The journal Russia in Global Politics has published in its new issue (2025, vol. 23, No. 4) a translation of an interesting and classic article by the famous British psychologist Norman Dickson (1922 - 2013), "The intellectual abilities of senior military Commanders", written back in the 1970s.
Großes Seestück // Bonaventure Peters (senior)
"I feel a fundamental, paralyzing indifference to our officers. There's too much body and too little head."
Thomas Edward Lawrence
"Most of Britain's defeats are due to stupidity."
Corelli Barnett, The Desert Generals
What are the grounds for the most popular explanation of military incompetence - stupidity? There is an opinion that the armed forces do not attract the most brilliant minds.
A recent survey on conscription in the United States found that the prestige of army officers is lower than that of professors, doctors, clergy, and schoolteachers. As Morris Janowitz notes, "Liberal ideology ... argues that because war is inherently destructive, better minds are drawn to more positive endeavors." According to Field Marshal Montgomery, this is true for certain times. Regarding 1787, he noted that the army was "an ordinary career for less capable younger sons," and wrote about 1907: "In those days, the army did not attract the best minds of the country."
On the other hand, there is a supposedly low quality of training for newly-minted officers. According to Janowitz, "the impression among teachers is that the intellectual level of those who choose military service through admission to military academies reflects adequate minimum acceptable standards, rather than some high concentration of students at the upper level of the intellectual spectrum." The same author notes that in the UK, 60 percent of all applicants to the Royal Military Academy were already rated as officers below the average level in the future.
When preparing for general ranks, it seems that intellectual abilities are not always crucial. Even Hague, an "educated soldier," became commander-in-chief of the British Army during the First World War, despite poor academic performance. This stern Scot from the plains, whom Duff Cooper dubbed the "idiot in the family," Lloyd George considered "completely stupid," and Brian, "tête du bois," passed the Sandhurst entrance exam with great difficulty. And that was only thanks to the tutor who trained him by rote, whose knowledge of the academy's methods practically guaranteed admission to even the dumbest candidate. Sir Henry Wilson, who later became chief of the Imperial General Staff, failed three times in his attempts to enter the Royal Military College.
It is quite reasonable to ask why bother with the selection procedure, testing mental abilities, when its ultimate goal could be easily circumvented.
Major General Fuller, according to Sir John Smith, resorted to the help of a tutor, who forced him to memorize the answers to twelve likely questions. Since half of them were given on the exam, Fuller received a record score of 497 out of 500! The examiners at the Royal Military College were so unaccustomed to any intellectual achievements that when one cadet memorized a textbook on the war on the Iberian Peninsula, he was accused of cheating!
The insignificance of mental abilities in subsequent career advancement may be evidenced by the academic success of Field Marshals Montgomery and Auchinleck - both barely entered Sandhurst and graduated with low scores.
Commenting on these phenomena, Smith notes, "the fact that both of these very capable officers passed both the college entrance and final exams with such relatively modest grades says a lot about the difficulty of passing the Sandhurst exam and the high level of competition during college." Perhaps he is right, although in the light of other evidence, a more logical explanation would be that the academic requirements of the Royal Military College do not fully meet those that are really necessary for competent command of troops. Of course, excellent academic performance in military schools does not guarantee further success. General Collie, whose string of defeats ended in 1881 with his death at Majuba Hill, had the honor of graduating from the Staff College with the highest grades in history. The view that education has nothing to do with subsequent military success is supported by the examples of Napoleon and Wellington, who received very low scores at school, while Lieutenant General Percival's brilliant grades did little to help him in Singapore.
Training
However, although military history is replete with examples of what is commonly called stupidity, there is reason to believe that there is a tendency for simple explanations of phenomena that are very complex in reality: an offensively simple explanation is better than an unpleasantly complex phenomenon.
The point of view presented here suggests that the intellectual flaws that seem to underlie military incompetence may have nothing to do with intelligence, but are usually the result of influencing the innate abilities of two ancient and related traditions. The first is initially based on the opinion that fighting depends more on muscles than on brains, and the second is that any demonstration of education is not only bad form, but can also undermine combat capability. The prevalence of these traditions was noted by members of Her Majesty's Commission in a report on errors during the war in South Africa. Not only were they very pessimistic about the level of education and intelligence of officers from the youngest to the most senior level; they also noted, to their disappointment, that "intelligence is not in fashion and is not considered necessary."
