The story of the Iraq war is not over, of course. But it is, already, a reminder that the most powerful and competent military the world has ever known can still stumble, and stumble badly. It can make large mistakes not because of stupidity or incompetence, but because it has chosen to embrace a comfortable version of history rather than an accurate one. No matter what the ultimate outcome in Iraq, it is clear that such a wishful reading of history, even if it does not yield failure, will, most assuredly, produce misfortune.
Notes
Chapter 1
WHY MISFORTUNE?
1. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking Press, 1976), p. 199.
2. Harry B. Williams, Communication in Community Disaster, Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1956, p. 69. Quoted in Charles E. Fritz, “Disaster,” in Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet, eds., Contemporary Social Problems: An Introduction to the Sociology of Deviant Behaviour and Social Disorganisation (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), p. 656.
3. This was the title Manstein gave to his memoirs.
4. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret, eds. and trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 85.
5. Guy Chapman, Why France Collapsed (London: Cassell, 1968), p. 334.
6. Marc Bloch, L’étrange défaite (Paris: Societé des Editions Franc-Tireur, 1946), p. 45.
Chapter 2
UNDERSTANDING DISASTER
1. For a discussion of the causes of this disaster, see John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking, 1970), pp. 78–116.
2. Patrick Macrory, Signal Catastrophe (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1966).
3. For an excellent account of these and other imperial misfortunes see V. G. Kiernan, European Empires from Conquest to Collapse 1815–1960 (London: Fontana Books, 1982).
4. Martin van Creveld, Command in War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
5. John Gooch, The Plans of War: The General Staff and British Military Strategy, c. 1900–1916 (London. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 306–7.
6. Edwin T. Layton, And I Was There (New York: Morrow, 1985).
7. Denis Judd, Someone Has Blundered: Calamities of the British Army in the Victorian Age (London: Arthur Barker, 1973) p. xx.
8. Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), p. 94.
9. Ibid., p. 278 (italics in original).
10. Ibid., p. 381.
11. For a look at World War II Allied commanders from this point of view, see David Irving, The War between the Generals (London: Allen Lane, 1981).
12. Charles Fair, From the Jaws of Victory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), p. 270.
13. Alan Clark, The Donkeys (London: Hutchinson, 1961).
14. C. S. Forester, The General (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1956), pp. 136, 181.
15. Ibid., p. 50.
16. Jere Clemens King, ed., The First World War (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. xlv.
17. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis 1911–1918 (London: Butterworth, abridged edition 1931), vol. 2, p. 929.
18. Leon Wolff, In Flanders Fields (London: Corgi, 1966), p. 276.
19. Corelli Barnett, Britain and Her Army 1509–1970 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 388. See also David French, “Sir Douglas Haig’s Reputation 1918–1928: A Note,” Historical Journal 28 (1985): 953–960.
20. Gerard J. De Groot, “Educated Soldier or Cavalry Officer? Contradictions in the pre-1914 career of Douglas Haig,” War and Society, 4:2 (September 1986): 51–69. See also C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, A History of the Great War 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), pp. 626–27; Sir Llewellyn Woodward, Great Britain and the War of 1914–1918 (London: Methuen, 1967), pp. 140–42; Gerard J. De Groot, Douglas Haig 1861–1928 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), passim.
21. John Terraine, Douglas Haig: The Educated Soldier (London: Hutchinson, 1963).
22. See Barnett, 397–98.
23. Tactical innovations are expertly summarized in Paul Kennedy, “Britain in the First World War,” in Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray, eds., Military Efficiency, vol. 1: The First World War (London: Allen and Unwin, 1988), pp. 60–72. See also S. Bidwell and D. Graham, Firepower: British Army Weapons and Theories of War, 1905–1945 (London & Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1982), passim.
24. Tim Travers, “The Hidden Army: Structural Problems in the British Officer Corps, 1900–1918,” Journal of Contemporary History 17:3 (July 1982): 523–38; and the same author’s “A Particular Style of Command: Haig and G.H.Q. 1916–1918.” Journal of Strategic Studies 10:3 (December 1987): 363–76.
