of reassessing goals in the light of the novel and perplexing conditions of trench warfare, Haig and his loyal coterie of staff officers disbursed reminders about age-old strategic principles and stressed general concepts. An attempt by Sir William Robertson, who as chief of the Imperial General Staff in London had overall responsibility for the military direction of the war, to persuade Haig in 1917 that traditional principles simply did not apply any longer, fell on deaf ears. When his senior commanders recommended a cautious step-by-step approach to attacking the enemy, Haig simply selected a general with a more congenial out-and-out aggressive attitude.31 It was not until after the near disaster in March 1918, when the German “Michael” offensive all but broke the Allied line and demonstrated beyond doubt that new techniques for launching penetration attacks led by small, heavily armed groups of stormtroops could succeed where conventional mass assaults ended in bloody setbacks, that Haig acknowledged the value of the unorthodox tactical doctrines devised by General Sir Ivor Maxse by appointing him inspector general of training.32
The Germans had a far different approach in World War I.33 Their peculiar general staff system also led senior commanders to give broad orders—Weisungsfuhrung, or “leadership by directive” as it was called. But balancing this was the practice of delegating to general staff members or other experts a kind of plenipotentiary power—Vollmacht—which short-circuited the chain of command when that proved necessary. Repeatedly during the war general staff officers of the rank of lieutenant colonel or colonel took control of situations that seemed on the brink of disaster. These interventions were not always successful—the constriction of the German left wing during the opening campaign of 1914 by Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hentsch is a particularly controversial case—but they did prevent certain kinds of failures. And the resulting flexibility enabled the Germans to score remarkable tactical successes in both the offense and defense throughout the war.
The “chateau generalship” of the British high command during the First World War, in which generals had become remote figures, glimpsed occasionally by the troops in a passing staff car, who sat in their offices like managing directors running the war like a factory enterprise, attracted the scornful and bitter criticism of Major General J. F. C. Fuller in 1933. In a book entitled Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure, Fuller castigated this style of leadership as having resulted in a neglect of the critical operational level of war. However, rather than moving on to analyze the system of command which had demonstrated so many shortcomings, Fuller concentrated his attention on leadership, or more accurately, on individual leaders, quoting with approval the judgment of the eighteenth-century French marshal, Maurice de Saxe, that a good commander needed courage, brains, and good health.34
In choosing to equate command with leadership, Fuller, despite his reputation as a highly unconventional soldier, lined himself up squarely alongside many of those whose performance in the Great War he so strongly criticized. Lecturing to the U.S. Army War College in 1921 on “Command,” General the Earl of Cavan informed his audience that “I firmly believe, and I more believe it than ever now after the experience of two wars, that leadership is everything.”35 What leadership amounted to, as far as Cavan was concerned, was trusting one’s subordinates and getting rid of any staff officer who showed himself “not capable of commanding the confidence of the men under him, and not capable of grasping what you want him to do and not capable of carrying it out.” Although too wise simply to equate command with leadership and nothing else, even General George C. Marshall, about to preside over an unparalleled expansion of the United States Army, had no doubts about its paramount importance in the summer of 1940: “Command involves leadership,” he wrote, and “leadership in a military emergency is, in my opinion, the most important single consideration.”36
Fuller had accurately identified the seat of the problem as far as the British failure on the Western Front in World War I was concerned, but he failed to discern more than a single one of its facets. For—at the summit—command consists of management as well as of leadership, and although the hierarchy of rank may make it seem otherwise, it is very much a collaborative activity. This perspective was long ignored by Fuller and others. Instead, they searched for the optimum mix of qualities and attributes that make the ideal commander.37 Only recently has the focus of attention switched to styles and functions of command, and the problem of structure has still not had the attention it deserves. Yet, as perceptive (if frustrated) leaders of military organizations have noted, changing the concept of command is, if anything more difficult than picking a single commander. John F. Lehman, Jr., secretary of the United States Navy from 1981 to 1987, scored an astonishing victory in purging the U.S. navy of Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear navy. Lehman believed that despite his undeniable virtues Rickover’s objective was:
no less than the creation of a kind of new socialist man for the nuclear program. .. . In ‘The Rickover Way’ the age-old military paradigm ‘Do not question higher authority’ is raised to a higher level of purity; all the answers are to be found in the book, and the book and the checklist must be followed—a philosophy essential for nuclear safety, but grotesque when extended to every aspect of one’s profession.38
Yet Lehman, despite his bureaucratic skills, remarkable knowledge of the U.S. navy, and sheer pluck failed in part. His account makes it quite clear that “the Rickover Way”—which he tackled head-on—survived his onslaught.39
“The Ghost in the Machine”
The idea that setbacks are frequently the consequence of mere bad luck is a seductive one. It is psychologically comforting to those who have not themselves experienced disaster, which may be the reason why it is so
often offered as a consolation. “You have my sympathies,” Admiral Nimitz remarked to Kimmel as he relieved him of command at Pearl Harbor on Christmas Day, 1941. “The same thing could have happened to anybody.”40 And Admiral Claude C. Bloch wrote (somewhat disingenuously) to a colleague some three months later: “I feel very sorry for both Kimmel and Short. . . . I think both you and I are very lucky because the same thing might well have happened to either or both of us.”41
The kinds of misfortunes we have discussed in this book are not, however, the product of malevolent chance. Neither are they the sole responsibility of any single individual, not even the military commander. Instead, each is the consequence of the inherent fragility of an entire organization. Misfortune lurks somewhere within the bowels of every military operation: It is “the ghost in the machine” that can be conjured up by a variety of circumstances. There may be occasions when it cannot be avoided or overcome; but just as frequently it is the consequence of deficiencies in structure and function. Military misfortunes, as we have identified them, are the equivalent of the “normal accidents” described by Charles Perrow, for, as we have seen, the chain of command is often more complex than the “wiring diagrams” allow for and can operate in ways that are not immediately obvious to those who occupy those diagrams’ boxes.
Military Misfortunes Page 31