One has only to read the descriptions of army and naval educational institutions to understand that these words appealed to the deaf. In such institutions, height, muscles, and athletic achievements were still the main criteria for evaluating a person. The vice president of Sandhurst, Brigadier General Smith, mainly mentions their physical qualities in articles about graduates. He says of Field Marshal Alexander that he was a good steyer; the cadet, who was awarded the Sword of Honor, was "an excellent athlete and captain of the rugby team," and the officer who died in 1915 "had a wonderful physique and stood out in all the sports he was engaged in." In light of such comments, the uninitiated can be forgiven for believing that the main purpose of the Royal Military College was to train athletes or male models, rather than minds capable of understanding the intricacies of war.
Fortunately, there were people who saw this approach as a threat to originality and intellectual thinking. In 1955, at the Royal Parade, the Duke of Edinburgh felt it necessary to say: "Finally, when you grow up, try not to be afraid of new ideas. New or original ideas can be both bad and good, but if an intelligent person with an unbiased mindset is able to refute a bad idea with reasoned arguments, then those who allow their brain to atrophy resort to meaningless catch phrases, ridicule and, eventually, get angry at the sight of everything new."
If, in comparison with other comparable professions, the intellectual level of future military leaders was below average, then, apparently, subsequent training did little to restore balance.
There have been cases of belief in a conspiracy aimed at preserving such a situation. In 1901, the Akers-Douglas Committee, which investigated the situation at the Royal Military College, advocated the complete abandonment of civilian instructors in favor of exclusively army officers. However, this inbreeding of uneducated people was opposed by the later Massey committee, which was so overwhelmed by what it saw that it considered it necessary to note the following:
The general education of the cadets should be continued (which is impossible when the instructors themselves are uneducated).
Few young officers have shown any ability to command.
There was too much drill, the discipline was unnecessarily harsh, and too much space was devoted to cramming in pursuit of grades.
The teachers were mediocre and were selected more for their gaming skills and quick wit than for their knowledge of the subject being taught or for their teaching qualities.
The same pattern prevailed at Britannia, the predecessor of the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. Once again, the emphasis was on blind obedience, sports and ceremonies, with little attention paid to intellectual pursuits and no pride in knowledge of their craft. Academies that have produced people whose incompetence has sometimes cost society dearly cannot be entirely blamed for the ideals and values they espouse-those who encouraged them are equally to blame. Even as recently as 1949, after the war, which was almost lost due to the impact of archaic tradition on the minds, Admiral of the Fleet Earl of Cork and Orrer at a ceremony at Dartmouth called on cadets to "absorb the tradition." In the same way, you can conjure a rheumatism sufferer to rub himself with some old, well-proven ointment. Speaking of the ground forces, we can recall how one famous general, after inspecting the Royal Military Academy, limited himself to praising combat training instead of noting the importance of knowledge for a modern soldier.
Perhaps the clearest evidence of the intellectual gap in officer training is the sad comments of the officers themselves. As E.S. Brand noted about Dartmouth College, "unfortunately, despite all their efforts, we [cadets who come directly from preparatory schools] did not receive a proper education, unlike public school cadets, whose horizons and knowledge were much broader than ours." In this context, Janowitz emphasizes that only the most prominent senior commanders can afford to question their choice of military career. So, General Robert E. Lee admitted that "the biggest mistake in my life was getting a military education," and General Stilwell said: "It is well known that an army officer thinks one-sidedly, that he is personally interested in fomenting wars in order to get promotions, awards and much more, that he has an extremely limited education. and he is unable to appreciate the subtle beauty of life."
More recently, in 1972, the officer training course at Sandhurst was shortened from two years to one year, to which Geoffrey Sale, former Director of Research at the Royal Military Academy, noted: "The fact that in 12 or 13 months you can prepare a professionally trained officer corps, able to cope with all situations and understand, why and why his profession is needed is simply ridiculous. This means that an officer with many years of service, but without higher education, becomes a semi-educated, worthy subject of BBC cartoons."
