Warriors fortune: Part I
How luck plays an important role in war, and how to deal with it.
What is the role of luck in war? How do flukes influence the success or failure of military operations? My hypothesis is that this plays a very significant role in war and military operations in general. Many of us acknowledge that flukes or luck are an important factor in war or conflict, yet there is scant reference to this factor in NATO doctrines or manuals.[1] Of course, we don’t want our troops to rely on luck or plan on flukes happening (which is impossible), but disregarding them altogether is also unrealistic. Moreover, it is possibly one of the reasons why we speak of the ‘art of war’ in contrary to it being a science. What to do with this tricky topic? In this post I will argue that luck in war is related to risk-taking. When we want to make use of luck in war, we need to look at how we view risk-taking.
Fluke
I was prompted to write about this topic when I read the excellent book Fluke by Brian Klaas. He concludes that “small, contingent, even accidental changes – flukes – are far more important than we tend to believe.”[2] Klaas continues to explain that: “Our understanding of human history is a battle between contingency and convergence. Do stable long-term trends drive change? Or does history pivot on the tiniest details? We’re left to speculate between the two worldviews because we can’t experimentally test the past.”[3]
Klaas gives many examples in his book on what he calls flukes. One that made a lasting impression on me is about the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the second world war. The bomb on Hiroshma was meant to be dropped on Kyoto, but one man’s vacation to this city years earlier convinced the US president to have it replaced by another city, Hiroshima. Killing 14,000 people. Kokura was the second target, but due to poor weather, this target was switched to Nagasaki, a last-minute addition to the back-up list. This bombing killed about 80,000 people.[5] Does history ‘pivot on the tiniest details’? For many people it did.
Brian Klaas does not provide an answer to the all-important question whether we live in a deterministic or indeterministic world, or whether we actually have free will or not. What Klaas does is show you what happens when you start asking questions: you will discover that there is not just one path to follow, but an entire garden of forking paths.[6] But on one thing he is very clear, we live in a world that is and will remain to a large degree uncertain and really hard to predict. We might be able to make accurate predictions in physics, but not in the social sciences.[7] [8] Unfortunately, this pessimistic conclusion likely also applies to the science of war (is it therefore an art?). I suspect that few of these theories are able to make predictions, and when they do they are not accurate.
Luck in War
Many articles have been written about this topic but few to none give any advice on how to deal with this factor in operations. They simply suggest that luck is something that happens to you or not, as if this is something extraordinary.[9] [10] [11] Let’s look at some historical examples of luck, or flukes, in war.
Blitzkrieg or Kriegsglück?
During my career I have had the opportunity to visit quite a number of historical battlefields with the purpose of learning from these battles. Many a time have I wondered (and many colleagues with me), was this victory or defeat really the result of some brilliant strategic insight or sheer strength, or was this just luck? During one of these battlefield tours we visited the small town of Sedan in France, in order to discuss the German success of Operation Fall Gelb in 1940. We were standing at the river Meuse at the exact point where the Germans were able to create only one bridge across the river that was able to accommodate armour. River-crossings with small boats had thus far only had effects on the tactical level. “On May 14th, almost six hundred Panzers passed through this eye of the needle. This meant that the success of the operation conducted under enormous time pressure, depended mostly on that one bridge. It assumed an operational-level significance like no other bridge during World War II. To that extent, it also symbolizes the risky go-for-broke gamble that Hitler’s adventurous war policy had forced his generals to adopt.”[12] This last sentence is especially apt, because it illuminates the difference between the German and the Allied approach to this battle: the Germans took great risks. Risks make you more vulnerable to flukes (or luck). Yet taking risks is a double-edged sword, luck may be with you or it can turn against. Yet from the perspective of the Germans this makes sense. The Allies outnumber the Germans at the start of the offensive, despite reason dictating that you ought to outnumber your adversary in a three to one ratio. Therefore, you must win the battle by out-manoeuvring your adversary, meaning that speed and time are your most important assets. Speed and time necessitate taking risks at all levels. After having taking Hill 301 earlier, the German officer Balck said: “Something that is easy today can cost us rivers of blood tomorrow”. [13] (See also my earlier post on time.)
The Allies understood that this single bridge had the potential to change the tide of the battle and perhaps the entire war. They therefore threw every air assets against this single bridge. Unfortunately having lost already numerous planes in the days before, they were (only) able to muster 152 bombers and 250 fighter sorties on the 14th of May. However, the Germans anticipated this already while planning the operation. Since their bridges were the Achilles-heel of the entire operation they were thus prepared. Never before had such a large concentration of antiaircraft been put together, a total of 303 Flak guns. Whereas the Allies flew around 250 fighter escorts, the Luftwaffe flew 814 sorties.[14] The Allies bombed the bridges with all they had, but kept missing their target. One desperate pilot even tried to steer his burning airplane into the bridge like a kamikaze attack, but missed.[15] This may indicates that this was for the Germans not an unanticipated gamble, but a calculated risk instead. Still, despite the fact that the numbers of fighters and Flak were in favour of the Germans, the Allies only needed to drop one bomb on target, one bomb. In theory, they would have at least 152 planes capable of dropping this one bomb on this one bridge, and thus at least 152 attempts. Even if the Germans were capable of creating a second or third bridge, these numbers would still be unfavourable. I am inclined to believe that the Germans were lucky that day.
