Military Misfortunes Read online

  “Cohen and Gooch have done their job well. They have mastered their sources, used considerable imagination . . . the book is well-written and sound in judgment.” —Caspar Weinberger, The Wall Street Journal

  WHY DO COMPETENT ARMIES FAIL?

  • Why did the American-led coalition in Iraq fail to wage a classic counterinsurgency campaign for so long after the fall of Baghdad?

  • Why was the sophisticated Israeli intelligence service so thoroughly surprised by the onslaught of combined Arab armies during the Yom Kippur War of 1973?

  • How did a dozen German U-boats manage to humiliate the U.S. Navy for nine months in 1942—sinking an average of 650,000 tons of shipping monthly?

  • What made the 1915 British-led invasion of Gallipoli one of the bloodiest catastrophes of the First World War?

  Since it was first published in 1990, Military Misfortunes has become the classic analysis of the unexpected catastrophes that befall competent militaries. Now with a new Afterword discussing America’s missteps in Iraq, Somalia, and the War on Terror, Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch’s gripping battlefield narratives and groundbreaking explanations of the hidden factors that undermine armies are brought thoroughly up to date. As recent events prove, Military Misfortunes will be required reading for as long as armies go to war.

  “The general reader will find this a fascinating and informative book; those responsible for their nations’ security will find in it lessons they will ignore at their own peril.”

  —Major General (Res.) Aharon Yariv, former director, Israeli Military Intelligence

  F R E E P R E S S

  Published by Simon & Schuster New York

  Cover design by Todd Robertson

  Cover photograph © Corbis

  Register online at www.SimonandSchuster.com for more

  information on this and other great books.

  ALSO BY ELIOT A. COHEN

  Supreme Command:

  Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime

  FREE PRESS

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1990 by The Free Press

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  First Free Press paperback edition 2006

  FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks

  of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cohen, Eliot A.

  Military misfortunes : the anatomy of failure in war / Eliot A. Cohen, John Gooch.

  p. cm.

  “Originally published in hardcover by The Free Press . . . New York, 1990”—T.p. verso.

  1. Military art and science—History—20th century. 2. Military history, Modern—20th

  century. I. Gooch, John. II. Title.

  [U42.C56 1991]

  355.4’8’0904—dc20 90–50491

  ISBN-13: 978-0-02-906060-5

  ISBN-10: 0-02-906060-5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-8082-2 (Pbk)

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-8082-2 (Pbk)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-3548-8

  Thank you for purchasing this Free Press Books eBook.

  Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Free Press Books and Simon & Schuster.

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  Contents

  Preface

  1. Why Misfortune?

  2. Understanding Disaster

  3. Analyzing Failure

  4. Failure to Learn

  American Antisubmarine Warfare in 1942

  5. Failure to Anticipate

  Israel Defense Forces on the Suez Front and the Golan Heights, 1973

  6. Failure to Adapt

  The British at Gallipoli, August 1915

  7. Aggregate Failure

  The Defeat of the American Eighth Army in Korea, November—December 1950

  8. Catastrophic Failure

  The French Army and Air Force, May–June 1940

  9. What Can Be Done?

  Afterword

  Notes

  Index

  Preface

  A BOOK ABOUT MISFORTUNE has emerged from what was, for us, a stroke of good fortune. In the autumn of 1985 we met as visiting faculty members in the Strategy Department of the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Following one of many heated but friendly informal debates about strategy and military history in Hewitt wardroom—the immediate subject was the Dardanelles campaign, about which see chapter 6—we decided to teach a seminar together on operational failure in war. More specifically, we decided to examine a dozen cases of what we label here “misfortunes”—that is, failures attributable neither to gross disproportions in odds nor to egregious incompetence on the part of the victim nor yet to extraordinary skill on the part of the victor. In short, we asked, Why do competent military organizations fail? After the seminar we came to the conclusion (endorsed by our students) that this question deserved book-length treatment.

  Although we chose cases sufficiently close to our time to be recognizably “modern,” we quite deliberately refrained from including one from Vietnam. (To discuss that misfortune, we are more-than-ever convinced, would require not a chapter but a separate book.) We chose to look at the experiences of Western democracies, believing that the nature of a country’s regime shapes its military organizations in important ways. The origins and nature of (not to mention the penalties for) failure in, say, Sadam Hussein’s Iraq or Stalin’s Russia are very different from those one sees in free states; for in many, though not all, respects, military organizations reflect the societies for which they fight. To strike a balance between a narrow focus and a broader scope, we have looked at the experiences of four nations over a period of nearly sixty years. We considered and rejected many more cases than we include, for a variety of reasons. In some instances we concluded, upon reflection, that we were indeed dealing with failures born of incompetence rather than “misfortunes”; in others, we found that the evidence available was too scanty to permit a sober judgment.

