Allanea’s Handy Guide To Military Incompetence and Military Errors
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Military incompetence (and competence) are the stuff of famous works of fiction and non-fiction. Anti-war films thrive on the subject - the notion of a military unit abandoned by its commanders to a pointless mission, a platoon lost deep in enemy territory, young men sacrificed by their cruel commanders, forced into meaningless charges across no man’s land, those things are the stuff of countless military films - Lebanon, Starship Troopers, Ninth Company (actually a war propaganda film under the guise of an anti-war film). Action cinema is also in love with the trope. Villains in adventure films are often portrayed as being incompetent, sending countless faceless goons to face off against the hero. (Soviet propaganda often portrayed Nazi commanders as incompetent maniacs and Tsarist commanders as arrogant buffoons.) Terrorists are also sometimes (not unjustifiably) portrayed as stupid or incompetent, such as in the film True Lies. The Vietnam-era film Siege of Firebase Gloria portrays both an incompetent US commander and incompetent North Vietnamese fighters.
Unfortunately, portrayals of military incompetence in cinema suffer from multiple problems. They are often flawed due to political biases of the writers or directors (the historical advisor for the production for the play Oh! What a Lovely War was literally a KGB spy), or sometimes because of the directors’ lack of understanding of what constitutes incompetence. This creates vastly exaggerated portrayals - for example, the silliness seen in the Starship Troopers film during the invasion of Klendathu, or indeed the entire second half of 9th Company where we are exposed to a portrayal wherein the Ninth Company is somehow forgotten in Afghanistan (in the real battle on which the film was based, the Company was deployed deliberately to protect the retreat of forces from Afghanistan. It was not only not forgotten, but received constant artillery support that rained fire on the Mujahedin. Of course, the real Ninth Company wasn’t wiped out like in the film - it lost six men and inflicted vast casualties.
Another good example of the fictionalization of incompetence is the insane scene shown in Enemy at the Gates, where endless Soviet soldiers are seen rushing into the Nazi machine guns, armed with one rifle per two men, while a commissar with a bullhorn shouts instructions at them to take the rifleman’s weapon should he fall dead. Were there many, many examples of institutional stupidity in the RKKA? Yes! Were the casualties vast? Yes! Were the men at Stalingrad actually herded dumbly towards the Nazi guns, as in the film? No. That is nonsense.
Unfortunately, portrayals of military incompetence in cinema suffer from multiple problems. They are often flawed due to political biases of the writers or directors (the historical advisor for the production for the play Oh! What a Lovely War was literally a KGB spy), or sometimes because of the directors’ lack of understanding of what constitutes incompetence. This creates vastly exaggerated portrayals - for example, the silliness seen in the Starship Troopers film during the invasion of Klendathu, or indeed the entire second half of 9th Company where we are exposed to a portrayal wherein the Ninth Company is somehow forgotten in Afghanistan (in the real battle on which the film was based, the Company was deployed deliberately to protect the retreat of forces from Afghanistan. It was not only not forgotten, but received constant artillery support that rained fire on the Mujahedin. Of course, the real Ninth Company wasn’t wiped out like in the film - it lost six men and inflicted vast casualties.
Another good example of the fictionalization of incompetence is the insane scene shown in Enemy at the Gates, where endless Soviet soldiers are seen rushing into the Nazi machine guns, armed with one rifle per two men, while a commissar with a bullhorn shouts instructions at them to take the rifleman’s weapon should he fall dead. Were there many, many examples of institutional stupidity in the RKKA? Yes! Were the casualties vast? Yes! Were the men at Stalingrad actually herded dumbly towards the Nazi guns, as in the film? No. That is nonsense.
A thing that never happened
So what causes military incompetence and military errors? What are their roots? Now obviously professional historians have broken many lances over this topic. I don’t claim to be an expert (though some aspects of military decisionmaking do form the topic of my PhD dissertation), but in this informative I’ll attempt to look at various causes of military error and incompetence. This is both to enable players to write about this topic realistically - to either roleplay the forms of incompetence and error what would be endemic to their form of government and national culture, and to assist them in worldbuilding competent, semi-competent, and incompetent military establishments.
For reasons of brevity and due to the limits on my own knowledge, the guide will focus primarily on military competence as it pertains to warfare in the industrial and post-industrial age (roughly 1890 through to what is called in Nationstates ‘PMT’ technology). FT is not covered at all (as we don’t really have a meaningful idea of what a far-future society will be like), and less advanced eras will be only touched upon tangentially.
For reasons of brevity and due to the limits on my own knowledge, the guide will focus primarily on military competence as it pertains to warfare in the industrial and post-industrial age (roughly 1890 through to what is called in Nationstates ‘PMT’ technology). FT is not covered at all (as we don’t really have a meaningful idea of what a far-future society will be like), and less advanced eras will be only touched upon tangentially.
Personal Incompetence
Personal military incompetence is frequently caricatured. Media often portray incompetent generals as fools and madmen, or sometimes even outright evil, disregarding their men’s casualties as they throw hundreds of men to their deaths. In fiction we can see this portrayal in Blackadder Goes Forth and Braveheart, where Edward I is shown ordering archers to fire in a manner that would endanger his own troops. Sometimes it is done to make the villain a foil to the hero (who, of course, defeats the villain while protecting the lives of his own men as much as possible), at other times it is because the author or filmmaker wants to create an image of warfare as futile and meaningless. In some cultures, writers and artists - the people creating the shows - simply have a stereotype of military men as uncouth, stupid, and cruel. However, this portrayal is simplistic and overly fictionalized.
Of course, sometimes, downright idiots do in fact get appointed to positions of military command. Sometimes it is an accident, sometimes it happens due to institutional reasons - which we will cover in latter chapters. But, importantly, most military commanders are not idiots. In modern societies, it’s because to become a senior commander, it is necessary to undergo specialized training and education (a university education is typically mandatory for senior offices, on top of years of training). While this does not guarantee brilliance, this does mean the average level of intelligence and education will be greater than those of the general public. In earlier eras, military commanders tended to come from social strata that had better access to education than the average person of the era.
So while it does sometimes happen that military commanders make tragic mistakes, the reason for it is quite often not simply them being stupid. If there is anything at all military history teaches us it is that intelligent, well-educated people can commit terrible blunders, leading to devastation and tragedy on a truly Homeric scale.
(As a curio, it’s generally suggested that the Achaeans brought between 70,000 and 130,000 men to siege Troy. I feel this could be used as an estimate to identify the scope of a literal epic conflict.)
Some personality flaws that can be leading to military incompetence have been outlined by Norman F. Dixon, a veteran and scientist, in his famous work, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. He argued that military incompetence often results from what is termed by psychologists authoritarian personality traits. At the time it was fashionable among psychologists to associate elements of the ‘authoritarian’ personality with political views they disapproved of. Dixon argued that subconscious neuroses or childhood trauma could lead individuals to develop personal traits that could lead them to failure as commanders. For example, a person could possess what had been termed, in Dixon’s work, the anal character - an excessive attention to detail, discipline, and ritual. In military life this sort of attitude is of course very desirable in a drill sergeant, a military policeman, or a safety inspector (with the caveat, of course, that one must not overdo it). In a combat officer it may easily prove lethal, should an officer (on the simplest example) waste time on bunk inspections, parade drills, or polishing buttons that could have been used to enhance battle preparedness.
Another psychological dysfunction sometimes present in military commanders - and identified by Dixon - is the fear of failure. In this context, fear of failure is identified not merely as literally fearing failure (obviously, nobody wants to fail), but a condition where the ‘fear of failure is stronger than the urge to succeed. This may lead generals to unconsciously avoid tasks where they may fail, choosing either tasks where their probability of success is very high (very easy tasks) or nearly impossible (very hard, in which case they won’t be blamed for failing). It is easy to imagine that in a prolonged war such commanders might avoid engagements for fear of being blamed of losing them, and thus actually fail at defeating the enemy and bring about worse disaster in the long term. Sometimes it may lead to a general failing to exploit an opportunity, or making the correct decision only when it too late. This behavior - risk-averseness - may be compounded by cultural and institutional issues we will discuss in later chapters. Another problem with people possessing the authoritarian personality is their tendency to shift blame to their subordinates, so as to avoid being seen as having failed.
