On August 2nd, 216 BC, a man named Gaius Terentius Varro rode his horse at full speed away from one of the most decisive military defeats in all of human history. He left behind on the battlefield 20 slain officers of the highest rank in the Republican Roman government—including his co-commander Lucius Aemillius Paullus—some 30 senators killed, and about 45,000 dead legionaries. This was an unmitigated disaster, to be sure, one made all the more onerous because Varro had outnumbered his Carthaginian foe by a significant margin. How . . . how could it have come to such an end?
History continues to judge Varro for his failure and his epic loss that day at the Battle of Cannae remains the subject of intense study for students of military history and practitioners of the military arts. That the smaller Carthaginian force managed to surround its much larger opponent testifies to the tactical genius embodied in the person of its commander, the now legendary Hannibal Barca. Still, the outcome of that day’s battle would have seemed impossible to predict just a few days prior, and yet, it is now a matter of historical record, the ensuing chaos in nearby Rome making the perfect backdrop for my latest novel Q.Fulvius: Debt of Dishonor.
Cannae, however, is far from the only historical example of things not turning out as it seems they should. History is sprinkled with such examples, some of which, like Cannae, continue to defy logical explanation or reproduction.
On August 28th, 1597 newly-promoted Admiral Won Gyun and some 200 Korean ships sailed out to meet the Japanese fleet they’d defeated no fewer than nineteen times since the Imjin War had begun five years previously. In fact, every single engagement in which the previous commander, Admiral Yi Sun-shin, had led the fleet, the Koreans had emerged victorious, and with much smaller forces than the one assembled that day. And yet at the Battle of Chilcheollyang Japan would achieve its single naval victory over the Koreans during the entire six-year conflict. Commander Bae Seol, the only Korean senior officer to survive the encounter, must have been sitting in port with his twelve ships—all that remained of the Korean Navy—wondering how the unthinkable debacle had come to pass.
In June of 1967, the combined forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan were preparing for the next war to crush, once-and-for-all, the nascent state of Israel. The allies numbered over half a million men armed with Soviet weaponry and doctrine, and desired nothing more than to push the Israelis into the sea. In the end, only about half that number would make it into the fight against some 100,000 Israeli troops. The forces of Israel, executing what might be the most successful preemptive strike in history, destroyed the Egyptian Air Force on the ground while simultaneously launching a ground assault into the Gaza Strip and the Sinai which crushed the surprised Egyptian forces there. First Jordan and then Syria entered the fray, with the former turned back after vicious fighting around Jerusalem and the latter fought to a standstill in the Golan Heights. The Six-Day War, as it came to be known, was a colossal success for the Israeli Defense Force, but must have left Arab leaders wondering what, if anything, it would take to secure victory. The loss was all but unbelievable and they had to be wondering how it could have come to such an end.
Yet this type of failure, the kind you really don’t see coming, often has a unique effect upon the organizations which suffer such defeats. You see it in Rome’s response to Hannibal and eventual victory over Carthage. Korea’s recovery and victory at the Battle of Myeongyang, made famous by the movie The Admiral: Roaring Currents. The changes implemented by the Arab Coalition after its 1967 humiliation which led to impressive successes early on in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. So impressive that both sides were forced to turn toward diplomacy to resolve long-standing issues across the region, a process that continues in fits and starts even today.
This is how organizations learn, how bureaucracies get better. Failure. Abject, difficult to swallow, hard to accept, failure. While it would be worth a minor digression on this being the most effective way that individuals improve themselves as well, I’ll avoid that temptation here and stick to a focus on organizations. Armies learn by taking casualties. Hospitals improve by losing patients. Law firms get tougher after losing cases. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers get better by . . . well . . . hiring retiring quarterbacks . . . maybe!
The reality is that organizations tend to develop a certain momentum, and when things are going well, management may be willing to overlook any number of practices they know aren’t healthy for the enterprise. Nobody wants to rock the boat when things are going well. But throw in a little failure, and watch those same managers cut into the work space like the Tasmanian Devil! And woe be unto the worker who responds on that day with “That’s the way we’ve always done it.”
Governments are large, complex, multi-tiered organizations and they function in much the same way as any other bureaucracy. Historically the type of government—whether democratic, socialist, totalitarian, etc.—seems to only affect the pace of change following a monumental failure, but it’s there nonetheless. The consequences for governments not learning those hard lessons are written into the history books under headings like “The Russian Revolution” and “The Fall of Rome”. Thus, governments, if only as a side-effect of the sense of professional self-preservation that has always guided politicians and bureaucrats, have a tendency to respond to such failures in a way that can only be described as energetic. In the US, this response generally seems to be magnified many times over.
The country was woefully unprepared for a Japanese attack in December 1941, yet destroyed its opponent just four years later, despite having lost every battleship in the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Gasoline shortages threatened our way of life in the 70s, and have tied the nation to every conflict the Middle East has produced going back a hundred years. Having grown tired of decades under OPEC’s thumb the US has developed into the world’s greatest producer of crude oil. A preoccupation, perhaps, with enduring conceptions of states as the only viable threats to the nation, left the country vulnerable to terrorism in September 2011. Yet there has—knock-on-wood—not been a significant act of terror on US soil since that horrible day.
The United States, just 234 years young in 2020, remains, for all its many faults, a vibrant nation of entrepreneurs and innovators. The vast majority of technical innovations that dominate lives worldwide were conceived and then developed in the US. This is crazy when you think just how big the world is—the population of the United States remains just 5% of the global total—but it’s true nonetheless. We’re a nation of problem solvers, and every facet of our nation’s attention span—normally akin to that of a five year-old—is now intensely focused on this virus from Wuhan.
As always, we will rise from the ashes of early defeat and find a way to overcome. Till then, I urge you all to hang in there, follow the instructions of the CDC and local governments, and take common sense precautions. Self-discipline (habitual hand-washing, social distancing, purchasing what you need and not hoarding) remains the close-in defense that buys time for some very, VERY smart people—backed by the virtually unlimited resources of the United States of America—to come up with a viable response . . . and return normalcy to our land and people.
As individuals and families, our part in this fight is simple, but critical, and I trust each one of you out there will do the right thing as we work to beat this bug. Stay strong. Refuse to give in to fear and panic. Look out for those on your left and right. And together we’ll prevail.
M. G. Haynes