  We have divided our work evenly, Gooch writing the first drafts of chapters 2, 6, 8, and 9 and Cohen tackling 3, 4, 5, and 7. Chapters 2 and 3 and the last chapter, which are broader in scope than the intervening five case studies, underwent extensive rewriting, so that the result is very much a joint product. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the French, German, and Hebrew are by us.

  We have had the assistance and advice of many people, whose help we would like to acknowledge. We begin with our students Edward Colonna, William Dalecky, James Hagen, Joseph King, James Lasswell, David Lindauer, Patrick Saxon, Peter Scofield, Drake Trumpe, Anthony Veiga, and Stanley Winarsky. As is so often the case at the Naval War College, these officers from the U.S. Navy, Army, Marine Corps, and Air Force (and in this case a civil servant as well) had much to teach their nominal teachers. This would not be the same book without the benefit of their professional experience and judgment as well as their enthusiasm and insight; individually and collectively they demonstrated the high worth of the ethic of responsibility that we discuss in chapter 3.

  Our research took us to a number of libraries and archives, and we are grateful for the aid we got there. In particular, we would like to acknowledge our debts to the resources of the Naval War College Library, Newport, R.I. (Robert Schnare); the Naval War College Historical Collection, Newport, R.I. (Evelyn Cherpak); Har
vard’s Widener Library; the Public Record Office, London; the University of London Library; the Liddell Hart Center for Military Archives, King’s College, London (Patricia Methven); the Imperial War Museum, London (R. W. Suddaby); the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv; the Modern Military Records branch of the National Archives, Washington, D.C. (John Taylor and Richard Boylan); the MacArthur Memorial, Norfolk, Va. (Edward J. Boone); the U.S. Navy Operational Archives, Washington, D.C. (Dean Allard and Bernard Cavalcante); the U.S. Marine Corps Historical Center, Washington, D.C. (H. I. Shaw); the U.S. Army Center for Military History, Washington, D.C. (Alexander Cochrane); and the U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pa. (Richard Somers and John Slonaker). In addition, Eliot Cohen had generous and frank interviews with a number of senior Israeli officials for his research on chapter 5, most notably Major Generals Aharon Yariv, Shlomo Gazit, and Israel Tal. Many others gave of their time, memories, and views but have requested anonymity, which in no way lessens our debt to them.

  Colleagues and friends were generous in their comments on various chapters of the draft manuscript of the book. We would like to thank, in particular, Marino Bartolomei, Philip Bell, Richard Betts, Joseph Bower, Donald Disney, Zeev Eytan, William Fuller, Michael Handel, Samuel Huntington, Robert Jervis, Ephraim Kam, Ephraim Karsh, Bradford Lee, Ariel Levite, Andrew Marshall, Williamson Murray, Charles Perrow, Juergen Rohwer, Stephen Rosen, David Rosenberg, Steven Ross, Zeev Schiff, Gary Schmitt, Abram Shulsky, Doug Smith, Frank Snyder, Brian Sullivan, Arthur Waldron, and Barry Watts. More broadly, we owe a debt to all of our colleagues in the Strategy Department of the Naval War College for their collegial interest and aid and to Tim Somes of the Operations Department for his encouragement. Robert Watts of the Naval War College and later of the Naval War College Foundation was a great help to us and made many administrative impediments vanish, for which we are grateful. The research was facilitated as well by John Mojdehi’s logistical support, and we received financial assistance from the Olin, Smith Richardson, and Naval War College foundations for which we are very grateful. Barbara Atkins was indispensable in the preparation of the manuscript; she brought not only promptness and accuracy to her work but her special good humor as well. Edward Rothstein introduced us to The Free Press, and our editor there, Robert Wallace, has been most helpful over the last few years. Ann Gooch and Judy Cohen provided gracious hospitality to one another’s partners during our trans-Atlantic consultations, wise criticism in the interim, and when the occasion demanded it, invaluable albeit gentle prodding to get on with it.

  We owe a particular debt to those who have made the Naval War College an incomparable place to study strategy. Rear Admirals (as they then were) James Service, Ronald Marryott, John Baldwin, and Ronald Kurth have each, as presidents of that institution, renewed its commitment to unfettered scholarship. Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, who believed deeply in the importance of liberal education for the profession of arms, created the Secretary of the Navy Senior Research Fellowships at Newport, positions both of us have held, which enabled us to pursue some of the themes herein described. But above all, we want to thank Alvin Bernstein, the chairman of the Strategy Department at the Naval War College who brought both of us to Newport and who has made that department such a source of intellectual stimulation on the one hand and conviviality on the other. His many virtues, rooted in the best of mid-twentieth-century Brooklyn and ancient Rome, are well known to his friends, among whom we are proud to number ourselves. We dedicate this book to him, with affection.

  Why Misfortune?

  THIS BOOK IS ABOUT a particular kind of failure—failure in battle. Much of the literature dealing with this subject has tended to oversimplify what is in reality a complex and complicated phenomenon. Therefore, to explain how and why such failures occur we must begin by questioning some popular and much-cherished misconceptions.