Another feature of the authoritarian personality is often linked to what is termed by some writers as ‘toxic masculinity’, but does sometimes appear in women too - the desire of a military commander to appear ‘strong’ or ‘ruthless’. In a combat context this might lead to the commander believing that he can solve complex military issues simply by applying more firepower or throwing more forces into the fray, or by carrying out more indiscriminate attacks. (This is not to say that increasing firepower or carrying out attacks that kill civilians never works - but rather that doing so blindly and indiscriminately often follows from this personality flaw.) In addition to this, people who suffer from the authoritarian personality tend to value other people less - one can imagine easily how terrifying this can become in a military scenario.
Dixon and his various disciples (who have gone on to apply the lessons of A Psychology of Military Incompetence to topics like academic and corporate management argued that individuals who possess the authoritarian personality are often described as more dishonest, less likely to understand opponent's intentions (they are less able than the average person to see themselves in the opponent’s proverbial shoes), less willing to accept change (think here of the various anecdotes of army general being unable to accept new technologies), more likely to insist on blind obedience, and more likely to underestimate the opposition, as well as use various racial and cultural stereotype of their enemy.
More broadly, those persons possessing the authoritarian personality are often obsessed not so much with success or victory in the objective world, but with notions of dominance and submission. According to supporters of the theory, persons of the authoritarian personality type would rather punish his troops painfully than accept a failure of discipline (which he views as an affront to his own dignity), or expend resources assaulting an enemy position as he would consider it humiliating (not only to himself, but to the uniform and national dignity) to back down.
Now it is important to state here that some elements of authoritarian personality theory have been questioned by psychologists and have not been borne out experimentally. The research carried out by Dixon himself into the military history aspect of his book was minimal, and essentially just replicates the accepted wisdom of his time. To some extent the theory also suffers from a degree of political bias, conceived as it was by Frankfurt School Marxists. It should also be viewed as a guideline and not a template - some individuals will display some elements of the Authoritarian Personality but not all of them. Whether or not the theory is true, we’ve all met individuals who can be somewhat described by it.
Another issue which can affect military decision-making is the peculiarities of a person’s particular talent. For example, Napoleon Bonaparte is often described by biographers as a brilliant tactical and operational genius - it’s hard to call Bonaparte incompetent in the sense which is often ascribed to cartoonish cinema generals. Yet he had sometimes made fatal errors when failing to completely account for military logistics (famously, during planning for his invasion of Russia), or engineering issues. One account of the battle of Waterloo claims that Napoleon had failed to have complete reconnaissance of the battlesite made, and ordered one of his Cuirassier units to charge through an area where there was a narrow ditch, which the Emperor of France had failed to see from his command post. By the time that the Cuirassiers were able to see the ditch, it was already too late to stop the charge. Dozens of horses flew at full speed into the ditch, bone crunching as legs broke, riders crushed alongside the horses, the men riding in the rear smashing into the men in the front - the attack broken entirely. Now while this account is disputed, something of this vein - omitting a crucial detail that then leads to horrific slaughter is something that can happen to many commanders.
In broader terms, a military commander must combine - in different proportions for different duties - several functions. He must be an educated manager (at higher rankings, many military professionals in Western have actual MBAs to go with their military training) to handle the logistics and planning necessary to have his unit’s training and supplies up to date in peacetime and during war. He must be an intelligent, and preferably creative, thinker, to be able to respond to the challenges of wartime and emergencies. Finally he must be a charismatic and brave person, to be able to lead his men into battle; would you be happy to risk yourself at the orders of someone whom you know to be a cowardly, annoying, possibly dishonest boss? Different military duties require some of these elements more than others - a Divisional Logistics Officer is more in need of managerial skills, whereas an infantry platoon commander needs the charisma more. But one can easily see how a lack of one of these skills when they are needed can lead to disaster.
One such famous example of a person having some command skills but not others was Marshal Budyonny, the famous Soviet Civil War hero. Reputed as a brave and fiercely loyal military commander, popular among his men and general public, Budyonny nevertheless proved badly fitted for commanding men in the industrial hell of the Second World War. After multiple terrible mishaps that led to the deaths of thousands of men, Budyonny was at last relegated by Stalin to a honorific position removed from actual combat decisionmaking.
A special note on Morale: One issue that affects both enlisted men and officers is the issue of morale. While morale is important in all enterprises (including in civilian life - just ask an HR management on employee morale and its importance), it’s particularly important in the military and the emergency services. Because it so important we need to discuss some of the ways it can fail.
Obviously the morale of troops can be sapped by misfortune. It is hard to remain brave when you have been living in the trenches for months, or when the enemy is chasing you back through the countryside and killing at will, or when you are lacking in food and clothing. Enemy propaganda - and domestic peace movements - can sap morale too. Indeed, sometimes peace movements coordinate, willingly or unwittingly, with the enemy’s troops.
Less obviously, morale issues can be caused by inadequate training. Part of the purpose of military training is to prepare civilians for the vicissitudes of war - its dangers, and the grinding physical discomfort that accompanies the military life, the lack of sleep, the dirt, the shortages of food. In some cases - especially in superstitious societies - it can be destroyed by bad omens. During the Ethiopian-Somali War, Ethiopian tank crews refused to fight at night - no threats or cajoling by the Soviet instructors could make them do it.
But morale issues are not only the unwillingness to fight. Sometimes soldiers can be just too lazy if they have not been accustomed to hard labor. The same Ethiopian soldiers also refused to clean their tanks, or to dig trenches in preparation for combat with the Somalis. Even the deaths of their comrades before their very eyes to Somali artillery fire could not force them to alter this behavior, and it was only when Soviet instructors forced them at gunpoint to dig several trenches, and they saw for themselves the ability of the trench to save lives, did their behavior alter.
Avoiding combat for too long may sometimes also dull morale as soldiers begin to perceive their service as meaningless and their commanders as too cowardly, or in some cases, become accustomed simply to not having to fight. Soldiers who are under enemy fire and cannot shoot back suffer damage to their morale as well; indeed, that is known to be more psychologically damaging than being engaged in actual combat. History knows many examples of soldiers who start out as being eager to fight, but whose morale suffers due to combat being delayed - either simply through being pampered in comparable living, or, conversely, exhausted by the daily grind of military life.
Of course, sometimes, downright idiots do in fact get appointed to positions of military command. Sometimes it is an accident, sometimes it happens due to institutional reasons - which we will cover in latter chapters. But, importantly, most military commanders are not idiots. In modern societies, it’s because to become a senior commander, it is necessary to undergo specialized training and education (a university education is typically mandatory for senior offices, on top of years of training). While this does not guarantee brilliance, this does mean the average level of intelligence and education will be greater than those of the general public. In earlier eras, military commanders tended to come from social strata that had better access to education than the average person of the era.
So while it does sometimes happen that military commanders make tragic mistakes, the reason for it is quite often not simply them being stupid. If there is anything at all military history teaches us it is that intelligent, well-educated people can commit terrible blunders, leading to devastation and tragedy on a truly Homeric scale.
(As a curio, it’s generally suggested that the Achaeans brought between 70,000 and 130,000 men to siege Troy. I feel this could be used as an estimate to identify the scope of a literal epic conflict.)
