Military is Incompetent- -and American Survival is at Risk. UPDATED 3. 1 March 2. On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. By Norman F. After 1. Royal Engineers, during which time he was wounded (. Dixon left the Army in 1. University where he obtained a first- class honors degree in Psychology.
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And he received the degrees of Doctor of Philosophy in 1. Doctor of science in 1. University of London Carpenter Medal . His previous book Subliminal Perception: the nature of our controversy was described by Professor George Westby .
It is hoped that none of these will feel misrepresented in the final picture which their contributions made. For errors of fact, and for the opinions expressed, I alone take full responsibility. Their encouragement, criticisms and advice have been in valuable.
In particular I would like to thank Mr. Ronald Littleton, Captain Donald Mc.
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Intyre, R. N., Brigadier Shelford Bidwell, Dr. Penelope Dixon and Dr. Hugh L'Etang for the many sorts of help they gave at every stage. Michael Dockrill of King's College, Mr. Russell Braddon, Wing- Commander F. Alex Cassie, Miss Combs of the Imperial War Museum, Professor Georgia Drew, Professor H. Robert Farr, General Sir Richard Gale, General Sir John Hackett, Professor J.
Keith Simpson of the Royal Military Academy, Dr. Kelvin, Sir Patrick Macrory, Lieutenant Colonel Brian Montgomery, Lieutenant General Sir Dennis O'Connor, Professor Stanley Schachter, Mr. Rupert Wilkinson also like to express my gratitude to Ms.
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Julie Steele for her secretarial assistance, to Ms. Susanna Clapp and Mrs. James Spender for editorial help, and to the librarians of University College, Kings College, the Royal United Services Institute and Rye Public Library for their unfailing courtesy and helpfulness. When he does, I am certain that he will find this book by Dr. Norman Dixon, for which I am privileged to write a foreword, to have been an important landmark.
Norman Dixon is specifically concerned with the subject of leadership on the highest level, or . The classical military historian sees political or religious causes playing their part as irritants; the Marxist sees purely economic factors; while others, perhaps, see the cause & conduct of war as embedded in, and the consequence of specific cultures. The study of warfare is, perhaps, a branch of sociology. Wars are not fought on solely with . They, for instance, had to be noble, or to profess a certain religion, or, where nobility was not a passport to rank, to belong to the appropriate class or caste. This is why successful generals when they emerge appear to be .
It also accounts for the sudden appearance of a plethora of competent generals when the mould of a society is broken as it was by the French and Russian revolutions, or when a new, classless and caste- less society evolves, as it did in United States and the 1. The best generals on both sides in the American Civil War could probably have beaten any comparable team from Europe, for the war made the profession of generalship a career open to talent and freed it from the rule of the authoritarians who flourish in rigid societies. Navies remained rigidly authoritarian in outlook and hierarchical in structure, but at the same time our Royal Navy, for instance, was extraordinarily open- minded and imaginative in the purely technical field. The great battleships of 1. Unfortunately, on land in the First World War, the tactics of Malplaquet or Borodino were combined with the killing power of modern technology, with the bloodiest of results. This tragedy did not arise solely from incompetence: the march of science so for had provided weapons to kill- -but not the essential apparatus for command- and- control. Scientists were still only asked for tools.
No one then dreamt of asking the question . It was confused with psychiatry, and psychiatrists were concerned with . To allow them to participate in leader selection, asking awkward questions about sex, was repugnant to many officers and the resistance offered by military commanders to their use was naturally deep and obdurate. Only the insistence of the most enlightened men ever to occupy the post of the Adjutant- General of the British Army, General Sir Ronald Adam overcame these obstacles.
Between 1. 93. 9 and 1. Army psychiatrists, and subsequently psychologists, made the most valuable contributions, quite outside a purely clinical field, to the question of training, officer selection, . Both the Royal Air Force and United States Air Force make good use of both branches of the science in the field of the effects of stress and motivation, which hitherto had been dominated by purely moral and unscientific assumptions. By the end of the Second World War, we knew a great deal about the nature of leadership on the level of pilots and platoon commanders.
