General disorder NEW BOOKS I By Norman F. Dixon. (Cape, ?6.95) The Face of Battle I By John Keegan (Cape; ?6.50) The retreat from Kabul, Black Week in the Boer. War, Kut, Passchendaele, Singapore- disasters whose names toll like Wilfred Owen's " passing-bells for these who die as cattle ". What is it in a- commander that leads to wrong decisions, unpardonable casualty-lists, in- tolerable surrenders ? What are the roots, in the specific military sense, of incompe- tence? Dr Dixon attacks the problem in a clinical way. Making it plain that he kdiows there have been many compe- tent generals, and that he is not "knocking" the military profession as a whole, he accepts the indisputable fact that generals, like politicians or . industrialists, sometimes make grave errors of judg- ment, and seeks to diagnose the particular cause. His technique is to apply the grammar of cybernetics and communications-theory to fhe -military mind, taking the gen- eral's brain as .a traffic-centre wvhose input is informatio: and' whose output emerges as com- mand decision. What is this information ? What . is . the " noise " that blurs, impedes, distorts it ? The use of com- munications-theory in this., sense, -to provide a model for the flow or jamming of Intelli- gence in its passage to a deci- sion-making centre, is not in itself new. Roberta Wohlstet- ter's Pearl Harbor Warning anrd Decision was an.outstand- ing examination, -- in these. terms, of the " noise' that affected the interpretation by Roosevelt and his advisers of the information-traffic preced- 'irig the Japahes6'attack. Blut Dr Dixon has a more powerful equipment. Years as a bomb disposal officer in the Royal Engineers taught him a good deal about soldiers' minds. A distinguished aca- demic career (he is now Reader in Psychology at Universi.ty College, London), has enabled . him- to correlate those minds with - the more. gen6ral characteristics of the human personality; To the. kind of "noise " indicated byr M.rs Wohlstetter, the " noise " created by essentially.-external circumstances-faulty reports, wrong briefing, bad organiza- tion, and so on-he adds the crucial element of the "noise" injected by the . .personality itself. Intensive. thought and wide reading, evident thtoughout. his text, 'bririg' Dr' Dixon to the conclusion that the common factor shared by incompetent perpetrators of military disas- ter is that their personalities are "authoritarian". Dogmatic, inflexible, callous, ethnocen- 'ric, conformist, o.bsessive,. the 'authoritarian soildiertyearns' for professional successt ahd' yet, ironically, is. 'prevented from exerz4sing high command crm- petently, when he _vas..at, because the inner .senise-'of inadequacy that drove . him 'upwards now parallyses, lAhib- Jting with fears df failure: Even sound advice (rei s'b- 'dinates becomes wuipalatable. And the cause, we. -inevitably learn, is too often 'the:.e4peri- ence of childhood. " Peopile are ,raised to their own level of inefficiency' It is surprising how, often 'generals so elevated fit- Dr .Dixon's tem- plate-whether it be Elphin- -stone 'of Kabul, Buller of Spion Kop, or Townshend of 'Kut. Sur- prising too, how manifestly competent, soldiers like Mont- gomery, 'Slim, Rommel,.- Guder, ian fail-to fit. Dr Dixon is not trading in final answers, but his book offers a powerful stimu- lant to. thought *for .anyone .concerned with military affairs. 'The Navy has taken. the point: Dr Dixon lectures to -its senior staff courses. Mr Keegan, who lectures at. Sandhurst, has written his own book out, of a sense of guilt, deriving-from the fact that he has spent 'too many years .describing and analysing bat- tles for officer-cadets without ever having 'been in a battle himself. Whatj then, is the true. face'. of battle ? . He -need' .not havre written' this 'book to assuage his guilt, 'for the fact is that nobody. knows. iRecon- structions are synthetic: the immediacy of the actual com- batanes experience is inev- 'itably limited and partial. Nevertheless, some milage can be .made- by analysing, as 'Mr Keegan has done, the expe- 'rience- of sdme 'soldiers in' some:battles. Clear, meticulous 'accounts of- Agincourt, 'Water- loo and the Somme's first day demonstrate his 'scholarship, his aciuity, and his realism. Yes one says, it. must have been pretty well like that. The diffi- culty is that three relatively confined actions fought in three different centuries over a 'western European terrain tell us little about what it is like for a soldier hazed by malaria in Burma or petrified in a -winter retreat from Mos- cow: they tell us, indeed, nothing about the psychology 'of retreat-or of recovery from defeat. The later days of the Somme have their own meaning. So has a tank action-Cambrai, Kursh, the Western Desert. 'In sum, Mr Keegan's conclu- sions are relative rather- than absolute. But this is a book to read with serendipity, for - as he talks around his subject the author projects obiter dicta and insights in enviable profu- sion. He4writes'well, he"thinks hard, and the width' of his reading is matched by the depth' of his brobding. The cadets of Sandhurst are as for- tunate in their instructor as are the Captains at Greenwich. Ronald Lewin General disorder : - O On the Psychology of MTqilitarv -Incomoetence
