From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Military incompetence
refers to incompetencies and failures of military organisations, whether through incompetent individuals or through a flawed institutional culture.
The effects of isolated cases of
personal
incompetence can be disproportionately significant in military organisations. Strict
hierarchies
of command provide the opportunity for a single decision to direct the work of thousands, whilst an
institutional culture
devoted to following orders without debate can help ensure that a bad or miscommunicated decision is implemented without being challenged or corrected.
However, the most common cases of "military incompetence" can be attributable to a flawed
organisational culture
. Perhaps the most marked of these is a
conservative
and traditionalist attitude, where innovative ideas or new technology are discarded or left untested. A tendency to believe that a problem can be solved by applying an earlier (failed) solution "better", be that with more men, more firepower, or simply more zeal, is common. A strict hierarchical system often discourages the
devolution
of power to junior commanders, and can encourage
micromanagement
by senior officers.
The nature of warfare provides several factors which exacerbate these effects; the
fog of war
means that information about the enemy forces is often limited or inaccurate, making it easy for the
intelligence process
to interpret the information to agree with existing assumptions, or to fit it to their own preconceptions and expectations. Communications tend to deteriorate in battlefield situations, with the flow of information between commanders and combat units being disrupted, making it difficult to react to changes in the situation as they develop.
After operations have ceased, military organisations often fail to learn effectively from experience. In victory, whatever methods have been used?no matter how inefficient?appear to have been vindicated (see
victory disease
), whilst in defeat there is a tendency to select
scapegoats
and to avoid looking in detail at the broader reasons for failure.
See also
[
edit
]
Further reading
[
edit
]
- Cohen, Eliot A.
; Gooch, John (2005).
Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War
.
Free Press
.
ISBN
978-0-7432-8082-2
.
- David, Saul
(1997).
Military Blunders: The How and Why of Military Failure
.
Robinson Publishing Ltd
.
ISBN
1-85487-918-9
.
- Dixon, Norman F.
(1976).
On the Psychology of Military Incompetence
.
Jonathan Cape
.
ISBN
0-224-01161-8
.
(also Pimlico, 1994
ISBN
0-7126-5889-0
)
- Dunnigan, James
;
Nofi, Albert
(1991).
Shooting Blanks: War Making That Doesn't Work
.
William Morrow and Company
.
ISBN
0-688-08947-X
.
- Fair, Charles
(1961).
From the Jaws of Victory: A History of the Character, Causes and Consequences of Military Stupidity, from Crassus to Johnson and Westmoreland
.
Simon & Schuster
.
ISBN
0-671-20997-3
.