The anti-intellectual cult
Regardless of whether mental disabilities underlie much of the military's incompetence or not, the fact remains that the armed forces are characterized by a deliberate cult of anti-intellectualism. Although its origins, as we will see, are linked to much deeper causes of military failures than simple ignorance or slow thinking, it must be admitted that anti-intellectualism has not brought benefits. Those generals and admirals who, in the period between the wars, denigrated progressive thinkers and poured contempt on people who wrote books that challenged established practice, undoubtedly had to resist any manifestation of the intellect of those who aspired to succeed and deter the gifted from pursuing a military career. As Robert McNamara once remarked, "Brains are like hearts-they go where they are valued."
Even during the Second World War, the harmful effects of anti-intellectualism affected much-needed mental abilities. A classic example is Major General Dorman-Smith. This straightforward but exceptionally gifted officer, whose talents were appreciated (and used) by such indisputably great commanders as Wavell, Auchinleck and O'Connor, caused such dissatisfaction in the military establishment with his intellectuality that when, after the first Battle of Alamein, he was relieved of his post as deputy commander in Cairo, his downfall was final. "There was no turning back. Everyone in the military who disliked him, who never forgave him for his brilliant talent and unorthodoxy, made sure that... rumors quietly leaked out in the military "establishment".: Dorman-Smith will not be given a chance to continue his career."
The saddest feature of anti-intellectualism is that it often reflects the actual suppression of mental activity, rather than the lack of any abilities.
This is evidenced by the speed with which many military men rush to publish their works as soon as they retire - something was clearly waiting in the wings to spill out. As Liddell Garth points out, unfortunately, a life during which one has to restrain the expression of original thoughts often ends with nothing left to express. A recent study on the relationship between mental activity and the intensity of blood flow in the brain confirms the old view that the brain, like muscles, atrophies during prolonged inactivity. But perhaps it touches on the true cause of military incompetence - age? Since promotion traditionally depends on seniority, commanders and generals tended to be elderly, and since thinking, memory, and intelligence deteriorate with age, maybe bad generals are just old generals? Of course, we can say that age exacerbates most mental defects, and for many years the quality of generals seemed to depend on the time of retirement. This has never been more noticeable than during the Crimean War, and then in the 1930s. Another age-related factor in incompetence was the pernicious tendency to dismiss, retire, or otherwise hinder the advancement of those young officers who recklessly failed to hide their talents under the guise of conformity.
This was the case with Major General J.F.K. Fuller on December 13, 1933. One of the most gifted men who ever served in the British Army has been retired. This waste of talent is explained by prejudice caused by Fuller's fully fulfilled prophecies and the fact that he dared to criticize people less gifted than himself.
At that time, Fuller had a defender in the person of the then relatively young General Ironside, who regarded the resignation as a scandal and expressed the opinion that Fuller had "the best brains in the military." However, when Ironside had the opportunity to reinstate Fuller, he only complained, "Oh, I couldn't do that-it would have disrupted the promotion process." As Liddell Garth observed, "It was a sadly revealing example of how even a progressive-minded soldier tended to obey the Buggins queue law." To be fair, Ironside did try to bring Fuller back in 1939, but this time - just a year before the British army was almost destroyed by the type of armored forces that Fuller advocated - the War Department did not allow it.
Another indicator of age incompetence is the voluntary retirement of smart young officers. According to Janowitz, a recent study of U.S. Army lieutenants showed that the most capable of them retire immediately after completing their mandatory service, while the less trained remain. Such natural selection does not allow us to find more capable people in the upper echelons of the military establishment. But despite these considerations, age is far from an exhaustive explanation of military incompetence, as there are many examples of capable old generals and a few extremely inept young ones. As Vagts noted, "Eighty-year-old generals, sick in body and even in mind, won important victories." Moreover, the extremely complex nature of military incompetence defies such a simple explanation as senility. Indeed, there is reason to consider the age factor as a symptom rather than a cause. But let's look at another aspect of what appears to be intellectual incompetence-the urge to rant.
