by Ian Leslie
This effect works both ways. Observers often assume that because somebody is good at something (say, public speaking) then they will probably be good at something else (say, governing). In organisations where it’s not crystal clear who is contributing what – that’s to say, most organisations – over-confident people tend to get promoted quicker and further. This is because they send out more ‘competence cues’: they talk louder, speak more assertively, make emphatic gestures – and we tend to assume these things mean they must be good at their job. A feedback loop is created: they get promoted, which makes them more confident, which spins them further up the hierarchy. Then these people hire and promote other people in their own image, until the boardroom table is populated by self-assured people who speak well and are possessed of a rock-solid – and often unjustified – confidence in the wisdom of their own decisions.
In time though, the over-confident and under-competent get found out, don’t they? Not necessarily. Over-confident people are more likely to take risky decisions, and as long as they’re not insanely risky, there’s a good chance some of them will pay off, especially if the conditions in which they’re operating are favourable – a booming industry or rising market. In these situations, their failures are written off as bad luck and their successes attributed to innate brilliance. As a result, they acquire superstar status and the salary to go with it. Only if they’re unlucky does something so catastrophic happen as a result of one of their decisions that they can’t escape the blame. Such catastrophes can arise when two exceptionally over-confident sets of people collide with one another.
The Clash of Positive Illusions: Self-Deception in Warfare
On the evening of 15 November 1532, the Spanish explorer Francisco Pizarro led a small band of weary men down a mountain in the northern highlands of Peru and into the town of Cajamarca. In the town square, he explained his plan. The Inca emperor, Atahualpa, was to meet them there the next day, ostensibly to open a negotiation over land and gold, and he would be surrounded by his vast armies. This, said Pizarro, would be the perfect moment to capture the emperor and hold him to ransom. Exactly what Pizarro’s troops thought about this plan is unrecorded, but they were a long way from home and many miles from their nearest countrymen, so had little option but to set up camp in the square and try to get some rest before the next day. As night fell the Spanish saw something beautiful and terrifying: thousands of flickering lights surrounded the town, as if the night sky had been draped over the mountains. Each light was a campfire, lit to warm members of Atahualpa’s army. In an attempt to keep spirits from breaking, Pizarro’s brother Hernando told the men he estimated there were forty thousand Incas, though all knew there were at least twice that number. The Spanish numbered one hundred and sixty-eight. Not one of them slept that night.
In the morning, Pizarro ordered his troops to conceal themselves in forts around the square and wait for his command. From their hiding places they watched as a wide river of Inca soldiers advanced slowly down the mountain towards the town. After several long hours they heard voices raised in song, and hundreds of Inca warriors filed into the square, the sun glinting off their jewellery. Atahualpa himself was carried in on a litter lined with brightly coloured parrot feathers, bedecked with gold and silver plates and hoisted by eighty chieftains in ceremonial dress. The watching Spanish soldiers felt sick with fear, some urinating involuntarily. They could hardly have been more certain that they were about to meet violent deaths.
After a brief meeting with the Spanish priest, during which Atahualpa angrily rejected a demand that he and his people should convert to Christianity, Pizarro gave the order to attack. The Spaniards sounded trumpet blasts, opened fire from their clumsy but noisy guns, and rushed out of their hiding places. Many of them were riding horses, which the Incas had never seen before. Stunned by the noise and the horrifying spectacle of half-men, half-beasts bearing down on them at tremendous speed, Atahualpa’s warriors panicked, dropped their weapons and fled. As they did so, they ran into each other and piled on top of one another, making them easy prey to the Spaniards who ran them through with their swords. Amidst the bloody chaos, Pizarro captured the emperor. He held Atahualpa to ransom for eight months and extracted a staggeringly large haul of gold in return for his freedom. After taking delivery of it, he reneged on his promise and executed him. The Incas – who had been obeying Atahualpa’s orders from captivity – were utterly reliant on the man they revered as a sun god. His death left them frantic and disunited, making subsequent Spanish victories much quicker and easier.
The battle of Cajamarca was perhaps the most astonishing upset in the history of warfare; at least seven thousand Incas were killed by fewer than two hundred Spanish fighters. It was decisive in the European conquest of the Americas, and thus a pivotal point in the biggest and most significant migration in human history. It was made possible by the superior technology of the Spanish – swords made of steel, clumsy but terrifying guns – and by their horses. But that it was embarked upon at all, given the wildly asymmetric nature of the contest, is a tribute to Pizarro’s powers of persuasion; he had to convince his men that such a victory was remotely possible in order to stop them fleeing or rebelling when they glimpsed the extent of Atahualpa’s army. And before that, he had to persuade himself.
From this side of history, Pizarro’s optimism looks visionary. In the face of his adversary’s overwhelming numerical superiority he saw something that nobody else could see – that a shock and awe strategy might enable his tiny band of conquistadors to overcome the massed ranks of Incas. But what if he’d been wrong?