Some personality flaws that can be leading to military incompetence have been outlined by Norman F. Dixon, a veteran and scientist, in his famous work, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. He argued that military incompetence often results from what is termed by psychologists authoritarian personality traits. At the time it was fashionable among psychologists to associate elements of the ‘authoritarian’ personality with political views they disapproved of. Dixon argued that subconscious neuroses or childhood trauma could lead individuals to develop personal traits that could lead them to failure as commanders. For example, a person could possess what had been termed, in Dixon’s work, the anal character - an excessive attention to detail, discipline, and ritual. In military life this sort of attitude is of course very desirable in a drill sergeant, a military policeman, or a safety inspector (with the caveat, of course, that one must not overdo it). In a combat officer it may easily prove lethal, should an officer (on the simplest example) waste time on bunk inspections, parade drills, or polishing buttons that could have been used to enhance battle preparedness.
Another psychological dysfunction sometimes present in military commanders - and identified by Dixon - is the fear of failure. In this context, fear of failure is identified not merely as literally fearing failure (obviously, nobody wants to fail), but a condition where the ‘fear of failure is stronger than the urge to succeed. This may lead generals to unconsciously avoid tasks where they may fail, choosing either tasks where their probability of success is very high (very easy tasks) or nearly impossible (very hard, in which case they won’t be blamed for failing). It is easy to imagine that in a prolonged war such commanders might avoid engagements for fear of being blamed of losing them, and thus actually fail at defeating the enemy and bring about worse disaster in the long term. Sometimes it may lead to a general failing to exploit an opportunity, or making the correct decision only when it too late. This behavior - risk-averseness - may be compounded by cultural and institutional issues we will discuss in later chapters. Another problem with people possessing the authoritarian personality is their tendency to shift blame to their subordinates, so as to avoid being seen as having failed.
Another feature of the authoritarian personality is often linked to what is termed by some writers as ‘toxic masculinity’, but does sometimes appear in women too - the desire of a military commander to appear ‘strong’ or ‘ruthless’. In a combat context this might lead to the commander believing that he can solve complex military issues simply by applying more firepower or throwing more forces into the fray, or by carrying out more indiscriminate attacks. (This is not to say that increasing firepower or carrying out attacks that kill civilians never works - but rather that doing so blindly and indiscriminately often follows from this personality flaw.) In addition to this, people who suffer from the authoritarian personality tend to value other people less - one can imagine easily how terrifying this can become in a military scenario.
Dixon and his various disciples (who have gone on to apply the lessons of A Psychology of Military Incompetence to topics like academic and corporate management argued that individuals who possess the authoritarian personality are often described as more dishonest, less likely to understand opponent's intentions (they are less able than the average person to see themselves in the opponent’s proverbial shoes), less willing to accept change (think here of the various anecdotes of army general being unable to accept new technologies), more likely to insist on blind obedience, and more likely to underestimate the opposition, as well as use various racial and cultural stereotype of their enemy.
More broadly, those persons possessing the authoritarian personality are often obsessed not so much with success or victory in the objective world, but with notions of dominance and submission. According to supporters of the theory, persons of the authoritarian personality type would rather punish his troops painfully than accept a failure of discipline (which he views as an affront to his own dignity), or expend resources assaulting an enemy position as he would consider it humiliating (not only to himself, but to the uniform and national dignity) to back down.
Now it is important to state here that some elements of authoritarian personality theory have been questioned by psychologists and have not been borne out experimentally. The research carried out by Dixon himself into the military history aspect of his book was minimal, and essentially just replicates the accepted wisdom of his time. To some extent the theory also suffers from a degree of political bias, conceived as it was by Frankfurt School Marxists. It should also be viewed as a guideline and not a template - some individuals will display some elements of the Authoritarian Personality but not all of them. Whether or not the theory is true, we’ve all met individuals who can be somewhat described by it.
Another issue which can affect military decision-making is the peculiarities of a person’s particular talent. For example, Napoleon Bonaparte is often described by biographers as a brilliant tactical and operational genius - it’s hard to call Bonaparte incompetent in the sense which is often ascribed to cartoonish cinema generals. Yet he had sometimes made fatal errors when failing to completely account for military logistics (famously, during planning for his invasion of Russia), or engineering issues. One account of the battle of Waterloo claims that Napoleon had failed to have complete reconnaissance of the battlesite made, and ordered one of his Cuirassier units to charge through an area where there was a narrow ditch, which the Emperor of France had failed to see from his command post. By the time that the Cuirassiers were able to see the ditch, it was already too late to stop the charge. Dozens of horses flew at full speed into the ditch, bone crunching as legs broke, riders crushed alongside the horses, the men riding in the rear smashing into the men in the front - the attack broken entirely. Now while this account is disputed, something of this vein - omitting a crucial detail that then leads to horrific slaughter is something that can happen to many commanders.
In broader terms, a military commander must combine - in different proportions for different duties - several functions. He must be an educated manager (at higher rankings, many military professionals in Western have actual MBAs to go with their military training) to handle the logistics and planning necessary to have his unit’s training and supplies up to date in peacetime and during war. He must be an intelligent, and preferably creative, thinker, to be able to respond to the challenges of wartime and emergencies. Finally he must be a charismatic and brave person, to be able to lead his men into battle; would you be happy to risk yourself at the orders of someone whom you know to be a cowardly, annoying, possibly dishonest boss? Different military duties require some of these elements more than others - a Divisional Logistics Officer is more in need of managerial skills, whereas an infantry platoon commander needs the charisma more. But one can easily see how a lack of one of these skills when they are needed can lead to disaster.
One such famous example of a person having some command skills but not others was Marshal Budyonny, the famous Soviet Civil War hero. Reputed as a brave and fiercely loyal military commander, popular among his men and general public, Budyonny nevertheless proved badly fitted for commanding men in the industrial hell of the Second World War. After multiple terrible mishaps that led to the deaths of thousands of men, Budyonny was at last relegated by Stalin to a honorific position removed from actual combat decisionmaking.
A special note on Morale: One issue that affects both enlisted men and officers is the issue of morale. While morale is important in all enterprises (including in civilian life - just ask an HR management on employee morale and its importance), it’s particularly important in the military and the emergency services. Because it so important we need to discuss some of the ways it can fail.
Obviously the morale of troops can be sapped by misfortune. It is hard to remain brave when you have been living in the trenches for months, or when the enemy is chasing you back through the countryside and killing at will, or when you are lacking in food and clothing. Enemy propaganda - and domestic peace movements - can sap morale too. Indeed, sometimes peace movements coordinate, willingly or unwittingly, with the enemy’s troops.
Less obviously, morale issues can be caused by inadequate training. Part of the purpose of military training is to prepare civilians for the vicissitudes of war - its dangers, and the grinding physical discomfort that accompanies the military life, the lack of sleep, the dirt, the shortages of food. In some cases - especially in superstitious societies - it can be destroyed by bad omens. During the Ethiopian-Somali War, Ethiopian tank crews refused to fight at night - no threats or cajoling by the Soviet instructors could make them do it.
But morale issues are not only the unwillingness to fight. Sometimes soldiers can be just too lazy if they have not been accustomed to hard labor. The same Ethiopian soldiers also refused to clean their tanks, or to dig trenches in preparation for combat with the Somalis. Even the deaths of their comrades before their very eyes to Somali artillery fire could not force them to alter this behavior, and it was only when Soviet instructors forced them at gunpoint to dig several trenches, and they saw for themselves the ability of the trench to save lives, did their behavior alter.
Avoiding combat for too long may sometimes also dull morale as soldiers begin to perceive their service as meaningless and their commanders as too cowardly, or in some cases, become accustomed simply to not having to fight. Soldiers who are under enemy fire and cannot shoot back suffer damage to their morale as well; indeed, that is known to be more psychologically damaging than being engaged in actual combat. History knows many examples of soldiers who start out as being eager to fight, but whose morale suffers due to combat being delayed - either simply through being pampered in comparable living, or, conversely, exhausted by the daily grind of military life.
