Military Incompetence Revisited : The Dark Side of Professionalism

Who now reads Norman Dixon’s The Psychology of Military Incompetence, published 40 years ago, and does it matter ? Historical examples of military incompetence – sometimes referred to as ‘military blunders’ or in the case of Elliot Cohen and John Gooch, 1 as “military misfortunes” or failures – are legion : the failure of the Royal Navy to defeat the German High Seas fleet at Jutland in 1916 – the absence of a ‘great victory’ that so many had anticipated before the First World War; the British defeat by the Japanese at Singapore 1941-2; the defeat of the French Army and Air Force (and the British Expeditionary Force) by the German Wehrmacht in 1940 ; the British defeat at Arnhem by the Wehrmacht (Operation Market Garden) in 1944 ; the failure of the US’s attempt to invade Cuba in 1961, known as the Bay of Pigs fiasco.