Book review: ‘On the Psychology of Military Incompetence’ by Norman Dixon

On the Psychology of Military Incompetence by Norman F. Dixon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


At times like these, here in Europe at least, questions on how battles – and wars – are won or lost are existential. What do we need, in order to save ourselves?

It’s too tempting to reduce the question to just considering which side can get hold of the larger amount of energy – food and fuel for fighters and other citizens alike, energy to keep warm (or cool), and kinetic energy, in the form of ammunition, to throw at the foe.

This book is for people who want the whole story: the human factors which can make the crucial difference.

The author first takes us on a tour of some of the most well-known and notorious instances of incompetent military leadership: from the initial battles of the Crimean War, with British troops put ashore with neither shelter nor food in the teeth of ice-cold driving rain, through a century of catastrophic mismanagement, to Arnhem, where a single file of tanks on a narrow, raised road across 60 miles of boggy ground (ring any bells?) failed to reach their appointed place in the consequentially-unsuccessful Operation Market Garden.

After dismissing the popular explanation of straightforward stupidity as a factor (many of the leaders of disasters had other, successful, campaigns under their belts), we are left with, as the author puts it, ‘a case to answer’.

This ‘case’ takes us through a menu of psychological factors common to people who are attracted to, and who are good at getting promoted in, a military environment – but which then place them in an impossible position: the very qualities that got them to the top prove a liability when it comes to leading squads of real humans to perform unnatural feats in conditions of extreme stress.

Why, then, isn’t military incompetence more rife? And why, also, did the side on which Britain fought go on to win both the wars just mentioned? In some ways these two questions answer each other: we read on to find out about the psychological factors which rendered the opposition’s leaders in these two conflicts even more incompetent than our own!

But isn’t all this something of an insult to the majority military leaders who, under extraordinary stress and danger, nevertheless pull off incredible feats of leadership and bravery? Well, the author asks us not to take it as such. He wants, more than anything, to solve a problem, and stresses that in spite of all the psychological factors we explore with him, the incompetence is the exception rather than the rule.

As he delightfully puts it, devotees of the military should no more take offence at an analysis of one of the reasons why things can go wrong, as should “admirers of teeth complain about a book on dental caries”.

And what of this constellation of factors which come together to make for incompetent military leaders? Many of them can be seen all over the world, but some are uniquely British.

These latter – although this book was written nearly half a century ago now – still plague us on these islands. And I don’t mean among the military.

I’m a lifelong civilian, and a physicist rather than a psychologist or historian. And yet I found this read fascinating, and in places hauntingly familiar. Anybody, in the end, who has even the remotest interest in why they have ended up labouring under poor leadership, in Britain or elsewhere, would do well to read this book.



View all my reviews

Book review: ‘What If?’ edited by Robert Cowley

What If?: The World’s Foremost Historians Imagine What Might Have Been by Robert Cowley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Have you heard the one about Winston Churchill and the New York taxicab driver? Could wild west sharp-shooter Annie Oakley have prevented World War One? And might the refined culture of Ancient Greece have been stopped before it started by… one man’s failure to get a good night’s sleep?

At a time like now, when history seems at a turning point, it’s fascinating to look back on so many other moments when a tiny change in events – weather, ship maintenance, one narrowly-avoided death… – might have changed the course of our past, and with it our present.

“What if..?” assembles the expertise of 20 military historians to ponder such turning points. Each essay sets the scene – culture, people, events – in detail before zooming-in on the point of change where things might have happened differently. These alternative chains of events then unfold with realistic logic and we get to see the result – sometimes a completely unexpected transformation, and a few times very little, or very subtle, change.

The turning-point that punched me in the guts had to be the one that spared Western Europe from the Golden Horde. I came to appreciate what had been lost: enlightened city-states in what is now Russia; irrigation systems that enabled the arid Middle East to support millions (also in enlightened city-states). The technology, and the entire population who might have remembered how to rebuild, were simply wiped off the map. We still don’t have the knowledge to rebuild! It could be said that Russia and the Middle East are living with the consequences to this day. Russia were having to ‘pay gifts’ to the Mongols’ descendents until Peter the Great finally put a stop to it – in 1700, after some 450 years of damage. “When I recall the beauty of our history before the accursed Mongols I want to drop on the ground and roll around in despair,” wrote Ivan Bunin.

Even now, the Chinese unit of paper money bears the name of the Mongol ‘dynasty’ there – Yuan.

So after all that, why only 4 stars and not 5?

It’s personal to me, as a Yorkshirewoman. I’d love to have had a chapter included on what would have happened here had William failed at Hastings. Our region would not have been massacred (three quarters of our population perished) nor its seat of government destroyed. Feudalism as we knew it would never have established here and, most bizarrely, England might have remained ‘Orthodox’ – answering to Constantinople and not Rome.

But we are all accidents of history, so 4 stars it is.



View all my reviews