Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War

This sort of system magnified the problems associated with Suvla Bay—and may even be said to have created many of them—by forcing the task into the framework of the organization rather than readjusting the organization to meet the needs of the job at hand.

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

An efficient communications system is of the greatest importance in directing and controlling raw or inexperienced troops in combat.

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.

The requirements to adapt to unexpected circumstances tests both organization and system, revealing weaknesses that are partly structural and partly functional, whose full potential for disaster may not previously have been noticed.

By dissecting military misfortune in the way demonstrated in this chapter, we find our attention drawn repeatedly to what one might call “the organizational dimension of strategy.”

We have seen, moreover, that the United States Navy made a serious and protracted effort to learn from British experience. Why did they fail in such a striking way? The answer seems to lie in how the United States Navy defined learning, particularly in the context of preparation for war. In a nutshell, the navy’s leadership defined its problem as t

Students and even practitioners of intelligence often suggest that it has two chief functions: warning (predicting what an opponent is about to do) and order of battle (information about the who, what, and where of an enemy’s forces).

The answer to the conundrum of the Western Front, in purely military terms, did not lie just with new instruments of war, however; it entailed developing new techniques for combining artillery, infantry, tanks, and airplanes and developing a doctrine that emphasized flexibility over rigidity and innovation over obedience to long-established “princi