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Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War

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Military historians will enjoy this book. I read it as part of the Air War College curriculum. The theme of the book is that often military blunders are the result of or enhanced by institutional/organizational flaws. The first couple of chapters lay out an analytical model that is used in the remainder of the book. The model combines in-depth knowledge of the campaign with a tailored, layered critical approach for each campaign. In the remaining chapters the model is applied to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Yom Kippur War 1973, the US anti-sub effort in 1942, the Brits' Sulva Bay enterprise at Gallipoli 1915, the US retreat from the Yalu River in Korea 1950, and the collapse of the French Army & Air Force in 1940. The six campaigns are very readable and enjoyable. The style is crisp and succint. I learned alot of interesting details about the campaigns. The Gooch & Cohen model is not a tool for prediction of the success of future campaigns - only for historical analysis. Nonetheless, once you get through the first two chapters, you'll be in for an enjoyable read. Try it.

If you enjoy this type "failure" analysis (such as the book "Normal Accidents"), I think you'll find this to be an excellent read. My interest is primarily in business strategy and related issues (not in military history and strategy per se), but the authors present material which I found to be very useful across many different professions. My complements to the authors for good cases, good analysis and good writing. I really had great fun reading this book. It could have used better proof reading, but the errors enountered in no way hindered the presentation in any material way.

Why do competent, well-led armies facing reasonable odds sometimes suffer spectacular defeat? That is the nettlesome question two young (at the time) professors of strategy at the US Naval War College sought to address with "Military Misfortunes."

The book is a curious and engaging mix of political science, military history and organizational theory with a dash of management consulting-style charts and decision matrices. It succeeds on a variety of levels, but most notably in its cogent critique on why previous attempts to explain military defeat have been woefully inadequate and its levelheaded view on the prospects for preventing major failure in the future. In short, this is an academic treatise on why failures occur in military organizations, not an attempt to devine formulas for preventing future failure; the authors concede that such a goal, while worthy, is essentially impossible.

To begin with, the authors highlight and dismiss the standard explanations for military failure that have most often been suggested by historians. Cohen and Gooch note that these stock explanations are nearly always homogenous in nature; that is, the cause of failure can be explained by one factor alone. Examples of these inadequate homogenous explanations are that failure is caused by the actions (or lack thereof) of an individual commander (what they call the "man-in-the-dock theory"); the inherent mental inflexibility and dullness of the typical professional military officer (the "man-on-the-couch"), the rigid conservativeness of military institutions, and ethnological defects or innate weaknesses of entire peoples and nations.

Cohen and Gooch see three very different and basic types of military failure, which can be committed at a variety of levels of command: failure to learn, failure to anticipate and failure to adapt. The combination of any two leads to what the authors call "aggregate failure" and the combination of all three lead to "catastrophic failure." To highlight each type of failure and combinations thereof, the authors' pursue a case study methodology, examining some of the most well-known military failures of the past century (the fall of France in 1940, Gallipoli in 1915, and the rout of the US VIII Army in 1950), as well as some lesser known examples (US anti-submarine warfare in 1942 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973). Each case study is briskly paced and follows the same general outline of first defining precisely what the failure under consideration was, citing the key events at each level of command that led to disaster, and then creating a matrix of actions and failures that reveal a "pathway to misfortune."

The authors concede that there are no easy remedies to curing military failure, just as there are no easy explanations for why it happens. However, they clearly see organizational dynamics as often playing a leading role on the road to misfortune. "It is the deficiency of particular organizations confronted with particular tasks that the embryo of military misfortune develops."

While there are no panaceas for preventing failures, the authors do review some ways to improve across the three general dimensions of failure: 1) learning - emphasize the importance of intellectual training and outlook combined with relentless empiricism in military education at all levels; 2) anticipation - think just as hard and realistically about the politico-military conditions under which future war could occur as about the tactics and/or weapons the other side may employ; and 3) adaptation - stress and promote the role of initiative at ever level of command.

The authors' general conclusion is gloomy, yet realistic: "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 circumstance." In the end, "Military Misfortunes" provides a compelling framework for better understanding how and why armed forces suffer major failure, but offers little to any hope for preventing those failures from occurring in the future.

Good use of historical examples to determine why 20th-Century battles have been lost. Good battle synopses. Moderate clarity of writing style. Unfortunately, analyses of the failure causes are sometimes weak. Some conclusions seem force-fitted into predetermined failure modes. Nonetheless, the analyses are thought-provoking and thorough. A good book overall.