  “All battles,” John Keegan has remarked, “are in some degree . . . disasters.”1 It is certainly true that every battle, and particularly every lost battle, looks like a disaster; but disaster is not a term that translates easily from the civil world to the military one. For one thing, it overlooks the fact that men in uniform are trained to function efficiently and effectively in an environment marked by danger and the imminent prospect of death—that is to say, to do their job in exactly those conditions that characterize civil disasters. Everyone in uniform lives with what has perceptively been called “the knowable possibility of disaster.”2

  So we do not expect sudden shocks to have the same paralyzing effect in the world of the soldier as they do in the world of the civilian. More important, war is a contest between two sides, and once a battle begins each party will do its level best to make a disaster occur by breaking the enemy’s physical strength and destroying his mental resilience. Thus in every military setback or defeat there is an interplay between adversaries that is never present in the world of civil disasters. A fire will not “react” to the actions of the men who are trying to put it out in a way that makes their task more difficult. An enemy will do exactly that. This makes war a very special kind of “disaster environment.”

  At a superficial level, military setbacks do seem to bear comparison with civil disasters insofar as they come in different shapes and sizes and have consequences of different magnitudes. An operation may fail with small loss of life and be only a minor setback, as with the abortive Dakar expedition undertaken by de Gaulle’s Free French forces in 1940. On the other hand, an operation may fail with relatively small loss and yet represent a major setback, as happened in the summer of 1940 when Britain lost the campaign in Norway. At a higher level of magnitude, the surrender of Singapore in February 1942 was both a big loss and a major setback—as was General Friedrich von Paulus’s surrender of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad a year later. And, on an altogether different plane, the fall of France in June 1940 was nothing less than a catastrophe.

  Thinking this way, it is all too easy to perceive military setbacks as part of a progression from minor embarrassment to mortal failure. However, regarding the problem as a matter of degree is of no help in explaining why these setbacks occur. It could be that the size of the setback is a function of the aggregation of adverse factors: The more that goes wrong, the greater the degree of failure. But we could just as well assume that major failures are born of major errors: The bigger the stumble, the harder the fall. Rough-and-ready categorizing of this sort, which differentiates defeats according to their magnitude, reflects their consequences but does nothing to explain their causes.

  The very notion of defeat—ostensibly the touchstone of failure—can be just as big an obstacle to understanding as disaster. For one thing, as the above examples suggest, the only feature many defeats have in common is their outcome. Also, defeat is not the only alternative to victory. Between these two poles lies the middle ground of missed opportunity—what Field Marshal Erich von Manstein called the “lost victories.”3 By making the concept of failure our central concern, we can incorporate into our analysis not merely battles lost but also battles that were not won. Understanding these is every bit as important to any military organization as understanding its defeats.

  Although military failure commonly results in defeat, not all defeats are equally worthy of study. Some are evidently the consequence of facing overwhelming odds; in such circumstances the only thing to be done is to try to exercise some form of damage limitation. Others can be the result of a stroke of blind chance. Carl von Clausewitz acknowledged this possibility in his classic work On War. “No other human activity,” he declared, “is so continuously or universally bound up with chance.”4 Others again may be the inescapable consequence of straightforward incompetence. The historian Guy Chapman found plenty of that in his inquiry into the causes of the fall of France in 1940: “There was hesitation, there was indecision, there was sheer bloody funk at the highest level, among ministers, politicians, generals, civil service chiefs.”5 Once we have identified the b
attles that fall into these categories, little benefit is to be gained from further study—they have yielded up their secret, such as it is.

  However, not all military failures fall into these convenient categories. Some are defeats, and others are the “lost victories” to which we have referred. They seem to share certain common characteristics that raise important questions about the nature and causes of military failure. Most striking is the fact that when they occur, no one individual is obviously to blame. Field Marshal Joseph Joffre was fond of saying that he did not know whether he was responsible for the victory on the Marne in September 1914, but he knew one thing—if the battle had been lost, it would have been he who lost it.6 True military “misfortunes”—as we define them—can never be justly laid at the door of any one commander. They are failures of the organization, not of the individual.

  The other thing the failures we shall examine have in common is their apparently puzzling nature. Although something has clearly gone wrong, it is hard to see what; rather, it seems that fortune—evenly balanced between both sides at the outset—has turned against one side and favored the other. These are the occasions when it seems that the outcome of the battle depended at least as much on one side’s mishandling of the situation as on the other’s skill in exploiting a position of superiority. Competent professionals have failed in their task, for reasons that are not immediately apparent. In truth, this is another side of the same coin: The causes of organizational failure in the military world are not easy to discern.

  Our choice of terminology, then, is both an indication of the complexity of military failure and an echo of the cry of bewilderment that so often greets it. It is a cry uttered as often by civilians as by soldiers. “What has happened at Chernobyl,” Pravda remarked three weeks after the double steam-hydrogen explosion at the Soviet nuclear reactor in May 1986, “is of course a great misfortune.”7