The Counter-deception Blog

Is military incompetence adaptive? An empirical test with risk-taking behaviour in modern warfare
Dominic D.P. Johnsona, Richard W. Wranghama, Stephen Peter Rosenb

Evolution and Human Behavior 23 (2002) 245–264

Abstract: In battles, opponents exhibit positive illusions in both believing they can win. With great costs of failure and uncertain success, this represents extreme risk-taking behaviour. Conflict may be expected if one side is cornered, a sacrificial pawn in an overall war strategy, or demanded into action by politicians. However, in many cases even patently weaker forces fight despite nonviolent options. This is ‘‘military incompetence’’, a failure in the assessment of winning probability. Previous explanations (stupidity, psychological deviance and cognitive constraints) have been rejected.

Recently, Wrangham [Evol. Hum. Behav. 20 (1999) 3.] proposed that such risk-taking could be adaptive through one of two effects:
(1) Performance Enhancement through exaggerated resolve or
(2) Opponent Deception by bluffing.

Although adaptive if they confer a tendency to win, both processes promote risk-taking behaviour and are therefore potentially responsible for military incompetence. These hypotheses can be distinguished because the Performance Enhancement hypothesis predicts positive illusions in any type of conflict. In contrast, the Opponent Deception hypothesis predicts them in battles but not in surprise attacks, where lack of communication disables any bluff.

We conducted a test of these hypotheses using data collected by the US Historical Evaluation Research Organisation, mainly from the Arab–Israeli and Second World Wars. The Opponent Deception hypothesis is supported over the Performance Enhancement hypothesis, but other explanations are not ruled out.

In general, many wars began with Positive Illusions about how quickly they could be fought and won. There has been an ‘‘unrealistic overconfidence in rapid victory which has characterized so many military adventures. . .it was a notable feature of the Boer War, of the First World War, of the Second World War and even, through what was by now a quite extraordinary incapacity to profit from experience, of the Suez crisis and Bay of Pigs fiasco’’ (Dixon, 1976, p. 45). We can now add Vietnam, the Falklands, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Rwanda, Chechnya and the Congo as examples of Positive Illusions in the ability to achieve military aims quickly and with relative ease.

Our analyses of battles from recent history provide some support for the hypothesis that Positive Illusions exist in accordance with the Opponent Deception hypothesis. Positive Illusions may or may not be adaptive any longer in human conflict, but as a persisting trait they could certainly explain the prevalence of risk-taking behaviour in warfare and be responsible for military incompetence.

Obviously, conflicts in our evolutionary past differ in many respects to ‘‘modern’’ warfare (defined as post-gunpowder, say) and since about 1870 commanders no longer have a direct overview of the battlefield (Cohen & Gooch, 1990; van Creveld, 1985). However, there is no reason to expect that Positive Illusions would have disappeared, because modern warfare is relatively recent and because incompetent commanders (away from the front) are unlikely to be selected out of the population as a result of their mistakes.