Perhaps more than any of the other types of failure we are examining, adaptive failure is susceptible to the belief that success was denied by only a small margin. A few more resources, a single change in the chain of cause and effect that apparently led directly to disaster, and the outcome would have been entirely different.

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

One of the things that best helps to explain how such untrained and inexpert amateurs can function so well and cope so effectively in these circumstances is the fact that their goals are often very clear—even, indeed, self-evident. Social ties that usually go unexamined emerge in testing circumstances and offer a clear guide to action, and often a

Finally, it is a cardinal principle of deception that the deceiver succeeds by reinforcing his opponent’s misconceptions.

Yet as Pearl Harbor and other cases suggest, it is in the deficiency of organizations that the embryo of misfortune develops.

One partial answer has to do with what one might call the “55/95 problem”—the tendency to see that element of military difficulty that bulks largest (55 percent of your problem) as the whole of it (95 percent). In this case the initial shortages of escort vessels and aircraft made such an impression that they made it difficult to understand the nat

Two explanations help explain why Israel failed, in several ways, to anticipate the Yom Kippur War. One reason lies not in the analysis of intelligence but in its sources. Studies of intelligence failure often look exclusively at the analytical problem, at the products of intelligence analysis rather than its sources. Yet in many cases one cannot u

The difficulties this produced were magnified by the system through which the command structure functioned. Two aspects of this system helped produce a failure to adapt by enfeebling command. One was the compartmentalization of the planning process, which isolated parts of the organization when they should have been communicating with one another.

Every war brings to the surface areas of warfare that may form an intelligible whole but that do not—for a variety of reasons—come under the purview of a preexisting military organization. One test of the high command in any war lies in its ability to perceive (and if possible anticipate) such “problem-organization mismatches” and attempt to resolv