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Notes -
Tore through three of the Jutland chapters in Castles of Steel.
God damn. This book needs to be required reading for anyone smugposting about military strategy. Oh, why didn’t Russia do X? Surely the U.S. should have done Y! Forget military strategy—I want to suggest this to the sort of person who insists that a failure to adopt some specific tactic means their opponents are stupid, evil, and/or insincere.
Let me back up. For the unfamiliar: Jutland was the first and only major sea battle of WWI. The UK’s Royal Navy and the Imperial German Navy had been prodding at each other for nearly two years without decisive action. At the end of May 1916, the Germans set a trap, but the British preempted it with one of their own. As with many actions in WWI, the result was a horrendously bloody method of preserving the status quo. It was also a long chain of failures, some of which were unavoidable, and others of which were COMPLETE BLUNDERS.
The British
dick-measuringinfighting.Meanwhile, the Germans
In the end, several thousand men died. The German fleet was never allowed to plan something like this again, which suited the Royal Navy fine. Their newfound free time was devoted to infighting. Someone had to be blamed for at least a few of their unforced errors.
Which brings me back to the modern day. As always, it’s tempting to abuse the power of hindsight: ah, the British ought to have known their ships were death traps. The Germans never should have sailed without a fix on their enemies’ positions. So on, so forth, until we remember that it’s called “fog of war” for a reason and rein in our expectations.
More insidious, though, are the fallacies of planning. Even when we recognize that they simply couldn’t have known what we know—we fail to apply this to the present. We ask questions without knowing they’re the right ones, give orders without realizing they’re ambiguous. Plans disintegrate not on contact with the enemy, but on contact with the air, falling apart even as they first escape our minds.
If you find yourself making a plan that relies on rigorous communication, on individual initiative, on specific reactions from outsiders: your plan will not be implemented as you envisioned it. That’s alright; you can still get a desirable result! But if you think it has to happen your way, you will be disappointed.
This goes double when you’re planning for someone else. You have less skin in the game. You probably have less information, too. So if you consider all this, and you still want to insist that a rational person would already have enacted your plan…
Read this book. Or, for efficiency’s sake, read longtime SSC commenter bean’s blog version. You won’t be disappointed.
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