Institutional and Organizational Incompetence
While personal incompetence is a very important issue, of course, the military is first of all an institution - or, at more detail an assembly of complicated social institutions. It is often said that we live in the age of industrial warfare - not simply through the sense that we make our guns and bombs in production factories and resupply our troops with boots and socks that have been made and knitted by machines - but because the modern military follows the organizational principles of a large industrial enterprise. The primary principle of the modern armed services, just like the primary principle of modern capitalism, is the division of labor.
Those of us who are more or less familiar with the armed service are well aware of the existence of a broad variety of weaponry and military professions - infantrymen, tank crews, artillerymen, and fighter pilots, and of course all those things that are sometimes included under the umbrella of military logistics - warehouses full of guns and uniforms, trucks and field kitchens. What is sometimes less appreciated is the amount of complexity that goes into carrying out military decisions.
The Soviet or Russian mechanized infantry regiment included in it, for example, units of infantry, a tank battalion, an artillery battalion, an AA battalion, a reconnaissance company, a combat engineer company, a signals company, an anti-tank battery, an NBC protection platoon, a repair company, a logistics support company, a medical unit and even an orchestra! In combat these people would be stretched out several kilometers wide and perhaps a dozen kilometers deep. Imagine administering all of this - practically impossible for a man to do on his own.
The regiment’s commander would have a team of officers - each with a different specialization - working with him in his headquarters to administer all the regiment’s affairs, running commands down to the commanders of all these battalions and companies, advising him on various matters (for example, the regimental artillery officer would have a clearer understanding of how the regiment’s artillery works and what it can do for the commander than the regiment’s commanding officer). It is best to imagine this group of people like a human computer - a bit like the Chinese Room, it can carry out intellectual tasks which not a single human being could carry out.
But should this computer fail - should the organizational arrangements that allow it to solve military tasks fail - even if you have decent, intelligent people working in it, it will fail at its task. The author of this brief piece was once present - as an enlisted man, assisting with some of the IT details - at an exercise designed to train the headquarters of a major IDF logistics unit to deal with large flows of information. The officers were seated in several rooms (a dozen men or more in each room), each behind a workstation, similarly to what they’d have to do in an emergency. Just like in a real emergency, these people would be given pieces of information (by means of having the information emailed to their inboxes on the internal network). Just like in the real world, however, the person who would first become aware of the information would not be necessarily the one to be responsible for it. As part of the exercise, the officers were tested on their ability to locate the man responsible and hand all the relevant information to them. They had computers, faxes, and phones. The rooms were well-lit and air conditioned. There was, of course, no actual combat ongoing...
The exercise commenced at 08:00.
By 12:00, the senior instructor called an emergency stop to the exercise.
The technical details were not then fully explained to me - they were quite a bit above my pay grade. However, on that day, the division headquarters misplaced over half of messages it handled. Some were relayed - despite the fact the officers had Outlook Express and were fully capable of hitting the Forward button - in misworded ways. A report requesting transport and beds for POWs accidentally got relayed with the number of POWs understated by a factor of ten. Imagine the comedy that would have occurred had this taken place in battle.
Indeed, such things did happen in battle throughout the history. During the Second Lebanon war, many IDF officers were trained in various aspects of military theory - but many senior officers still were not very skilled at using Command and Control software that was in use with the IDF, prefering still to use paper maps which were updated, every half-hour, by men in their staff. This simple organizational problem soon took the life of a young man and injured several more.
In the well-lit, air-conditioned headquarters in Israel, the leadership of an infantry brigade and a tank brigade sat at different sides of the same large room, working on their maps and issuing order as Merkava tanks and men with rifles pushed across the hills of Lebanon. They coordinated, of course - but not nearly enough, and of course it was hard for their two sets of paper maps to match up perfectly when they were getting updated only periodically. During the night, a tank commander just on the edge of his unit’s area of operation saw the figures of armed men in his infra-red scope. Wanting to avoid shooting an Israeli soldier by mistake, he contacted his command by radio, asking them if there were any IDF soldiers in the area. They checked their paper map - which, again, was not completely up to date with the infantry unit’s map. “These people are not IDF troops”, they responded, and of course, the tank commander opened fire with his main gun. One man was killed on the spot, and five injured.
These stories are not told here merely to regale the reader. They are told here as to demonstrate examples of ways in which military command organizations - those large human computers - can fail, without any individual doing something wrong. Unlike what is often imagined by pop culture’s renditions of military events, quite often military failures occur without any particular person doing something wrong.
Three important forms of organizational failure occur in the armed forces:
Decisionmaking failure: A common example of military failure comes from the inability of military organizations to have a clear decisionmaking process. Military organizations absolutely must have a clear, top-down, chain of command. A clear example of what happens when this principle is violated is the military forces of Nazi Germany, where several parallel command structures existed. While these organizations all of course answered to one man, Hitler, in reality it was of course impossible for Hitler to oversee their daily functioning. This resulted in unseemly struggles in which the various organizations plotted against each other for supplies (for example, the Luftwaffe constantly plotted to have Me-109s earmarked for the air defense forces shifted into its purview... which ended up harming Germany’s ability to repel Allied bombers).
Another reason for decisionmaking failure to occur is if the armed forces have a structural reason that overly constrains low-tier commanders and punishes them for acting creatively. Obviously there is a need for discipline in the armed forces, but an organizational or training deficiency that destroys initiative will lead to a propensity of junior officers to only carry out maneuvers and tactics that they had literally memorized from their training books.
It should be noted that sometimes a chain of command can be united badly. For example, during the Second Chechen War, the Russian Federation had (quite reasonably) subordinated certain types of strike aircraft to the Army. It was argued that since things like SU-25s and Mi-24s carried out operations directly in cooperation with ground forces units, they needed to be reorganized as part of the ground forces so that they could provide rapid response to the soldiers in the field.
Implementation, however, suffered. Ground forces commanders found themselves suddenly responsible for helicopters - with limited training if any about the limitations and capabilities of the helicopters in Russian service, they were now called upon to perform tasks such as plan the layouts of the runways on which the helicopters had to land (under the new system, helicopter landing positions were now attached to infantry compounds that did not have them before). Planning errors meant that several ground forces bases had only one or two possible approach paths for a helicopter - paths that Chechen rebels soon learned, with tragic results. Another tragic reality was that air liaison officers were now under the command of ground forces commanders, once again not fully aware of the limitations of their men. When helicopters were unavailable - for reasons of weather or otherwise - ground forces commanders ordered the air liaison officers to assist their men with menial tasks, such as digging trenches and field fortifications. They did this out of the rational desire to ease the burden of hard work on the men for whom they were directly responsible. The result was, quite often, that the liaison officers were exhausted by digging trenches for hours, and had difficulties concentrating on their task of directing air strikes when the time came.
2. Information sharing failure: Conversely, a big source of failure in armed services is having organizations which are not good at transferring or handling information - either laterally (to other units on the same level), or vertically (to subordinate or superior units). We had already covered two examples of this. If we follow the parable of the armed forces as a computer, you should have all your circuits designed clearly in such a way that they can clearly hand over the right information. Officers must have clear knowledge about who is responsible for what, and what information needs to be relayed onward.
One of the most famous examples of a failed ‘human computer’ is the actions of Soviet command early on in the Great Patriotic War. As the Nazis invaded the USSR, the Soviets were plagued, on the high level, with a hastily organized General Staff. As, before the war, the structure of the General Staff did not exist in practice, and the generals and Marshals who participated in it did not have experience drilling as a General Staff, there was no clear understanding among them what each member of the General Staff was meant to do. On lower levels of command, because many commanders and soldiers had been recruited from remote areas of the USSR, there was the obvious problem that some officers simply did not speak the same language as the soldiers under their command, or other officers in the same unit.