Despite the possibility that the German command took these risks deliberately, I still get a sense that this operation was also in a sense, reckless. On this day, the 14th of May, Guderian kept positioning himself on this very bridge as an example to his men. He even met that day with the commander in chief of Army Group A, General von Rundstedt, on that very bridge. Rundstedt apparently asked, while continuously being bombed and a fierce air battle was taking place overhead: “is it always like this here?” Brave as this may seem, the entire Allied air force was trying to bomb this particular bridge with everything at their disposal. Why make your report to the Army Group commander at that very spot?[16] The fact that they were not hit can be called luck. If history turned out differently, and a bomb killed both generals, this would have simply been called stupid, or luck on the Allied side. In this case, warriors fortune was with them.
To conclude, this historic example shows us that luck is correlated with taking risks. Sometimes risks can deliver huge-payoffs, as this battle demonstrated. Other times, taking risks can border on stupidity. The million dollar question is, when are you taking too much or unnecessary risks and when does risk-taking provide rewards? Like Brian Klaas said: “the world will remain to a large degree uncertain and really hard to predict”.[18]
How to deal with luck?
In the previous historical example, we identified that there is some relation between luck and risk-taking. But when you play a game of dice there is hardly any risk involved yet it is definitely a game of luck. Let’s look at the definition of risk:
- (noun) Exposure to the change of injury or loss;
- (verb) To venture upon; take or run the chance of.[19]
As you can see, risk is about injury or loss and not just simply about luck, as is the case in games. War or conflict almost always involves injury or loss. It is also about taking chances apparently, which seems to imply that you have some influence on whether chances occur or not, or how large they may be. The important distinction here is that we can influence chance, but we cannot control it.
“Each individual controls almost nothing but influences almost everything.” – Scott Page[20]
The way we can influence chance is by taking smaller or bigger risks. Remember that luck is a double-edged sword that can work in both your advantage or disadvantage. I will argue that the same is true for risks. Some risks can materialize into advantages. My personal experience however is that we often associate risks with disadvantages and negative outcomes and hardly as something desirable. For example, in risk management tools we talk about risk mitigation, meaning we want to eliminate as many risks as possible. Of course, since the definition provided clearly speaks of injury and loss, risks in this sense are something you want to avoid.
Risks is something that, in contrary to the word luck, you can find in NATO doctrines and there are entire schools of thought devoted to ‘risk management’. In the NATO Allied Joint Doctrine for Land Operations for example, the word risks is mainly used in the sense of something that needs to be avoided or mitigated, but there are some instances where it is described as something that is unavoidable and even necessary. For example, the doctrine prescribes ‘taking risks’ as an element of the nature of fighting power.[21] In the chapter on mission command, it also speaks of ‘what risks to take’, which can be interpreted as being associated with necessity or positive outcomes. Otherwise it would have mentioned ‘risks to avoid’.[22] On the joint function ‘manoeuver’ it mentions: “It involves trade-offs (for example, speed versus time, width versus depth, concentration versus dispersion), and thus requires an acceptance of risk.”[23]
I will argue that when we want to make use of luck in war, we need to look at how we view risk-taking. Due to the definition and associations we have with the word ‘risk’, we tend to focus on possible negative outcomes, such as injury or loss. However, as the historical example of Operation Fall Gelb shows us, taking risks can also provide huge pay-offs, and perhaps change the outcome of battles or even entire wars.
“May warriors fortune be with you” – Grand Admiral Thrawn
This will be one of several in the series on Warriors Fortune. In the next part I will explore how risk-taking can also lead to success and why in war, risk-aversion is something you don’t want to foster.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Armed Forces.
[1] Or none at all, for example not in AJP 3.2 NATO Allied Joint Doctrine for Land Operations.
[2] Brian Klaas, Fluke: change, chaos, and why everything we do matters, P38
[3] Brian Klaas, Fluke: change, chaos, and why everything we do matters, P51
[4] https://www.amazon.ca/Fluke-Chance-Chaos-Everything-Matters/dp/B0CBCTTZFQ
[5] Brian Klaas, Fluke: change, chaos, and why everything we do matters, P3, 4
[6] As is the name of Brain Klaas’ substack.
[7] Brian Klaas, Fluke: change, chaos, and why everything we do matters, P210
[8] “Over a decade in the American Economic Review, only 12 articles out of 2,414 tried to make predictions” To name just one example from: Brian Klaas, Fluke: change, chaos, and why everything we do matters, P216
[9] https://www.historynet.com/james-holland-lucky-in-war/
[10] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-role-of-luck-accident_b_14337878
[11] https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/SSI-Media/Recent-Publications/Article/3947892/geniuses-dare-to-ride-their-luck-clausewitzs-card-game-analogies/
[12] Karl-Heinz Frieser, The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West, P178
[13] Karl-Heinz Frieser, The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West, P167
[14] Karl-Heinz Frieser, The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West, P180
[15] Karl-Heinz Frieser, The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West, P181
[16] Karl-Heinz Frieser, The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West, P181-183
[17] https://www.asisbiz.com/Battles/Barbarossa/pages/German-Command-General-Heinz-Wilhelm-Guderian-01.html
[18] Brian Klaas, Fluke: change, chaos, and why everything we do matters, P210
[20] Brian Klaas, Fluke: change, chaos, and why everything we do matters, P97
[21] AJP 3.2 NATO Allied Joint Doctrine for Land Operations, P22
[22] AJP 3.2 NATO Allied Joint Doctrine for Land Operations, P46
[23] AJP 3.2 NATO Allied Joint Doctrine for Land Operations, P57
Bibliography:
- Karl-Heinz Frieser, The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West (2012: Naval Institue Press, Annapolis)
- Brian Klaas, Fluke: change, chaos, and why everything we do matters, (2024: Scribner, New York)
Photo by Nika Benedictova on Unsplash