25. Tim Travers, The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900–1918 (London & Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. 262.
26. Samuel R. Williamson, Jr., The Politics of Grand Strategy: Britain and France Prepare for War, 1904–1914 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 128.
27. Douglas Porch, “The French Army and the Spirit of the Offensive, 1900–14,” in Brian Bond and Ian Roy, eds., War and Society: A Yearbook of Military History (London: Croom Helm, 1975), pp. 117–43; see also the same author’s The March to the Marne: The French Army 1871 -1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
28. Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 17, 51, 54, 104.
29. Michael Howard, “Men against Fire: The Doctrine of the Offensive in 1914,” in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 510–26.
30. Walter Goerlitz, History of the German General Staff 1657–1945 (New York: Praeger, 1959); Trevor Dupuy, A Genius for War: The German Army and General Staff 1807–1945 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1977).
31. See Denis E. Showalter, “Army and Society in Imperial Germany: The Pains of Modernization,” Journal of Contemporary History 18:4 (October 1983): 583–618; Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power (Washington, D.C.: Office of Net Assessment, 1980); David N. Spires, Image and Reality: The Making of the German Officer 1921–1933 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984); Williamson Murray, “The German Response to Victory in Poland: A Case Study in Professionalism,” Armed Forces and Society 7:2 (Winter 1980): 285–98.
32. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Knopf, 1964), p. 126.
33. “Italian Military Efficiency—A Debate,” Journal of Strategic Studies 5: 2 (June 1982): 248–77.
34. See Ken Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism (London: Croom Helm, 1979).
35. William H. Form and Sigmund Nosow, Community in Disaster (New York: Harper Bros., 1958).
36. Talcott Parsons, “Cause and Effect in Sociology,” in Daniel Lerner, ed., Cause and Effect (New York: Free Press, 1965), pp. 51–64, 68; Irving B. Janis, “Problems of Theory in the Analysis of Stress Behavior,” Journal of Social Issues 10 (1954): 12–25.
37. Barry A. Turner, “The Organizational and Interorganizational Development of Disasters,” Administrative Science Quarterly 21 (1976): 385.
38. Martha Wolfenstein, Disaster: A Psychological Essay (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), pp. 214–16.
39. Chernobyl, United Kingdom Central Electricity Generating Board, September 1986; “Chernobyl Special,” Power News, September 1986, pp. 2–3; Julia Thornton, “Chernobyl and Soviet Energy,” Problems of Communism (November/December 1986): 7, lists the errors.
40. Three Mile Island: A Report to the Commissioners and to the Public (Washington, D.C.: Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 1980), vol. 1, p. 3.
41. Ibid., p. 102.
42. Janice C. Simpson, “Business Schools—and Students—Want to Talk Only About Success,” The Wall Street Journal, December 15, 1986, pp. 30–31. This issue of the Journal has an interesting set of articles about business failure. See, for example, Isadore Barmas
h, ed., Great Business Disasters: Swindlers, Bunglers, and Frauds in American Industry (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1972). A far more thoughtful—and equally entertaining—journalistic work is Paul Solman and Thomas Friedman, Life & Death on the Corporate Battlefield: How Companies Win, Lose, Survive (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).
43. See, in particular, O. P. Kharbanda and E. A. Stallworthy, Corporate Failure: Prediction, Panacea, and Prevention (London: McGraw-Hill, 1985), and John Argenti, Corporate Collapse: The Causes and Symptoms (London: McGraw-Hill, 1976).
44. On the Edsel see the odd collection of articles assembled by Jan G. Deutsch in Selling the People’s Cadillac: The Edsel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); John Brooks, The Fate of the Edsel and Other Business Adventures (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), and Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Decline and Rebirth, 1933–1962 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962), pp. 380ff., 437ff. The account that follows is based largely on these sources.