Another one that has been immortalized in poetry - a British officer, Louis Edward Nolan, mistakenly delivering slightly misworded instructions to James Cardigan, a British cavalry commander during the Crimean War. Instead of attacking and harrying a group of retreating Russian, Cardigan and his cavalry were under the impression that they were meant to attack a heavily fortified Russian artillery position. Worse, Cardigan and his men had no idea further Russian artillery were concealed on the flanks of the position they were attacking, allowing the Russians to open fire from three directions, killing about a hundred out of the 668 members of the Light Brigade, and injuring another 160. The act was immortalized in Tennyson’s Classic Poem
Those of us who are more or less familiar with the armed service are well aware of the existence of a broad variety of weaponry and military professions - infantrymen, tank crews, artillerymen, and fighter pilots, and of course all those things that are sometimes included under the umbrella of military logistics - warehouses full of guns and uniforms, trucks and field kitchens. What is sometimes less appreciated is the amount of complexity that goes into carrying out military decisions.
The Soviet or Russian mechanized infantry regiment included in it, for example, units of infantry, a tank battalion, an artillery battalion, an AA battalion, a reconnaissance company, a combat engineer company, a signals company, an anti-tank battery, an NBC protection platoon, a repair company, a logistics support company, a medical unit and even an orchestra! In combat these people would be stretched out several kilometers wide and perhaps a dozen kilometers deep. Imagine administering all of this - practically impossible for a man to do on his own.
The regiment’s commander would have a team of officers - each with a different specialization - working with him in his headquarters to administer all the regiment’s affairs, running commands down to the commanders of all these battalions and companies, advising him on various matters (for example, the regimental artillery officer would have a clearer understanding of how the regiment’s artillery works and what it can do for the commander than the regiment’s commanding officer). It is best to imagine this group of people like a human computer - a bit like the Chinese Room, it can carry out intellectual tasks which not a single human being could carry out.
But should this computer fail - should the organizational arrangements that allow it to solve military tasks fail - even if you have decent, intelligent people working in it, it will fail at its task. The author of this brief piece was once present - as an enlisted man, assisting with some of the IT details - at an exercise designed to train the headquarters of a major IDF logistics unit to deal with large flows of information. The officers were seated in several rooms (a dozen men or more in each room), each behind a workstation, similarly to what they’d have to do in an emergency. Just like in a real emergency, these people would be given pieces of information (by means of having the information emailed to their inboxes on the internal network). Just like in the real world, however, the person who would first become aware of the information would not be necessarily the one to be responsible for it. As part of the exercise, the officers were tested on their ability to locate the man responsible and hand all the relevant information to them. They had computers, faxes, and phones. The rooms were well-lit and air conditioned. There was, of course, no actual combat ongoing...
The exercise commenced at 08:00.
By 12:00, the senior instructor called an emergency stop to the exercise.
The technical details were not then fully explained to me - they were quite a bit above my pay grade. However, on that day, the division headquarters misplaced over half of messages it handled. Some were relayed - despite the fact the officers had Outlook Express and were fully capable of hitting the Forward button - in misworded ways. A report requesting transport and beds for POWs accidentally got relayed with the number of POWs understated by a factor of ten. Imagine the comedy that would have occurred had this taken place in battle.
Indeed, such things did happen in battle throughout the history. During the Second Lebanon war, many IDF officers were trained in various aspects of military theory - but many senior officers still were not very skilled at using Command and Control software that was in use with the IDF, prefering still to use paper maps which were updated, every half-hour, by men in their staff. This simple organizational problem soon took the life of a young man and injured several more.
In the well-lit, air-conditioned headquarters in Israel, the leadership of an infantry brigade and a tank brigade sat at different sides of the same large room, working on their maps and issuing order as Merkava tanks and men with rifles pushed across the hills of Lebanon. They coordinated, of course - but not nearly enough, and of course it was hard for their two sets of paper maps to match up perfectly when they were getting updated only periodically. During the night, a tank commander just on the edge of his unit’s area of operation saw the figures of armed men in his infra-red scope. Wanting to avoid shooting an Israeli soldier by mistake, he contacted his command by radio, asking them if there were any IDF soldiers in the area. They checked their paper map - which, again, was not completely up to date with the infantry unit’s map. “These people are not IDF troops”, they responded, and of course, the tank commander opened fire with his main gun. One man was killed on the spot, and five injured.
These stories are not told here merely to regale the reader. They are told here as to demonstrate examples of ways in which military command organizations - those large human computers - can fail, without any individual doing something wrong. Unlike what is often imagined by pop culture’s renditions of military events, quite often military failures occur without any particular person doing something wrong.
Three important forms of organizational failure occur in the armed forces:
Decisionmaking failure: A common example of military failure comes from the inability of military organizations to have a clear decisionmaking process. Military organizations absolutely must have a clear, top-down, chain of command. A clear example of what happens when this principle is violated is the military forces of Nazi Germany, where several parallel command structures existed. While these organizations all of course answered to one man, Hitler, in reality it was of course impossible for Hitler to oversee their daily functioning. This resulted in unseemly struggles in which the various organizations plotted against each other for supplies (for example, the Luftwaffe constantly plotted to have Me-109s earmarked for the air defense forces shifted into its purview... which ended up harming Germany’s ability to repel Allied bombers).
Another reason for decisionmaking failure to occur is if the armed forces have a structural reason that overly constrains low-tier commanders and punishes them for acting creatively. Obviously there is a need for discipline in the armed forces, but an organizational or training deficiency that destroys initiative will lead to a propensity of junior officers to only carry out maneuvers and tactics that they had literally memorized from their training books.
It should be noted that sometimes a chain of command can be united badly. For example, during the Second Chechen War, the Russian Federation had (quite reasonably) subordinated certain types of strike aircraft to the Army. It was argued that since things like SU-25s and Mi-24s carried out operations directly in cooperation with ground forces units, they needed to be reorganized as part of the ground forces so that they could provide rapid response to the soldiers in the field.
Implementation, however, suffered. Ground forces commanders found themselves suddenly responsible for helicopters - with limited training if any about the limitations and capabilities of the helicopters in Russian service, they were now called upon to perform tasks such as plan the layouts of the runways on which the helicopters had to land (under the new system, helicopter landing positions were now attached to infantry compounds that did not have them before). Planning errors meant that several ground forces bases had only one or two possible approach paths for a helicopter - paths that Chechen rebels soon learned, with tragic results. Another tragic reality was that air liaison officers were now under the command of ground forces commanders, once again not fully aware of the limitations of their men. When helicopters were unavailable - for reasons of weather or otherwise - ground forces commanders ordered the air liaison officers to assist their men with menial tasks, such as digging trenches and field fortifications. They did this out of the rational desire to ease the burden of hard work on the men for whom they were directly responsible. The result was, quite often, that the liaison officers were exhausted by digging trenches for hours, and had difficulties concentrating on their task of directing air strikes when the time came.
2. Information sharing failure: Conversely, a big source of failure in armed services is having organizations which are not good at transferring or handling information - either laterally (to other units on the same level), or vertically (to subordinate or superior units). We had already covered two examples of this. If we follow the parable of the armed forces as a computer, you should have all your circuits designed clearly in such a way that they can clearly hand over the right information. Officers must have clear knowledge about who is responsible for what, and what information needs to be relayed onward.
One of the most famous examples of a failed ‘human computer’ is the actions of Soviet command early on in the Great Patriotic War. As the Nazis invaded the USSR, the Soviets were plagued, on the high level, with a hastily organized General Staff. As, before the war, the structure of the General Staff did not exist in practice, and the generals and Marshals who participated in it did not have experience drilling as a General Staff, there was no clear understanding among them what each member of the General Staff was meant to do. On lower levels of command, because many commanders and soldiers had been recruited from remote areas of the USSR, there was the obvious problem that some officers simply did not speak the same language as the soldiers under their command, or other officers in the same unit.
