Exercises: Field Autopsy — Military Strategy

Part A: Comprehension and Application

A.1. Explain how the French military's preparation for World War II illustrates the Einstellung effect at institutional scale. Why was the Maginot Line a rational response to 1918 but a catastrophic response to 1940?

A.2. Define "McNamara's fallacy" and explain its two-step structure. How did the body count metric in Vietnam satisfy the first step while violating the second?

A.3. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey found that German industrial production increased during the heaviest Allied bombing. How did strategic bombing advocates explain this finding without abandoning their doctrine? What failure mode from earlier chapters does this response illustrate?

A.4. Describe the counterinsurgency learn-forget-relearn cycle. Identify the four structural mechanisms that drive the "forget" phase (career incentives, budget allocation, institutional identity, Einstellung).

A.5. The chapter argues that institutional learning infrastructure is "necessary but not sufficient." Explain what this means using the military's experience as evidence. What is missing that infrastructure alone cannot provide?

Part B: Analysis

B.1. Apply the Correction Speed Model to military strategy. Compare your scoring with the chapter's analysis. The chapter argues that the military corrects faster during crises than almost any other institution but forgets faster between them. What does this tell us about the relationship between crisis probability and net learning speed?

B.2. Compare the military's body count metric in Vietnam to the financial industry's Value at Risk (VaR) models before 2008 (Chapter 12). Analyze the structural similarities: both are precise quantitative measures applied to the wrong question. What makes quantitative metrics particularly resistant to challenge — even when they are measuring the wrong thing?

B.3. The chapter describes how General Shinseki was marginalized for warning that occupying Iraq would require "several hundred thousand" troops. Apply the outsider problem framework (Chapter 18): was Shinseki an outsider? What structural features of the military made it possible to dismiss his warning?

B.4. Design an institutional mechanism that would force the military to retain counterinsurgency lessons during peacetime. What incentive structures, career paths, budget allocations, or organizational structures would need to change? What resistance would you expect?

Part C: Synthesis and Evaluation

C.1. The chapter identifies a paradox: the military has invested more in institutional learning than any other institution and still repeats the same errors. Evaluate whether this paradox applies to your own field. Does your field have learning infrastructure that is overridden by structural incentives? Provide specific examples.

C.2. Compare the military's failure mode profile with criminal justice's (Chapter 27). Both fields repeat errors despite clear evidence. But their Correction Speed Model profiles are different — the military corrects faster during crises. What structural differences account for this? Which field is more likely to achieve lasting correction?

C.3. The chapter argues that strategic bombing doctrine persisted because of sunk cost (the Air Force's institutional identity), authority cascade (the air power theorists), and unfalsifiable defense ("we would have won if the politicians hadn't constrained us"). Evaluate whether this combination of failure modes is unique to the military or whether it appears in other fields. Identify a parallel case.

Part D: Mixed Practice (Interleaved)

D.1. A military organization has just suffered a significant defeat due to doctrinal failure. Using the crisis-driven correction framework (Chapter 19), the overcorrection framework (Chapter 21), and the counterinsurgency amnesia pattern from this chapter, predict what will happen: (a) in the next 2 years, (b) in the next 10 years, (c) in the next 20 years. What could the organization do differently to break the cycle?

D.2. A hospital system has implemented a comprehensive "lessons learned" program after a series of medical errors. The program includes after-action reviews, error databases, training modules, and a dedicated patient safety office. Using the military's institutional learning paradox, predict the likely trajectory of this program. What structural conditions would determine whether the lessons are retained or forgotten?

D.3. Apply the "fighting the last war" pattern to a non-military field. Identify a specific case where an institution prepared thoroughly for a repeat of its most recent crisis — and was blindsided by a different kind of crisis. Analyze the failure using the Einstellung framework and the doctrinal lock-in concept from this chapter.