Three hundred and fifty years later, at the Battle of Little Bighorn, General Custer, perhaps inspired by the legendary tale of Pizarro’s victory, led his force of six hundred and seventy-five men into battle against three thousand Indians with a cry of, ‘Hurrah boys, we’ve got them!’ Custer’s army was annihilated and the general himself was killed. In retrospect, Custer was a disaster waiting to happen. His sole talent was for recklessness; he had finished thirty-fourth and last in his class at West Point, and later was nearly expelled from the army on two occasions for misconduct. But when the Civil War came, what one officer called his ‘desperate gallantry’ caught the eye of the generals. He was promoted, found himself at the forefront of some dramatic victories, and capped a glorious war by receiving the Confederate flag of truce at Appomattox. In his own mind, he was a brilliant as well as fearless leader of men, rather than a man who had ridden his luck further than he had any right to expect.
Following the war, Custer’s star waned. He was involved in botched campaigns against Native Americans. By the time that President Ulysses Grant ordered the army to deal with the Sioux and Cheyenne forces occupying land between the Yellowstone River and Montana’s Bighorn Mountains, Custer was yearning to restore the shine to his reputation. On 25 June 1876, he waved away the suggestion that he arm his regiment with Gatling guns, disdained the pleas for caution from men who knew the terrain and enemy better than he did, ignored the carefully planned orders of his commanding officers, and led his men to their deaths.
The Duke of Wellington remarked that, ‘There is nothing on earth so stupid as a gallant officer.’ If Pizarro had lost his audacious gamble we might regard him as we regard Custer, or the hundreds of lesser known commanders who led small forces of men into the jaws of larger armies: as an irresponsible, delusional fool. Throughout military history there have been many more Custers than Pizarros, enough for a whole field of study to be devoted to their blunders – that of ‘military incompetence’. Again and again, generals deceive themselves, and often their civilian masters, into thinking that unlikely victories are possible. Sometimes they are right; more often they are proved wrong. According to Norman Dixon, one of a handful of historians to apply a psychological analysis to military history, the tendency of military leaders to ‘under-estimate the enemy and over-estimate the capabilities of one’s own side’ is a persistent
feature of military disasters. Unrealistic over-confidence in rapid victory was a significant cause of the second Boer War, the First World War, the Second World War, and the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
The problem is not just that a tendency to over-confidence seems to be built into normal human psychology; it’s that military leaders are even more prone to it than the rest of us. Like Starek’s championship swimmers, an exceptionally successful soldier is likely to be good at deceiving himself – it would help him perform well under stress, and to instil confidence in himself and others that victory is possible even in desperate situations. If he makes the odd mistake then, with luck, little harm is done. But when he’s acclaimed by his peers, promoted to the senior ranks of command and involved in decisions about battles and wars, his natural over-confidence can cost hundreds or even thousands of lives
In democratic societies, the civilians in charge of the military may also be cut from this cloth; successful politicians are likely to be particularly talented self-deceivers. During his 2008 campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama remarked that, at some level, anybody who runs for president is a megalomaniac; you have to be at least half-crazy to think you should be in charge of the country, and that enough other people will agree for it to come true. Of course, if nobody convinced themselves of this, nobody would be president, but it leaves us with a ruling class that is unusually prone to excessive optimism. Indeed, Michael Handel, a scholar of military strategy, has suggested that when it comes to war, politicians are even more likely to self-deceive than generals, because politicians are often dealing with vague matters like an adversary’s intentions or long-term policy rather than with ‘hard’ evidence like aerial photographs and tank and troop concentrations. Perhaps they are also even more likely to think of the contest in moral terms, as a battle between good and evil in which they are, invariably, on the side of righteousness.
Conceptual scheme of variation in positive illusions among the population at large.
Dominic Johnson, author of Overconfidence and War; the Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions, has designed a scale of self-deception (see overleaf). Should the military only promote officers who don’t appear to be over-confident, and should voters do the same with politicians? Not necessarily; a generous measure of self-deception, when combined with other qualities, can certainly make for a better leader. ‘Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues,’ said Thomas Hobbes, and a measure of self-deception helps with both. Deceiving yourself about your ability to win a fight enhances your combat performance; it also helps to bluff better, and thus to inspire confidence in your troops and fear in your opponents. The most efficient way to see off a rival, or group of rivals, is to bluff them into backing down. If the bluff works, then one side may ‘win’ but both have been saved loss of life. When two sets of over-confident bluffers come into conflict, however, a catastrophic war is more likely, because both sides are over-estimating their chances of victory and will stop at nothing to prove themselves right. The biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that this helps explain why there have been so many irrationally destructive wars in human history.
‘Always remember,’ said Winston Churchill, ‘however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.’ It’s a warning our leaders tend to be inclined, by nature, to ignore. We are left with a troubling paradox: self-deception may be useful to the individual and even beneficial to the group, but deadly for the species as a whole.