45. Argenti, Corporate Collapse, pp. 128–38.
46. A metaphor developed in Bruce D. Henderson, The Logic of Business Strategy (Cambridge: Ballinger, 1984), pp. 1–6.
47. Charles Perrow, Complex Organizations. A Critical Essay (Glenview, 111.: Scott, Foresman, 1972), p. 143.
48. See Elting E. Morison, Men, Machines and Modern Times (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1966), pp. 17–44; also William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), pp. 262–306.
49. Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 5.
50. Ibid., pp. 72–79.
51. Ibid., p. 97.
52. Amos Perlmutter, “Military Incompetence and Failure: A Historical Comparative and Analytical Evaluation,” Journal of Strategic Studies 1:2 (September 1978): 121.
53. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret, eds. and trans. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 249.
54. Ibid., pp. 595–96. This contradiction is pointed out in Katherine Herbig, “Chance and Uncertainty in On War,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 9:1/2 (March/June 1986): 78–79.
55. Stephen Bailey, Fire: An International Report (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1972), pp. 87–88, 152–55.
56. Ibid., pp. 128–29, 175.
57. Wolfenstein, Disaster, p. 21.
58. Form and Nosow, Community in Disaster, p. 244.
Chapter 3
ANALYZING FAILURE
1. Two of the more recent and interesting studies of the Pearl Harbor attack and the ensuing controversy are Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), and Edwin T. Layton, And I Was There (New York. Morrow, 1985). On the historical debate that followed Pearl Harbor see Gordon W. Prange with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History (New York: McGraw Hill, 1986). The best account of the disaster remains Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Report of the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, seventy-ninth Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1946). Henceforth cited as PHA Report; the accompanying hearings will be cited as PHA Hearings.
2. See Charles E. Fritz, “Disaster,” in Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet, eds., Contemporary Social Problems (New York. Harcourt Brace, 1961), pp. 651–94, especially pp. 657ff.
3. Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident (Washington, D.C.: Governmental Printing Office, 1986), p. 149.
4. W. J. Holmes, Double Edged Secrets: U.S. Naval Intelligence Operations in the Pacific during World War II (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1979), p. 41.
5. See Chaim Herzog, The War of Atonement (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), p. 280.
6. Matthew B. Ridgway, The Korean War (New York. Doubleday, 1967), p. 103.
7. See two wise and charming essays, Bernard Lewis, History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), and Carl Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian,” in Everyman His Own Historian: Essays on History and Politics (1935; reprint. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966), pp. 235–53.
8. See, inter alia, two essays by Michael Howard, “The Use and Abuse of Military History,” Journal of the Royal United Services Institute 107:625 (February 1962): 4–10, and “The Demand for Military History,” Times Literary Supplement, November 13, 1969, pp. 1293–95.
9. Jay Luvaas, “Military History: The Academic Historian’s Point of View,” in Russell F. Weigley, ed., New Dimensions in Military History (San Rafael, Ca.: Presidio Press, 1975), p. 34.
10. On the development of the Prussian and later German military’s attitudes to military history see Heinrich Aschenbrandt, “Kriegsgeschichtschreibung und Kriegsgeschichtstudium im deutschen Heere” [“The Writing and Study of Military History in the German Army”], Historical Division, Headquarters U.S. Army Europe, Foreign Military Studies Branch, 1952. Aschenbrandt was formerly a colonel in the German General Staff’s historical section.
11. Eberhard Kessel, “Moltke und die Kriegsgeschichte,” [“Moltke and Military History”], Militärwissenschaftliche Rundschau (June 1941): 96–125.
12. The nineteenth century Kriegsakademie curriculum is discussed in Bernhard Poten, Geschichte des Militär-und-Erziebungswesens in den Landen deutschen Zunge [“History of Military and General Education in German-speaking Countries”] (Berlin: A. Hoffman, 1896), volume 4, pp. 253–307. On military history in particular see Hans H. Driftman, Grundzüge des militärischen Erziebungs-und-Bildungswesens in der Zeit 1871–1939 [“Foundations of Military Training and Education, 1871–1939”] (Regensburg: Walhalla u. Praetoria Verlag, 1980), pp. 71, 129–35. This obsession with military history did not diminish appreciably in the twentieth century.