Another one that has been immortalized in poetry - a British officer, Louis Edward Nolan, mistakenly delivering slightly misworded instructions to James Cardigan, a British cavalry commander during the Crimean War. Instead of attacking and harrying a group of retreating Russian, Cardigan and his cavalry were under the impression that they were meant to attack a heavily fortified Russian artillery position. Worse, Cardigan and his men had no idea further Russian artillery were concealed on the flanks of the position they were attacking, allowing the Russians to open fire from three directions, killing about a hundred out of the 668 members of the Light Brigade, and injuring another 160. The act was immortalized in Tennyson’s Classic Poem
And a variety of heroic art
3. A third mention that bears mention is training failure - that is not to say, specifically, that individuals are entirely lacking in any kind of training - although there are sometimes circumstances, particularly in great military emergencies, in which individuals are sent to the field after having been only trained for weeks or sometimes even days. But these are fairly extreme, cartoonish circumstances, and they ought to be considered only in passing. More important are various seemingly minor deficiencies, which, in combat, can prove lethal to thousands of men. There are several important considerations in terms of training which ought to be considered
Lacking training - there are situations in which soldiers and even officers appear to have undergone the training that had been required by their military regulations, but the training is lacking in some important aspect that proves crucial on the battlefield. A good example of this is the training of soldiers in the late Soviet Union. At the time, the Soviet government, wishing to both save on ammunition and avoid its theft, limited the marksmanship training of soldiers to only 3 rifle rounds per year, making its men woefully unprepared for the brutal fighting seen in the post-Soviet conflicts. Equally, before the Chechen War, Russian commanders, seeing trench warfare as outdated in the late 20th century, reduced training with trenches to a few exercise a year, held with plywood mockups of trench lines - again, making it difficult for Russian officers and men to confront Chechen separatists who were not so ill-prepared.
In a modern-day military force that wishes to remain relevant, there must be a group of people which continuously studies and improves training. The Israel Defense Force even has uniformed behavioral studies personnel who continuously poll soldiers to establish the psychological effects of training. Additionally, militaries employ researchers - historians and military scientists - who continuously study wars past and present, to constantly improve training and doctrine. In some cases, governments will send officers to tag along as observers to allied and foreign forces in wartime, and learn from their experiences. Sending forces to assist developing countries’ governments deal with their enemies does not only extend the nation’s geopolitical reach, it also allows the force to gain experience and knowledge of real-world conflicts.
Wrong training - sometimes soldiers are trained in things that are downright harmful to them. The Imperial Japanese military is a major offender in this, having included in its training a fervent belief in dominating the enemy through sheer ferocity and military willpower, at the expense of rational military considerations.
Another idea that many people have - some of them, scarily, actual military planners - that making training tougher and more painful will necessarily make soldiers better at waging war. While of course military training needs to be tough to some extent (what this extent is is not really well known), but an excessive focus of toughness, either mental or physical, quite often turns out to be harmful to soldiers. (Many people think Sgt. Hartmann in Full Metal Jacket is cool. Sgt. Hartmann gets himself and another Marine killed.) The extreme example of this - once again - the Imperial Japanese Army, which subjected its soldiers to sleeping in the snow and being stabbed with sharp sticks to prove their willpower. Sometimes soldiers died (as tends to happen when you sleep in the snow in light clothing or get stabbed with what is essentially a spear). Another (possibly more harmful) example includes Russian commanders tolerating a brutal form of hazing (called dedovschina) in the armed forces, where more recently enlisted soldiers were beaten or abused by older ones. This was tolerated, in part, because it was felt it helped the troops ‘toughen up’ and subject themselves to a kind of informal discipline. The result was hundreds of deaths to injuries and suicide, a degrading standard of training, and a devastation of the enlistment rate as Russian mothers and their sons were now willing to pay any bribe to avoid a military service which was rumored to be worse than prison. Lesser examples occur in every military.
Badly organized training - specifically, the failure to regularly produce sensibly-trained troops or even officers for your armed forces. Sometimes this occurs due to having a training cycle that;s too long or too complex - if you train your infantry for two years, you will not be able to replace them with infantrymen of equal grade if your military suddenly takes a lot of casualties. Another serious issue is the loss of command officers.
To some extent, such losses can be staunched somewhat by creating expedited training courses. In an emergency, passable infantry and junior officers can be trained within only a few months (and even weeks, if they’re being retrained from people with previous military experience). Replacing Colonels and Generals on the other hand, is much harder and large losses in this area may very well lead to all the other forms of errors previously shown in this document. Because these individuals take years to train, the loss of generals in combat is devastating to the quality of military command.
Another important issue that can occur for either reasons for faulty training or organizational problems is something that Soviet military experts refer to as template thinking - the inability of officers and units to apply their command protocols in a creative ways. In this context, armed organizations’ revert to applying tactics that the officers had learned in the academy or elsewhere in an unthinking way, not altering them for the situation, nor adapting them to surprise the enemy. In WW2, this was the most clear, when Soviet commanders would tenaciously assault a German position several time from the same direction. Another form of error is to repeatedly arrange your intelligence and reconnaissance efforts in the same way, thus limiting your ability to actually gather intelligence. As such, it is preferable to have training processes that impose upon the officers some ability of independent thinking, and weed out those incapable of it - or remove them to non-combat postings where it is less important. To some extent, it is unavoidable that some creativity would be lost in a military structure - thus is the nature of every conventional military organizations. But one should, at least, seek to limit this phenomenon.
Lacking training - there are situations in which soldiers and even officers appear to have undergone the training that had been required by their military regulations, but the training is lacking in some important aspect that proves crucial on the battlefield. A good example of this is the training of soldiers in the late Soviet Union. At the time, the Soviet government, wishing to both save on ammunition and avoid its theft, limited the marksmanship training of soldiers to only 3 rifle rounds per year, making its men woefully unprepared for the brutal fighting seen in the post-Soviet conflicts. Equally, before the Chechen War, Russian commanders, seeing trench warfare as outdated in the late 20th century, reduced training with trenches to a few exercise a year, held with plywood mockups of trench lines - again, making it difficult for Russian officers and men to confront Chechen separatists who were not so ill-prepared.
In a modern-day military force that wishes to remain relevant, there must be a group of people which continuously studies and improves training. The Israel Defense Force even has uniformed behavioral studies personnel who continuously poll soldiers to establish the psychological effects of training. Additionally, militaries employ researchers - historians and military scientists - who continuously study wars past and present, to constantly improve training and doctrine. In some cases, governments will send officers to tag along as observers to allied and foreign forces in wartime, and learn from their experiences. Sending forces to assist developing countries’ governments deal with their enemies does not only extend the nation’s geopolitical reach, it also allows the force to gain experience and knowledge of real-world conflicts.
Wrong training - sometimes soldiers are trained in things that are downright harmful to them. The Imperial Japanese military is a major offender in this, having included in its training a fervent belief in dominating the enemy through sheer ferocity and military willpower, at the expense of rational military considerations.
Another idea that many people have - some of them, scarily, actual military planners - that making training tougher and more painful will necessarily make soldiers better at waging war. While of course military training needs to be tough to some extent (what this extent is is not really well known), but an excessive focus of toughness, either mental or physical, quite often turns out to be harmful to soldiers. (Many people think Sgt. Hartmann in Full Metal Jacket is cool. Sgt. Hartmann gets himself and another Marine killed.) The extreme example of this - once again - the Imperial Japanese Army, which subjected its soldiers to sleeping in the snow and being stabbed with sharp sticks to prove their willpower. Sometimes soldiers died (as tends to happen when you sleep in the snow in light clothing or get stabbed with what is essentially a spear). Another (possibly more harmful) example includes Russian commanders tolerating a brutal form of hazing (called dedovschina) in the armed forces, where more recently enlisted soldiers were beaten or abused by older ones. This was tolerated, in part, because it was felt it helped the troops ‘toughen up’ and subject themselves to a kind of informal discipline. The result was hundreds of deaths to injuries and suicide, a degrading standard of training, and a devastation of the enlistment rate as Russian mothers and their sons were now willing to pay any bribe to avoid a military service which was rumored to be worse than prison. Lesser examples occur in every military.
