Earlier this month, The National Security Archive at The George Washington University declassified the briefings conducted between Saddam Hussein and the FBI. During these briefings, Saddam stalwartly defended himself against accusations (1) that he had aligned himself with Al-Qaeda and (2) that Iraq had WMD capabilities–the two main reasons given by the Bush administration for the Iraq invasion. Saddam states that any talk of WMDs was, in fact, a bluff directed at Iran so that Iraq would not appear weak. If what Saddam told his interrogators was not deception used by a captured man seeking to cover up the truth, his statements point to a red team debacle by U.S. intelligence agencies.
In an earlier blog post I wrote about the Defense Science Board’s report on red teaming. At the end of the report, the board discusses two examples of unsuccessful red teaming:
- Pearl Harbor–One planning error was the Japanese failure to destroy the military infrastructure during the surprise attack. Additionally, the Japanese committed a strategic blunder by not realizing that their attack would mean the U.S. would respond by engaging Japan in a total war, which would mean an all-or-nothing war. The U.S. response (total war) resulted in Japan not being able to retain any of the territories in South Asia it seized early in the war.
- The Battle of Midway–The Japanese believed their forces were greatly superior to those of the United States, and the Japanese planers failed to prepare contingency plans. Groupthink pervaded within the Japanese planning staffs, and there was a lack of nerve among those who questioned the fundamental tenets of the lead planners (in other words, they failed to voice any opposition to assumptions they knew to be wrong).
History is replete with incidents where nations and militaries conducted operations based on faulty intelligence due to inaccurate red teaming. Here is a short list I compiled which could also supplement the two examples above:
- The Germans and the Schlieffen plan during World War I. (The Germans assumed the British would not support the French and did not expect the Russians to mobilize for war as quickly as they did.)
- The German U-boat campaign in the Atlantic. (The Germans assumed the Americans would not participate in World War I due to these naval attacks.)
- Napoleon during the Battle of Waterloo. (He assumed the Prussian forces would not arrive in time to support Wellington.)
- Napoleon and his invasion of Spain. (He assumed the Spaniards would welcome the French forces with open arms.)
- General MacArthur and his belief that the Chinese forces would not aid the North Koreans during the Korean war.
- Stalin’s Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with the Nazis. (Stalin refused to believe intelligence that the Nazis were planning to invade Russia.)
While it would be an overstatement to claim that many of military history’s greatest blunders were a direct result of faulty intelligence due to misinterpreting an opponent’s actions (i.e. red teaming), it would nonetheless be an omission to not acknowledge red teaming as a factor in many blunders committed by militaries.
I encourage readers to expand the list above and provide what they think was the worst red team mistake ever committed. Or perhaps post a note on examples from military history, diplomatic history, business, or even sports where red teaming mistakes contributed to a blunder.
{ 10 comments }
Mark Mateski 07.23.09 at 3:04 pm
One of the examples I use in my red teaming course is the Battle of Singapore. Senior British decision makers employed a set of bad assumptions, not the least of which were (1) the Japanese couldn’t use tanks on the Malay peninsula and (2) the Japanese were inferior technically and militarily. Of course, the British were wrong on both counts and paid for their poor decisions by surrendering a force of 130,000 (approximately 50,000 in Malaya and 80,000 in Singapore).
Adam Elkus 07.23.09 at 6:05 pm
On our side, we could say that we disregarded the lessons gleaned from Red-Teaming. Both Sigma 11-65 in Vietnam and Millennium Challenge in 2002 demonstrated key weaknesses in our operational and strategic concepts. Both were also remarkably prescient about the strategies that OPFOR would pursue and the effects it would have on fielded forces and (in the case of Sigma 11-65 the home front).
Duncan Kinder 07.23.09 at 8:28 pm
The Japanese failure at Peal Harbor resulted not from their failure to know the United States so much as their failure to appreciate two tectonic shifts in military weaponry: 1) the aircraft carrier and 2) the atomic bomb.
The Pearl Harbor attack was modeled upon their earlier, successful surprise attack upon the Russian fleet at Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War. This crippled the local Russian fleet and allowed them subsequently to destroy the relief Russian Baltic fleet at the Battle of Tsushima.
Like the Russian fleet, the pre-war American fleet was divided into the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. Unlike the Russian fleet, the American battleships were linked by the Panama Canal. The Japanese had addressed this issue by building the superbattleships, Yamoto and Mushashi, which outclassed all existing American battleships and which could only be matched by ships too large to transit the Panama Canal. This placed the United States navy in precisely the same situation as the Russian once had been.
The fly in the Japanese’ ointment was that at precisely the time that Pearl Harbor took place, the battleship was being superseded by the aircraft carrier. Had the attack occurred only a few years earlier, the blow to our battleships would have been decisive for precisely the same reasons the Port Arthur attack had been decisive.
As for the total defeat of Japan: absent the atomic bomb, that would have required a costly and problematical invasion. So Japan would have had chances to secure terms.
Accordingly, Japan’s failure was not one of lack of information but rather inability to anticipate new, unheralded developments – a lack of imagination or perhaps pure bad luck.