Grandiloquence
The connection between ignorance and grandstanding in military incompetence is not entirely straightforward. First of all, in accordance with the principle that nature abhors emptiness, ignorance tends to hide behind bombast among those who seek to conceal a lack of knowledge, or for whom ignorance of the facts allows them to feel free to express firm beliefs of the opposite nature. As a fairly harmless example of the first of these two types of pontifications, one can cite the story of a Dartmouth cadet who asked why pi was 22/7, and received a mentor's answer: "It's not for us to question the wisdom of the Admiralty."
Simon Raven gives an amazing example of the second type of idle talk: "I will never forget the trouble I got into when I objected to a general who said that sodomy had corrupted the Roman Empire; the fact that this general barely knew a word of Latin and, by his own admission, had never read a single line from Gibbon., was deemed insignificant."
Sermons aimed at eliminating unpleasant facts with the help of magic spells are much more serious. Here are a few statements of this kind. Field Marshal Montgomery-Massingberd, chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1926 to 1933: "There are certain critics in the press who say that we must prepare the army for war in Europe again... The army is unlikely to be involved in a major war in Europe for many years to come."
Sir Ronald Charles, Commander-in-Chief, Artillery: "War is unlikely in our lifetime" - this was said during the years of Hitler's rise to power. And, also before the last war, Sir Hugh Elles, who was in charge of combat training: "The Japanese pose no danger to us and long for our friendship."
In an area where the accuracy of a message can be a matter of life and death, the tendency to grandiloquence is dangerous. Unfortunately, this predisposition is most evident in people such as school principals, judges, prison chiefs, and senior military leaders who have had the opportunity to dominate their subordinates for too long. This predisposition is also strongest in authoritarian organizations, where maintaining the alleged omniscience of higher-ups may be considered more important than the truth.
However, the most important thing about grandstanding is that, although it is an intellectual exercise, it is based on emotions.
Closely related to it (and no less dangerous) is "cognitive dissonance," an unpleasant mental condition that occurs when a person has knowledge or beliefs that contradict their decision. The following example helps clarify the situation: a heavy smoker experiences dissonance because smoking is incompatible with knowledge of the increased risk of cancer. Since he cannot quit smoking, he tries to reduce dissonance (that is, tip the scales towards peace of mind) by focusing on the excuses for smoking and ignoring evidence of its dangers. He may tell himself that the income from tobacco sales helps the government (that is, he is showing patriotism), that it helps him lose weight, and that it is a courageous, socializing habit. At the same time, he is quite capable of refraining from reading the latest report on the relationship between smoking and lung cancer. If, on the other hand, he is unable to avoid statistics that are unpleasant to him, then he may well try to reduce the dissonance by convincing himself (and others) that the correlation between smoking and cancer may just as well mean that people who get cancer anyway tend to smoke.
The theory of dissonance, put forward by Festinger in 1957, has generated a large number of empirical studies. Although the exact nature of psychological processes is far from clear, there are certain conclusions that can have serious implications for military decision-making. They can be summarized as follows: "As soon as a decision is made and a person adheres to a certain course of action, the psychological situation changes decisively. Less attention is paid to objectivity, and instead there is greater bias and bias in considering and evaluating alternatives."
In other words, making a decision may well be followed by a period of mental activity that could be described as at least somewhat one-sided.
Since the degree of dissonance experienced depends on the importance of the decision made, it is likely that many military decisions lead to quite serious forms of mental disorder. But a military commander cannot afford to reduce dissonance by ignoring unpleasant information or "rethinking" it. The terrible consequences of such an attempt were all too obvious after the offensive at Cambrai and during Townsend's offensive on Ctesiphon. In both cases, the ostrich behavior of senior officers (Bing in the first case and Nixon in the second) cost the troops dearly. The same can be said about the counteroffensive in the Ardennes in 1944 and Montgomery's inability to think more carefully about the decision to seize the bridge in Arnhem in the light of incoming intelligence reports.
While the costs of some military personnel trying to resolve dissonance may be prohibitively high, ignoring dissonance is also fraught. There are three reasons for this. First, military decisions are very often irreversible. Secondly, a lot depends on their outcome, including the reputation of the decision maker. Finally, commanders with weak egos, an overly strong need for approval, and the most introverted minds are the least able to tolerate the painful doubts of cognitive dissonance. In other words, the least rational people are most likely to reduce dissonance by ignoring unpleasant intelligence. Studies of individual differences in cognitive dissonance show that its effects are probably most pronounced in those who suffer from chronically low self-esteem and general passivity.