Badly organized training - specifically, the failure to regularly produce sensibly-trained troops or even officers for your armed forces. Sometimes this occurs due to having a training cycle that;s too long or too complex - if you train your infantry for two years, you will not be able to replace them with infantrymen of equal grade if your military suddenly takes a lot of casualties. Another serious issue is the loss of command officers.
To some extent, such losses can be staunched somewhat by creating expedited training courses. In an emergency, passable infantry and junior officers can be trained within only a few months (and even weeks, if they’re being retrained from people with previous military experience). Replacing Colonels and Generals on the other hand, is much harder and large losses in this area may very well lead to all the other forms of errors previously shown in this document. Because these individuals take years to train, the loss of generals in combat is devastating to the quality of military command.
Another important issue that can occur for either reasons for faulty training or organizational problems is something that Soviet military experts refer to as template thinking - the inability of officers and units to apply their command protocols in a creative ways. In this context, armed organizations’ revert to applying tactics that the officers had learned in the academy or elsewhere in an unthinking way, not altering them for the situation, nor adapting them to surprise the enemy. In WW2, this was the most clear, when Soviet commanders would tenaciously assault a German position several time from the same direction. Another form of error is to repeatedly arrange your intelligence and reconnaissance efforts in the same way, thus limiting your ability to actually gather intelligence. As such, it is preferable to have training processes that impose upon the officers some ability of independent thinking, and weed out those incapable of it - or remove them to non-combat postings where it is less important. To some extent, it is unavoidable that some creativity would be lost in a military structure - thus is the nature of every conventional military organizations. But one should, at least, seek to limit this phenomenon.
Politics of Incompetence
A serious issue in terms of military incompetence is political and institutional contributions. In the previous chapters we have covered somewhat the psychological factors that lead to military errors. Another important interpretation, however - as outlined, for example, in Victor Davis Hanson’s The Western Way of War - portrays military errors as being the product, not so much of individual failure (although individual failure still has a place in this narrative) but as the product of institutional failure. Some societies - thus argues Hanson in his book - are more fit for participating in armed conflict than others. In a straightforward way, Hanson stressed the long-term military superiority of open societies over dictatorial, closed ones. He argued that while dictators (or absolute kings) are quick to make decisions and go to war, and democracies often take time to discuss their decisions before making them, this leads to a long-term advantage as there is a clearer understanding between citizens (and soldiers) in open societies in regards to both the cause they are fighting for, and the methods that need to be accomplished.
Hanson is, however, a fairly controversial historian. Like Dixon, he has a serious degree of political bias (unlike Dixon, Hanson is a conservative) and some elements of his books have been criticised extensively by his colleagues. But he does bring up an important point - while there exists a myth among the general public that dictatorships are ostensibly very warlike (being able, so it goes, to ignore the opinion of civilians and various democratic niceties), and therefore very good at waging war. In Russia, Stalin’s ‘military genius’ is still credited by many people with defeating the Nazis. In other countries, many people believe that Hitler’s Germany or Imperial Japan possessed an incredible degree of strategic prowess.
There are indeed some advantages to being a dictatorship. A dictatorship can commandeer the attention of the people so as to prepare them for war psychologically (through patriotic propaganda that goes unchallenged due to censorship), it can grab hold of resources via the sheer political power of the leader, and it is often associated with a great focus on military preparedness and training.
However, in reality, dictatorships (and especially totalitarian dictatorships like Stalin’s Russia) have vast military flaws that more than balance out their successes. The same organizational issues that have applied to military forces also apply - to some extent - in countries. A nation where the authority of a single leader (or group of leaders, such as the Politburo) is absolute often runs into management problems - when discussion of issues is constrained by fear of the leadership, it often occurs that the leader is kept uninformed of real and serious problems. Worse, positions of unlimited power tend to attract people who can be described as having an authoritarian personality, or, worse perhaps, encourage the state to act as if it had the features of such a personality. Oftentimes, this leads to deficiencies in military command.
The textbook example of this is the Soviet military establishment in the 1930s. Early on it was run by a mix of individuals who had shown a degree of prowess in the Russian Civil War and former Czarist-era military officers. Some of them were even quite talented - it was this group of people that included Georgy Zhukov, Konstantin Rokossovsky, and Mikhail Tukhachevsky. These people had pioneered some of the military inventions that would have become definitive features of 20th century warfare. On the strategic level, Tukhachevsky invented and pioneered Deep Battle Theory - one of the precursors to modern mechanized warfare theory. On the tactical level, Soviet military designers pioneered recoilless rifles, automatic grenade launchers, and other innovative weapons.
However, there were serious problems with the arrangement as it existed. Tukhachevsky himself, while brilliant, overlooked many aspects of military logistics in his planning. His plans called for the construction of tens of thousands of tanks, ignoring entirely the vast shortages of logistics and the infrastructure (even roads were lacking in many parts of Russia). Because, in the Soviet Union, military decisionmaking was affected by the political influence that generals and engineers had, Tukhachevsky promoted people he trusted into leadership positions - for example, promoting Kurchevsky, a pioneer recoilless gun designer, to be in charge of Soviet artillery production. Kurchevsky, in turn, used his influence to have competing engineers arrested or fired. By the time it turned out that Kurchevsky was incompetent (most of the recoilless guns he developed used a pneumatic, muzzle-loading, mechanism to reload, which was incredibly unreliable), competing recoilless gun designers had been practically wiped out, and regular artillery production in the USSR set back years.
The solution, however, which the Soviet Union had for this issue, turned out to be massive purges of the Red Army high command. Hundreds of generals, thousands of officers were imprisoned or shot. Worse, the purges gravitated towards removing the senior - and thus the most experienced and qualified - officers of the Red Army. 65% of Red Army senior staff were imprisoned or shot. Casualties of Corps Commanders reached 112%. In total, A second wave of repressions started in 1940, and continued into the war. Total deaths among Soviet generals reached 446 men - just slightly less than the amount of generals who perished fighting the Nazis (458 were killed or died from disease during the war).
Nor were the structural problems fixed by the purges. Military officers and engineers still resolved competitions between military designs and doctrines by trying to find personal favor with Stalin or members of his inner circle. Taubin - the inventor of the fully-automatic grenade launcher - and several of the engineers in his laboratory were arrested and executed. A powerful group of engineers and officers known as the Mortar Lobby are sometimes blamed for his death. The same group of people, obsessed with the idea of deploying mortars on every level of the armed forces, including the common infantryman, eventually diverted vast amounts of resources into creating said mortars - including a 37mm infantry mortar built into the handle of a small infantry shovel. This design ended up costing untold thousands of roubles to field, was incredibly unsafe... and in the end, had to be removed from use as it turned out that the tiny 37mm mortar rounds could not even pierce thick snow in the Winter War.
While vast purges of the military command are not common, the practice of military officers using intrigue and even crimes to try and wrest control of military planning is the common product of the military planning of totalitarian and authoritarian states. The most extreme example of this is the Japanese phenomenon of gekokujo, in which military officers attempted various actions to try and make their nation more warlike, most famously starting a war with China by carrying out false flag attacks on Japanese troops.
Most importantly, because the government of a dictatorship is centered on one man - and one man, by nature, has only limited expertise, whenever he has unlimited power, military decisions are affected by the ability of whatever faction to influence or persuade this leader. Over the long term, nations (whether democratic or authoritarian) create methods to limit this effect by formalizing their decisionmaking - creating set structures through which information and decisionmaking travels. The German General Staff and the British Admiralty are examples of these institutions in non-democracy, and in the Second World War Stalin, realizing his limits, deferred to some extent to the Soviet General Staff . In democracies, there are established military decisionmaking bodies (like Israel’s General Staff and of course the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the US) which are overseen by the civilian authority.