But no one so far had the temerity to apply the same criteria to the General's; and this is why I think Norman Dixon's book is by way of being a landmark. The subject of generalship is peculiarly the province of military historians of . Norman Dixon is therefore likely to come under a hot fire from several quarters. Fortunately, he's accustomed to heat. As a former regular officer in the Royal Engineers, including nine years in bomb disposal, he was moulded in the corps where intellectual habitually meets danger and he has exchanged his old discipline for a new one to become an experimental psychologist. I cannot think of anyone better qualified to attempt this synthesis. Psychologists (he argues) can identify a distinct personality type in whom a fundamental conflict between the dictates of conscience and the need for aggression may seriously interfere with the open- mindedness, imagination and intellect needed to reach correct decisions.
Obviously, the human personality is far too complex to be represented by a simple stereotype, but Norman Dixon's approach is to use the well- documented . Surely, he resolves the problem of conflicting qualities: ruthlessness and consideration, relentless pursuit of the aim and flexibility of approach, which so confuse the old- fashioned historian. He speaks in modern terms, of the . But in classical terms, this is old and familiar to us; was it not once said of Massena that ? Both professional Soldiers and the equally useful generation of young academic students of warfare will find new knowledge and valuable insights in this challenging study of how some men in high command may react when under the appalling stresses of war. Erickson, Youth, Change and Challenge. Lawrence, letter, in Liddell- Hart, Memoirs.
Like the common cold, flat feet or the British climate, it is accepted as a part of life- -faintly ludicrous but quite unavoidable. Surely there can be nothing left to say about the subject? It also follows certain laws. The first intimation of this came to the writer during desultory reading about notorious military disasters. These moving, often horrific, accounts evoked a curious deja vu experience.
For there was something about these apparently senseless goings- on which sent one's thought along new channels, making contact with phenomenon from quite other, hitherto, unrelated, contexts; and then back again to senseless facts, not now quite so senseless, until gradually a theme, continuous as a hairline crack, could be discerned throughout the stirring tales of daring- do. These were tested and found correct. Yet other pieces began falling into place, until gradually the mosaic of elements took on the semblance of a theory.
This book is about that theory. It is concerned with placing aspects of military behavior in the context of general psychological principles. Unfortunate, however, such a unit may not be entirely agreeable to. Judging from the attitude of some historians, a putting together of psychology and history is, to say the least, bad form, while a putting together of psychology and military history is positively indecent. There at least two reasons for this anxiety.
The first is that since there are few things more annoying than having one's behavior explained, there exists a natural distaste for explanations of historical figures with whom one perhaps identifies. Of course historical events are determined by a complex set of variables - - political, economic, geographical, climatic and sociological. But ultimately history is made by human beings, and whatever other factors may have contributed to the military disaster, one of these was the minds of those who were there, and another the behavior to which these minds gave rise. Now these are complex variables; hence it has been necessary to play down the other factors in order to focus upon more clearly upon possible psychological determinants. Consider the analogous case of aircraft accidents.
Nobody would deny that airplanes crash for number of different reasons, sometimes working independently, sometimes in unison; this does not mean that the selecting out for particular study a single factor, such as metal fatigue, necessitates dwelling on such other variables as bad weather, indifferent navigation, or too much alcohol in the bloodstream of the pilot. Whether they are well- equipped or ill- equipped, whether they are in control of men who were armed with spears or men with tanks and rockets, whether they are English, Russian, German, Zulu, American, or French, good commanders remain pretty much the same. Likewise, bad commanders have much in common with each other. In point of fact, for devotees of the military to take exception to a study a military incompetence is as unjustified as it would be for admirers of teeth to complain about book on dental caries. In an imperfect world, the activities of professional fighters are presumably as necessary to society as those of the police, prostitutes, sewage disposers and psychologists. It is just because we cannot do without these callings (except, possibly, the last) that any serious attempt to understand their peculiarities should be welcomed and, indeed taken, as a compliment.