‘Everyone Started Lying’: Saddam’s Last Stand
The better part of war is deceiving.
Saddam Hussein
The 2003 Iraq war was a grisly example of two sets of illusions coming together to produce catastrophe. Much effort has already been expended in analysing the West’s miscalculations; here I’m going to focus on the Iraqi perspective because, for all the mistakes made by the US and its allies, Saddam’s were at least as significant.
After 11 September 2001, a steady drumbeat of pronouncements from the American government signalled that the US was preparing to disarm and overthrow by force a regime it had already declared its intention to remove. As we now know, Saddam didn’t pursue a serious weapons of mass destruction programme after 1998. Yet he managed to convince everyone, including Western intelligence agencies, his neighbours in the region, and his own people, that he was doing so. If he had acted quickly, Saddam might have struck an agreement with the US and its allies, enabling him to stay in power. But he made no such attempt, and never backed down from his bluff, even when it was clear to everyone that the United States, under the second President Bush, was serious about removing him. Neither did Saddam do much to prepare his military for war; the swift collapse of Iraq’s defences came as a welcome but baffling surprise to the invaders. He didn’t even arrange his own escape: seven months after the invasion, the dictator was found hiding in a rabbit-hole near his family home. For over twenty-three years, Saddam had survived internal revolts, assassination attempts, two wars, destabilising defections, and concerted international efforts to remove him. Why did this master of self-preservation simply walk into the fire in 2003? The answer has much to do with the dynamics of deceit.
Following his capture, Saddam himself provided his interrogators with little insight about his pre-war calculations – he was too intent on presenting himself as heir to the great Arab heroes of the past. But we now have a much clearer idea of his thinking than we did at the time. After Baghdad fell, the US military scooped up many of the regime’s most sensitive documents from government ministries and Saddam’s palaces, including thousands of hours of recorded conversations between Saddam and his inner circle (Saddam had the Nixonian habit of taping all of his meetings and phone calls). As part of a ‘lessons learned’ exercise, the army handed over this vast dossier to a team led by Kevin Woods, a defence analyst, retired army officer, and former member of the US Joint Forces Command.
Woods also spent more than three months in Baghdad in the summer of 2003 talking to former members of the Iraqi army and government, who were by then in the custody of the coalition. He would sit down, put a map on the table and invite them to tell him everything. ‘I’m not here to interrogate you,’ he assured them. ‘I’m here to get your story.’ These were experienced, proud men who were keen to take this chance to let the world know about the sacrifices they and their troops had made in impossible circumstances, and most were happy to talk.19 Over a period of more than five years, Woods pieced together their testimony with the documentary evidence to create a detailed picture of how Saddam’s regime prepared – or didn’t prepare – for war. Woods discovered that the world from the point of view of Saddam in early 2003 looked very different to the world as seen by the West.
When American soldiers entered Iraq, they were surprised and grateful that the Iraqis were not better prepared to defend themselves. For instance, the Iraqi army failed to blow up bridges across the Euphrates, enabling their enemies to advance at much greater speed than they would otherwise have done. After the fall of Baghdad, a senior Iraqi official was asked what he had imagined would happen when the coalition invaded. The official recalled that he and his colleagues had given little thought to it, being more concerned with potential threats from Turkey and Iran than any threat from America. It was a stunning insight into the delusional mindset of the whole regime, a mindset that had melded with that of Iraq’s leader.
Most of the world viewed the 1991 Gulf War (Desert Storm) as a humiliation for Saddam. But faced with two contradictory cognitions – his army was devastated by the Americans and he was forced to withdraw from Kuwait, versus his self-perception as an invincible leader of the Arab world – Saddam chose to see it as a victory. After all, he and his regime had survived in the face of accumulated Western might. This belief was reinforced when the first President Bush lost his 1992 re-election attempt, a defeat for which Saddam took credit. In the face of Americ
a’s renewed threats, Saddam remained sceptical and unperturbed. He reminded his advisers that even if the Americans were serious, this time they had only half the number of troops and fewer allies, even though ‘Little Bush’ wanted to go further than his father and occupy Baghdad itself. To Saddam, America vs Iraq: The Sequel would be a pale retread of the first, but with an even more glorious ending for Iraq.
Saddam’s officials, rather than telling him the truth – that America seemed quite willing and more than able to remove him by force – told him what they knew he wanted to hear. He was reassured by his foreign ministers that America and Britain would never go to war without Russia and France, and by his generals that non-existent state-of-the-art weapons systems were coming along nicely. The military internalised Saddam’s views, focusing more on threats from within the country and from their neighbours than from the US and UK. This delusion was sustained even after the invasion; the reason the army didn’t blow up the Euphrates bridges was because they anticipated having to quell an internal rebellion after the war once the Americans had stopped or retreated. Saddam’s personal secretary told Woods that even ten days after the US invasion, Saddam was sublimely confident of prevailing.