But, that said, democracies have their own political problems. These are sometimes exaggerated by people with a political axe to grind, but they’re still very important to discuss. The primary problem of democracies, of course, is that decisionmaking in democratic societies is subject to the 24-hour news cycle. As such, while the process for making military decisions in a democracy is overall more effective than in a dictatorship, cultural and social problems that a democracy has reflect in a more immediate fashion on the military.
Additionally, it should be noted that no society is truly equal. While in a dictatorship the elite is typically composed of the dictator and those associated with him (such as members of the security services), in a democracy the social elite includes also media magnates and the reporter class. It’s easy to imagine how military failures can be brought about by faulty media coverage. The media can easily cover a controversial military operation in such a way as to make it seem that it had completely failed (consider, for example, the coverage that US media gave to the Tet Offensive - the Viet Cong were smashed militarily and died by the thousands, but the US media portrayed the events as a military disaster). Conversely, nationalist feelings in the media can cause a war where one is not winnable. During the early 19th century the US public believed the Army easily capable of conquering British Canada, and in 1812, driven by outrage over the British policy of impressment, started what turned out to be a disastrous conflict against the British Empire, ending in a series of terrible defeats, exacerbated by the previous refusal of Congress to spend money on naval preparedness or expansion of the Army. (Only Commodore Perry’s actions on the Great Lakes prevented New York from becoming part of the Empire once more.)
Hanson is, however, a fairly controversial historian. Like Dixon, he has a serious degree of political bias (unlike Dixon, Hanson is a conservative) and some elements of his books have been criticised extensively by his colleagues. But he does bring up an important point - while there exists a myth among the general public that dictatorships are ostensibly very warlike (being able, so it goes, to ignore the opinion of civilians and various democratic niceties), and therefore very good at waging war. In Russia, Stalin’s ‘military genius’ is still credited by many people with defeating the Nazis. In other countries, many people believe that Hitler’s Germany or Imperial Japan possessed an incredible degree of strategic prowess.
There are indeed some advantages to being a dictatorship. A dictatorship can commandeer the attention of the people so as to prepare them for war psychologically (through patriotic propaganda that goes unchallenged due to censorship), it can grab hold of resources via the sheer political power of the leader, and it is often associated with a great focus on military preparedness and training.
However, in reality, dictatorships (and especially totalitarian dictatorships like Stalin’s Russia) have vast military flaws that more than balance out their successes. The same organizational issues that have applied to military forces also apply - to some extent - in countries. A nation where the authority of a single leader (or group of leaders, such as the Politburo) is absolute often runs into management problems - when discussion of issues is constrained by fear of the leadership, it often occurs that the leader is kept uninformed of real and serious problems. Worse, positions of unlimited power tend to attract people who can be described as having an authoritarian personality, or, worse perhaps, encourage the state to act as if it had the features of such a personality. Oftentimes, this leads to deficiencies in military command.
The textbook example of this is the Soviet military establishment in the 1930s. Early on it was run by a mix of individuals who had shown a degree of prowess in the Russian Civil War and former Czarist-era military officers. Some of them were even quite talented - it was this group of people that included Georgy Zhukov, Konstantin Rokossovsky, and Mikhail Tukhachevsky. These people had pioneered some of the military inventions that would have become definitive features of 20th century warfare. On the strategic level, Tukhachevsky invented and pioneered Deep Battle Theory - one of the precursors to modern mechanized warfare theory. On the tactical level, Soviet military designers pioneered recoilless rifles, automatic grenade launchers, and other innovative weapons.
However, there were serious problems with the arrangement as it existed. Tukhachevsky himself, while brilliant, overlooked many aspects of military logistics in his planning. His plans called for the construction of tens of thousands of tanks, ignoring entirely the vast shortages of logistics and the infrastructure (even roads were lacking in many parts of Russia). Because, in the Soviet Union, military decisionmaking was affected by the political influence that generals and engineers had, Tukhachevsky promoted people he trusted into leadership positions - for example, promoting Kurchevsky, a pioneer recoilless gun designer, to be in charge of Soviet artillery production. Kurchevsky, in turn, used his influence to have competing engineers arrested or fired. By the time it turned out that Kurchevsky was incompetent (most of the recoilless guns he developed used a pneumatic, muzzle-loading, mechanism to reload, which was incredibly unreliable), competing recoilless gun designers had been practically wiped out, and regular artillery production in the USSR set back years.
The solution, however, which the Soviet Union had for this issue, turned out to be massive purges of the Red Army high command. Hundreds of generals, thousands of officers were imprisoned or shot. Worse, the purges gravitated towards removing the senior - and thus the most experienced and qualified - officers of the Red Army. 65% of Red Army senior staff were imprisoned or shot. Casualties of Corps Commanders reached 112%. In total, A second wave of repressions started in 1940, and continued into the war. Total deaths among Soviet generals reached 446 men - just slightly less than the amount of generals who perished fighting the Nazis (458 were killed or died from disease during the war).
Nor were the structural problems fixed by the purges. Military officers and engineers still resolved competitions between military designs and doctrines by trying to find personal favor with Stalin or members of his inner circle. Taubin - the inventor of the fully-automatic grenade launcher - and several of the engineers in his laboratory were arrested and executed. A powerful group of engineers and officers known as the Mortar Lobby are sometimes blamed for his death. The same group of people, obsessed with the idea of deploying mortars on every level of the armed forces, including the common infantryman, eventually diverted vast amounts of resources into creating said mortars - including a 37mm infantry mortar built into the handle of a small infantry shovel. This design ended up costing untold thousands of roubles to field, was incredibly unsafe... and in the end, had to be removed from use as it turned out that the tiny 37mm mortar rounds could not even pierce thick snow in the Winter War.
While vast purges of the military command are not common, the practice of military officers using intrigue and even crimes to try and wrest control of military planning is the common product of the military planning of totalitarian and authoritarian states. The most extreme example of this is the Japanese phenomenon of gekokujo, in which military officers attempted various actions to try and make their nation more warlike, most famously starting a war with China by carrying out false flag attacks on Japanese troops.
Most importantly, because the government of a dictatorship is centered on one man - and one man, by nature, has only limited expertise, whenever he has unlimited power, military decisions are affected by the ability of whatever faction to influence or persuade this leader. Over the long term, nations (whether democratic or authoritarian) create methods to limit this effect by formalizing their decisionmaking - creating set structures through which information and decisionmaking travels. The German General Staff and the British Admiralty are examples of these institutions in non-democracy, and in the Second World War Stalin, realizing his limits, deferred to some extent to the Soviet General Staff . In democracies, there are established military decisionmaking bodies (like Israel’s General Staff and of course the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the US) which are overseen by the civilian authority.
But, that said, democracies have their own political problems. These are sometimes exaggerated by people with a political axe to grind, but they’re still very important to discuss. The primary problem of democracies, of course, is that decisionmaking in democratic societies is subject to the 24-hour news cycle. As such, while the process for making military decisions in a democracy is overall more effective than in a dictatorship, cultural and social problems that a democracy has reflect in a more immediate fashion on the military.
Additionally, it should be noted that no society is truly equal. While in a dictatorship the elite is typically composed of the dictator and those associated with him (such as members of the security services), in a democracy the social elite includes also media magnates and the reporter class. It’s easy to imagine how military failures can be brought about by faulty media coverage. The media can easily cover a controversial military operation in such a way as to make it seem that it had completely failed (consider, for example, the coverage that US media gave to the Tet Offensive - the Viet Cong were smashed militarily and died by the thousands, but the US media portrayed the events as a military disaster). Conversely, nationalist feelings in the media can cause a war where one is not winnable. During the early 19th century the US public believed the Army easily capable of conquering British Canada, and in 1812, driven by outrage over the British policy of impressment, started what turned out to be a disastrous conflict against the British Empire, ending in a series of terrible defeats, exacerbated by the previous refusal of Congress to spend money on naval preparedness or expansion of the Army. (Only Commodore Perry’s actions on the Great Lakes prevented New York from becoming part of the Empire once more.)