More recent studies of cognitive dissonance have revealed another variable that has a certain significance for the behavior of military personnel: the degree of validity of the initial decision. The experiments of Zimbardo and other scientists have shown that the less reasonable the decision, the stronger the dissonance will be and, consequently, the more energetic the willingness to stick to the original plan. There is no better example than the capture of Kuta by Townsend. Since his progress up the Tigris was completely unjustified due to the realities of which he was fully aware, when the disaster broke out, his dissonance had to be overwhelming and, since he was a selfish man, required an immediate solution. He retreated to Kut, despite numerous indications to the contrary, since a more reasonable and feasible decision to withdraw to Basra would have been an admission of the unreasonableness of his previous order. For the same reason, once in Kuta, he could not move, because a breakthrough, even to help those who had been sent to block his troops, would emphasize the complete lack of grounds for sitting in a siege. In short, the greater the scale of the error, the greater the inability to admit that you are wrong. And the greater the latter, the more bizarre a person's attempts to justify the unjustifiable will be.
Now we can see the relationship between loquacity and cognitive dissonance.
Grandiosity is one of the ways in which people try to resolve their dissonance by loudly stating what is consistent with their decision and ignoring what contradicts it. It is clear that in a military context, such a combination of intellectual processes is very dangerous.
Riskiness
But there is another equally disturbing aspect of decision-making -"riskiness." Recent research has shown that people vary in the degree to which they adjust the riskiness of their decisions to the realities of the external situation. Those who exhibit anxiety under stress or tend to take a defensive position and deny anything that threatens their self-esteem tend to have a poor understanding of whether the risks they take or the caution they show are justified. For example, they might well exercise an equal degree of caution by making small bets, getting married, or starting a nuclear war. There is a sad irony in this state of affairs, because it means that people who are most sensitive to the success or failure of a decision will make the biggest mistakes. Conversely, less anxious people will act more rationally because they pay more attention to the realities they face.
Obviously, these discoveries have significant implications for the military sphere. Because, as one psychologist said, "under stress, people are more likely to act irrationally, strike blindly, or even freeze in dumb immobility." Others have noted: "The presence of a relatively high level of rationality in decision-making characterizes only a minority of people... we are burdened by a painful curiosity about how those people who control our fate would be distributed into marked personality groups." But why do anxious and defensive individuals-those who have something to lose-act more irrationally than those who are less susceptible to neurosis? Two reasons were put forward. The first one is well formulated by Deutsch: "Nervousness-the need to react quickly due to fear that a person will lose the desire or ability to react-increases the likelihood that the reaction will be triggered by an unsatisfactory stimulus and thus lead to instability."
The second reason why some people make irrational decisions, the riskiness of which is unrelated to reality, is that, being neurotics, they tend to maintain an image of either "bold and daring" or "cautious and prudent." And the desire to maintain one's special self-esteem will be put above the need to act realistically. Townsend's risky attempt to capture Baghdad is consistent with this principle.
We started with the intention of examining the oldest theory of military incompetence, namely that poor decisions are made because of mental disability. The simplest form of this theory is that some military commanders (as well as some psychologists) are simply stupid and that their erroneous decisions are due to their low intellectual level.
Since decision-making is by definition a cognitive process, it is obvious that this ancient theory is in some sense a truism - however, this does not mean that a simple hypothesis about a low mental level meets all the requirements. On the contrary, when further studying the nature of decision-making processes, we are forced to admit another, somewhat different possibility - namely, that the obvious intellectual flaws of a number of military leaders are explained not by a lack of intelligence, but by feelings. Cognitive dissonance, bigotry, denial, risk-taking, and anti-intellectualism are actually driven more by emotions than intelligence. Susceptibility to cognitive dissonance, a tendency to empty words, and an inability to adapt risky decisions to a real situation are the result of neurotic abnormalities such as extreme anxiety under stress, low self-esteem, nervousness, the need for approval, and a general tendency to defend oneself. Apparently, it is these factors outside the intellectual level of a person that influence his decisions in a given situation.
