Military Misfortunes

Having rejected the single-culprit story, Cohen and Gooch need a replacement — and the core of their book is a taxonomy of the ways a competent military breaks down. They identify three basic kinds of organizational failure, each distinct, each traceable, and none of them reducible to one man having a bad day.

The first is failure to learn. An army fails to absorb the lessons of its own recent experience, or of others' wars fought in plain sight. The knowledge exists; it simply does not travel into doctrine, training, or planning. The second is failure to anticipate — the institution does not prepare for a threat it could reasonably have foreseen, not because it lacked imagination entirely, but because its structures screened out the warning or filed it under the wrong heading. The third is failure to adapt: the army meets a situation it did not expect and cannot reorganize itself, mid-fight, quickly enough to respond.

The framework only convinces because the case studies are so concrete, and Cohen and Gooch choose defeats that resist easy blame. Take Gallipoli in 1915: an Allied attempt to force the Dardanelles and knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war, which instead bogged down into months of slaughter on the beaches and cliffs of the peninsula before an ignominious evacuation. It is tempting to hang the whole thing on Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and the popular memory largely does. The authors show a diffuse failure of anticipation and coordination — between navy and army, between London and the theater — that no single resignation could have repaired.

Pearl Harbor is their showcase of failure to anticipate. The United States was not blind; it had broken Japanese codes, it expected war, it had issued warnings. But the intelligence was scattered across services that did not share, analysts who could not distinguish signal from noise, and commanders primed to expect the wrong kind of attack. The information needed to prevent the disaster existed inside the American system. It was simply never assembled in one place, in time, in a form anyone could act on. That is an organizational fact, not a character flaw.

Step back from the battlefields and Cohen and Gooch are making an argument that reaches well past the army. Their real target is the human craving for a responsible individual — the conviction that every disaster must have an author, that behind every wreck stands a person who could and should have prevented it. Armies indulge this craving through courts-martial and reliefs of command; the impulse is universal, and so is the error it produces.

Their claim is that complex organizations can fail in ways no member intended, foresaw, or could have stopped alone. The failure emerges from the interaction of parts, each of which behaved more or less as designed. Intelligence was gathered, orders were issued, plans were made — and the aggregate still produced catastrophe, because the connections between the pieces were where the fault lived. You can fire everyone in the chain and, if the chain itself is misbuilt, the next set of people will fail the same way.

Kimmel and Short were never fully vindicated in their lifetimes, though later reviews softened the verdict against them. That, in a sense, is Cohen and Gooch's point. The relief of two admirals and generals settled the matter for the record while leaving the actual machinery — the split commands, the siloed intelligence, the assumptions nobody thought to question — exactly as it was. The comfortable story closed the case; the useful story was never really opened.