Jason Sigger 07.24.09 at 9:25 am
Is it fair to say that the IC’s inability to discern the actual size and locations of Saddam’s WMD program was a “red team” failure? To the best of my knowledge (and I was on the Joint Staff at the time), there was no “red teaming” of Saddam’s WMD program. By any fair account from open source literature, the intel failure was because they started with the UNSCOM statements in 1998 that there were “unaccounted” materials and munitions, and they never really changed from that assessment. Logic failure, yes, red team failure, not so sure.
Adam Elkus 07.24.09 at 11:17 am
I think that what Tim might have been referring to with that was a failure to check their assumptions via alternative analysis.
Tim, what do you think?
Tim 07.24.09 at 1:15 pm
Jason and Duncan, thanks for your enlightening comments.
I agree with you Duncan on the failure of the Japanese to realize that the naval carrier had superseded the battleship. But the atomic bomb is not germane to a discussion about planning considerations regarding Pearl Harbor. The Japanese planners did not correctly factor the total war mentality which the U.S. would approach the Pacific campaign and WWII as a whole. A lack of imagination is related to red teaming if it applies to not correctly factoring an opponent’s response. I definitely believe though that much historical debate is done with hindsight bias and probably mine included.
Adam, thanks for your clarification, and that is what I meant. But planners do not just check if a nation has nuclear weapons but also what a nation’s or a nation’s leaders plan to do with its nuclear arms. China and Russia have nuclear weapons and we have not gone to war with them over them (I acknowledge this might be stretching the analogy), but nation’s go to war many times over not just off perceived ability but perceived intent. The previous administration had believed that Saddam had provided refuge for Al Qaeda and had interests aligned with these terrorists. Another part of the perceived threat was that Saddam could pass dirty bombs to AQ. But based off Saddam’s confessions and his political history and ideology, it seems he had no love for AQ and his nuclear weapons discussions were meant for Iran.
Did we attack India or Pakistan after finding out they had nuclear weapons? Have we attacked North Korea yet despite its possible amibitions for possessing nuclear weapons? No, and it’s because of what we’ve perceived their intentions to be. It could be persuasively argued that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons pose as much a danger as a theoretical case in which Iraq w/Saddam owned nuclear weapons. But we didn’t attack Pakistan because we understood it to be a regional struggle of arms between India-Pak rather then one directed to the U.S. If we had viewed Saddam thru the lens of a regional struggle between Iran-Iraq (which would not have been a huge logical leap given the large resevoir of animosity stemming from the Iran-Iraq war) then history might have played out differently.
Adam Elkus 07.24.09 at 4:23 pm
I’d have to agree w/ Tim about Pearl Harbor as well. Famously, some members of the Japanese high command (including Yamamoto who had studied abroad in the United States and thus understood us better) had misgivings about bringing us into war. That being said, Yamamoto never said the words attributed to him in that wretched Michael Bay movie.
Lexington Green 07.25.09 at 9:40 pm
The German decision to invade Russia in 1941 is an obvious case. Some of the details are very interesting. Martin van Creveld, in his book, Supplying War, describes some of the studies the Germans did that were disregarded or argued away by senior commanders. A similar process occurred in Japan pre-Pearl Harbor.
The over-arching pattern seems to be consistent. The politico-military leadership is faced with an intractable problem. All avenues of escape, or at least face-saving resolution of the problem, seem closed. The desire to go to war, to break out of the political blind alley, grows. The politicians demand a plan to use force to solve the problem. The military, with a can-do spirit, looks for ways to respond to that demand. Counter-arguments get whittled down or shouted down, and gaps that should have given pause or terminated the planning process are papered over with wishful assumptions. No one is willing to say: “we cannot do this; it will be too costly and risky to do this; we need to take a political defeat, or choke back our ambitions, because we cannot make something this big work out in our favor. We need to face reality.” No one wants to have to answer to the second-guessing that would ensue, the accusations of cowardice, the historical record saying that a golden opportunity had been squandered, etc.
More leaders fall for this than succeed in resisting it. Eisenhower, who had nothing to prove to anyone, could say no to a deeper involvement in Vietnam. JFK, who had been, in his view, let down badly by the military in the Bay of Pigs and in the Cuban Missile Crisis (LeMay told him he had one option: A massive attack on Cuba. Kennedy and his civilians had to come up with the Naval quarantine plan), would not have trusted them to “do” Vietnam. LBJ, not a soldier, overly impressed by soldiers, failed to ask the right questions and demand answers, and he got a lot of people killed.
Adam Elkus 07.27.09 at 6:23 pm
Lexington,
On that note, you might enjoy this AFJI article: http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2009/04/3901424
Lexington Green 07.28.09 at 7:42 pm
Good article. I agree in the main. His assessment of Britain is wrong in some important respects. There is a distinction between opposing a hegemonic challenger, and getting bogged down on the periphery. Currently we face nothing like the challenges Britain faced in 1914 to its global position. But the basic thrust is sound.
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