As I recall Stuart's essay, for that matter, Commander Edell's mistakes were less to blame than many of the other factors involved. His main error was screwing up ship identification because he had been directed to go after an Egyptian warship, not a neutral vessel. He assumed that he was going after such a ship... which is exactly what his superiors had ordered him to do. "Go to this area and intercept the Egyptian warship that just bombarded the coast." Of course, in reality there had been no bombardment and no Egyptian warship, but Edell had no way of knowing that.Emerson33260 wrote:Unlike the pyrotechnic specialists, there is no real test for a commander other than combat. The commander may not get a passing grade, but the only reason to kick him to the curb is a failure to fight at all. The old saying that "it takes 15,000 casualties to train a major general" seems to me to be a reasonable approximation of reality. (For the picky: yes, I have seen a lot of different numbers in that quote, and a number of different attributions, too.)
He also messed up his estimate of the target's speed, which led him to attack when his rules of engagement would strictly require him not to... but this mistake ties into the previous error. Edell's real sin was seeing what he expected to see, not what was really there.
There's a really huge problem with doing that.Gil Hamilton wrote:And that's shit. That's no way to run a professional military. You see, if those pyrotechnics guys fuck up and burn some audience members due to poorly set up displays, they get fired and possibly worse.The standards of the US Navy are not any higher. Google "USS Vincennes" and "Iran Air flight 655". Captain Will C. Rogers III was subjected to no penalty at all for killing 290 people in error, unless that action was the difference between making admiral and retiring as captain.
How do you justify people whose job it is to be armed to the teeth and operate things like a guided missile cruiser or an FAC having so little professional standards? They should have the mother of all liability, not "Whoops, you accidentally killed several dozen people out of sheer negligence and helped shoot up a ship belonging to just about your only ally. As punishment, we are demoting you, you bad boy. Let that be a lesson to you!"
Let's say you drop the hammer on any military officer who screws up and kills a large number of people by mistake. That sounds like a good idea a priori. But what happens then in other ambiguous situations? What if the enemy launches a surprise attack, or if attack craft are dispatched to intercept an enemy ship cruising in waters frequented by neutral shipping? If the military has a strong institutional memory of officers getting their balls handed to them on a plate for making mistakes in those situations, they're going to be very nervous about acting aggressively to investigate and deal with possible threats.
After all, they don't know if the target they were assigned to intercept was identified based on faulty intelligence; they don't have control over errors made at the staff level. If they cannot be absolutely sure that they are dealing with a genuine foe, and you go far out of your way to ruin anyone who shoots at neutrals by mistake... they're going to make damned sure they aren't dealing with a neutral.
Which would be fine, except that sometimes you really are facing an armed enemy, not a neutral. One that knows how hyper-careful their enemy's rules of engagement are. That can result in your troops walking, sailing, or flying straight into ambushes, and in lost battles or even lost wars.
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Based on my reading of the essay:
For instance, in the Liberty case, what if the Liberty actually had been an Egyptian armed naval freighter, as Edell believed it to be? At that point, nothing the Israelis actually knew precluded that possibility, so far as I can tell; even assuming they hadn't screwed up and erased the plot data showing LIberty to be in the area, that wouldn't guarantee that an Egyptian warship was not operating nearby. Certainly, nothing Edell knew precluded the possibility that he was dealing with an Egyptian warship.*
What would the Israeli MTBs have had to do in order to get positive identification of the Liberty? Chasing the ship from behind wasn't good enough, because that threw up huge plumes of spray and made it hard to identify anything- ships are a lot easier to tell apart from the side than from the stern. They would have had to move up on the sides of the ship to get a reliable identification... but recall that they only had about a 10-15 km/h speed advantage over the freighter. Getting into the right position from a safe distance would be quite difficult, and doing it at close quarters would have left the MTBs vulnerable to fire from the freighter.
If Edell's MTBs had been dealing with an Egyptian armed freighter, and had taken the necessary steps to be absolutely sure that their target was such a freighter, they might very well have gotten shot up by the freighter's guns.
*Though things he should have known would have tipped him off that something screwy was going on.
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My take on that specific incident may well be wrong. But I hope it illustrates a general problem: forcing commanders in the field to go far out of their way to identify targets and eliminate any possibility of error puts them and their commands at risk. As I understand it, this is one of the reasons the kind of staff work and command and control measures Stuart is big on are so important: done properly, they reduce the burden of target identification placed on the field commander by having someone safely behind the lines keeping track of the position of neutral and friendly forces.
A more historically certain example would be the misidentification of incoming Japanese planes attacking Pearl Harbor. The planes were spotted on radar well before they arrived, but were mistaken for a scheduled flight of B-17 bombers. No alert was sounded, and surprise was total. While having Lt. Tyler (the first officer to get a report from the radar operators) sound the alarm and alert the base commanders that an attack might be coming might not have changed the outcome much, the fact remains that it did not happen, which made Hawaii's radar installation useless in the face of one of the most devastating air attacks of the war.
Ideally, the news that a large force of planes was inbound would have been passed up the chain of command. There are obvious reasons why it wasn't, though, and fear of raising false alarms is one of them. That fear is very common in a peacetime military, and can be a major factor in allowing surprise attacks at the beginning of a war to succeed.
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To sum up: make commanders afraid of the possibility of making a mistake in identifying an enemy, and they will probably not see enemies that aren't there. But they will also tend to not see enemies that are there. So you have to balance the need to punish incompetence and its consequences against the need to keep the rest of the officers from losing confidence in their own judgement in a crisis. Guys working pyrotechnics on a stage can afford to take hours to check everything before showtime; military officers can't.
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- PeZook