While this book deals with military failures, the paralels to running a business or a family are rich and rewarding. One example: The story of the US failure in Korea, and how certain branches of the armed forces prevailed but other failed was fascinating ... we tend to think of events as successes or failures, but really they are combinations of successes and failures -- studying in a granular, detailed way illuminates both and allows one to succeed overall by cutting failing tactics and replacing them with successful ones. Many other rich paralels here too.

A great analytic framework for looking at various battles over the last two millenia or so. Interesting to think about the various lessons that could be learned.

I also thought the framework for how decisions get made to be super interesting. It is too bad that there aren't more analytic books like this rather than the straight narrative that is typical in military history books

This book is not, unlike most books on military disasters, one that concentrates on "important" factors contributing to defeat (or almost causing it) such as intelligence failure or poor leadership or poor command and control. It instead looks at many relatively minor factors (usually institutional) that are not quite important, per se, but that add up. For example, the chapter on the near disaster of American anti-submarine warfare in early 1942 does not only concentrate on Admiral King's reluctance to institute convoys (in his opinion they were not "offensive") and the lack of anti-submarine vessels but on a myriad of factors that also contributed to the disastrous loss of shipping in that period, primarily off the U.S. coast. Such factors included lack of anti-submarine warfare training and doctrine, the lack of cooperation in the military-civilian naval communication sphere, no naval policy relating to blacking out civilian lights along coastal waterways, no military restrictions on civilian transport vessel communications (this information was to provide the Germans with considerable intelligence on shipping traffic), little coordination between the navy and coast guard regarding search and rescue, etc. The author's make the point, well, that even if the two "major" factors contributing to the disaster never occurred (i.e., the convoy system would have been introduced immediately and there were enough escort vessels) there still would have been considerable losses caused by these "minor" factors. Death of a thousand cuts so to speak. The authors also follow this same course in their analysis with regards to the four other case studies presented in their book, the British failure at Gallipoli, the surprise of Israeli forces in 1973, the defeat of the U.S. Eighth army in Korea and the French army and air force's defeat in 1940.

The serious discussion of these factors makes this book more geared to the specialist reader than the general. The general reader may find many of these "minor" factors contributing to defeat too technical or boring. The specialist reader will be more likely to appreciate a detailed discussion of them.

As an ex army officer and a corporate strategist, I couldnt put this book down. what a great read with such a simple yet powerful framework backed up by some semi-quantitave analysis.

I think the authors did themselves a dis-service limiting the title to military failure when in fact the framework applies equally as 'organisational failure'. Sure the Military has the absolute imperative to win - coming second is not just loss of market share or going bankrupt - it is the death and destruction of your people and culture. As Sun Tsu said 'a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never again come into being nor the dead brought back to life'. Thus read this book before deciding how your empire will survive and thrive.

They list three basic types of failure that provide a simple yet powerful framework to assist in working through all the complexities of modern war and business.
1. failure to anticipate
2 failure to adapt
3 failure to learn
all errors can be grouped into of one these. You can survive 'singular' failures and with luck even pull thru 'aggregate' failure of two. Committing all three totals to'catastrphic failure' and 'misfortune' is sure to follow.

Now whenever I read history or look at corporate strategy, I always run thru this three part checklist to make sure we have covered off against them

good reading
david

"Military Misfortunes" is, in one way, a celebration of the aspect of the American military that the late David Hackworth found most reprehensible: the "no-fault" army. Eliot Cohen and John Gooch reject the great man theory in favor of organization and management.

They come very close to saying that a well-organized, well-managed army will succeed, no matter the odds. And they explicitly do say that military misfortunes (which are more honestly called defeats) are not "the sole responsibility of any single individual, not even the military commander."

If they were going to convince anyone of that by means of case studies, they met disastrous misfortune by choosing as one of their five examples the defeat of the U.S. Eighth Army in Korea in 1950. That defeat was the responsibility of a single man, Supreme Allied Commander Douglas MacArthur, the worst general in the history of the United States (with the possible exception of some of the amateur militia generals of the Civil War).

MacArthur remains the only American general to have maneuvered his troops into a "march of death." He did it twice.