13. See Julius Hoppenstedt’s Wie studiert man Kriegsgeschichte [“How to Study Military History”] (Berlin. E. S. Mittler, 1905), a primer of the applicatory method. Translations of some of the General Staff histories used to teach the applicatory method include Verdy du Vernois, A Tactical Study Based on the Battle of Custozza, 24th of June, 1866, G. F. R. Henderson, trans. (London: Gale and Polden, 1894).
14. G. F. R. Henderson, The Science of War (London: Longmans, Green, 1913), p. 49; see also p. 47.
15. See for example, Infantry in Battle (Washington, D.C.: The Infantry Journal, 1939), recently reissued by the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College.
16. Herbert W. Richmond, National Policy and Naval Strength (London: Longmans, Green, 1934), p. 279. See his two essays in this volume, “The Place of History in Naval Education,” and “The Use of History,” pp. 255–93.
17. See John Gooch, “Clio and Mars: The Use and Abuse of Military History,” Journal of Strategic Studies 3:3 (December 1980): 21–36. Regrettably, this inclination has not died out: see “General Bryce Poe Tells AFSC Historians: You Can Use History To Help Your Commanders,” Air Historian 2 (Fall 1985): 1. General Poe urged the assembled historians to use history to help demonstrate the continuing validity and importance of the principles of war—the objective, the offensive, and so on.
18. See Kessel, “Moltke und die Kriegsgeschichte,” p. 117, and John Keegan, “The Historian and Battle,” International Security 3:3 (Winter 1978/1979): 144.
19. Major General Frank W. Norris, Review of Army Officer Educational System (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1971), p. 13–2. Two interesting products from Army’s Command and General Staff College and the Office of the Chief of Military History, respectively, are Charles E. Hiller and William A. Stofft, eds., America’s First Battles, 1776–1965 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1986) and Charles R. Schrader, ed., “The Impact of Unsuccessful Military Campaigns on Military Institutions, 1860–1980,” Proceedings of the 1982 International Military History Symposium (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1984).
20. Arden Bucholz, Hans Delbrück and the German Military Establishment: War Images in Conflict (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1985), pp. 27 ff.
The disdain of German academics—including the militarists—for military history is a recurring theme in this book.
21. Cyril Falls, The Art of War From the Age of Napoleon to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 6. For two defenses of the study of military history see his The Place of War in History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), and Charles Oman, “A Defence of Military History,” in Studies in the Napoleonic Wars (London: Methuen, 1929), pp. 24–36. A similar defensive note is detectable in Louis Morton, “The Historian and the Study of War,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 48:4 (March 1962): 599–613. Even in what now appears to have been a golden age of American military historiography, the general distaste of historians for military history surfaced periodically. See Arthur A. Ekirch, “Military History: A Civilian Caveat,” Military Affairs 21 (Summer 1957): 49–54.
22. Walter Millis, “Military History,” Publication #39 (Washington, D.C.: Service Center for Teachers of History, 1961), pp. 17–18.
23. Peter Paret, “The History of War,” Daedalus (Spring 1971): 381. A similar set of complaints was offered by Walter Emil Kaegi in “The Crisis in Military Historiography,” Armed Forces and Society 7:2 (Winter 1980): 299–316.
24. The fullest discussion of the “War and Society” school, and some vigorous defenses of it can be found in Ursaul von Gersdorff, ed., Geschichte und Militärgeschichte [“History and Military History”) (Frankfurt am Main: Bernard & Graefe, 1974), and “Zielsetzung und Methode der Militärgeschichtsschreihung,” [“Aims and Methods of the Writing of Military History”] Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 20 (2/76): 9–20. The trend toward the “war and society” school goes back to before World War II. See the inaugural issue of Revue Internationale d’Histoire Militaire 1 (1939): 7.
25. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking Press, 1976), especially his introductory chapter on the historiography of battle, “Old, Unhappy, Far-off Things,” pp. 15–78.
Military Misfortunes Page 33