There are some very odd conclusions in the other case studies as well. No one would gainsay that a well-thought out, well-managed military is a good idea. On the other hand, crowing over defeating a ramshackle, mismanaged, crazy military, as Americans did over Saddam Hussein's joke army in Gulf War I, suggests an inability to recognize either good or bad management, and Cohen and Gooch are as guilty of this as the average yahoo at the VFW.

The oddest - after the completely wrongheaded treatment of MacArthur - is the conclusion concerning the "strange defeat" of the French army in 1940;

While the French had the wrong sort of weapons, the wrong sort of generals and the wrong strategy, the defeat was still strange because the French did not fight. They might not have been capable of defeating the Germans, but the collapse in little more than a week needs explaining. Gooch (who wrote this chapter) hardly tries.

And, given his focus on military organization, he completely neglects morale, except in the summation, where he dismisses its importance. He rejects the argument, made elsewhere, that the army was subverted by the left, noting that the sabotage in the factories was limited.

Even if it had been extensive, sabotage in factories could not have been a factor in a war that was over in two weeks. Nor were there communists in government, and certainly not in the officer corps. No, the failure of nerve is elsewhere to be sought, on the right, not the left. Gooch does not so much as mention it.

The fact is that large sections of the officer corps and of leading sectors of the country had no desire to fight for the republic, which they despised. (Just as the expectation and fear of the Americans that Iraqis would fight for Saddam was misplaced.) Significant fractions of the French population - it is questionable whether it could be called a nation - preferred German occupation to Socialist government, just as in Italy, the Catholic church preferred fascism to democracy.

The other case studies are Gallipoli, the antisubmarine failure of the U.S. Navy in 1942 and Israel's experience in the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

Again, if Gooch and Cohen want to make the point that organizations, not men, create misfortunes, the examples are ill-chosen. At Gallipoli, there were mistakes aplenty, but any officer who looked on those sere hills ought to have thought of all the past battles where the fighting men were desperate for water and made it a first priority to see that it did not happen here. No one in the British Army paid more than sketchy attention to this, however, suggesting a deep incompetence and stupidity that would have been proof against even a much better organized system.

This book was published in 1990, and the paperback edition of 2006 includes a new afterword briefly discussing the failures (they were not misfortunes) of the American army in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Gooch and Cohen get off on the wrong foot here by declaring that the American military is the most powerful and competent the world has ever known."

Powerful it is, and often rescued from its incompetence by the ability of steam hammers to crack walnuts. But at its high levels, both civilian and uniformed, the American military has proven itself incompetent in almost every fighting occasion since 1951. The authors themselves note, without any evident sense of the incongruity, that they excluded Vietnam from their candidate list of misfortunes because it would have deserved a book in itself.

One of their themes is failure to learn, but they show no awareness of how little the Americans learned from 1980 on in Iran, Libya, Panama, Grenada, Lebanon, Somalia, Kuwait. Everywhere Americans used their weapons, they performed abysmally, nowhere more so than in Grenada.

But instead of sacking the generals, they awarded themselves heaps of medals and pretended that because the most powerful military force in history had managed (though only just) to prevail over 600 construction workers, all was well.

Gooch and Cohen's summary of the defeat in Iraq packs a lot of misconceptions in a few paragraphs, but to take just one point, it was obvious in Gulf War I that the American army was deficient in infantry. Neither the civilian nor the military high command was able or willing to acknowledge this, and even after the complete failure of American policy in Iraq, which was fundamentally due to a political misconception that, however, might have been at least partly made good by a real occupation of the country following the destruction of the old order-keeping structure, no one in the American high command seems to realize this.

On an unconscious level, the resort to "surges" shows that infantry was the answer, and a lot of the infantrymen who served in Afghanistan and Iraq understand what they accomplished in limited areas; but both the high military command and the political command (both Bush and Obama) have denied the value of infantry. The US Army has been nearly destroyed by this obtuseness, to the extent that, earlier this year, when political policy (rightly) determined that it was in American interest to depose Khadafy, the "most powerful and competent" military organization in history was afraid to act.

This book is about three major failures made in war. Especialy when 2 or all 3 of the failures were made, the war was lost. Preventing these 3 failures is not only useful for the military and in wars, but also for other people, and in other situations. For instance in business and in sports. So, in general one should adapt, anticipate and learn. The examples used in the book are very illustrating. Most recent examples are missing, for instance the first and second Gulf wars.