The Evening Star (December 6, 1945)
Eliot: Army thinking
By Maj. George Fielding Eliot
The Pearl Harbor Investigating Committee is hammering away, trying to find out why it was that the War and Navy Departments were not more definite and positive about seeing to it that the base and fleet at Pearl Harbor were properly alerted against the possibility of Japanese attack.
In these matters, hindsight is always better than foresight.
It is easy enough for a critic to sit basking in the clear light of after knowledge and say what should have been done. It is not always so easy for the responsible officer to determine what he should do in advance of the event.
For one thing, he does not know what the enemy is going to do. If he makes up his mind that the enemy is going to follow such and such a course, and the enemy does something else, he is in serious trouble.
This appears to have been the case at Pearl Harbor.
The war plans and intelligence branches of both the Army and the Navy had apparently come to the conclusion that the “most probable enemy action” would be an attack southward from the Japanese main islands: An attack directed against the Philippines, possibly against Malaya.
Maj. Gen. Sherman Miles, then Assistant Chief of Staff for Military Intelligence, has testified that in his “estimate of the situation” dated December 5, he included the likelihood of such operations to the southward, but did not mention Pearl Harbor as a point of possible enemy offensive action. Asked why, he said that a Pearl Harbor attack was “inherent” in the situation, was accepted, so to speak, aa a remote possibility, but apparently not considered likely enough for specific mention.
This did not, apparently, satisfy the Congress member who was questioning him. It should not have satisfied him, for it is a faulty method of reasoning. But the fault is not so much that of Gen. Miles as it is of the way in which he and all his generation of Army officers had been taught to think.
The fault lies in the so-called “method of intentions.”
“Two schools of thought,” says a brochure on military intelligence published by the Command and General Staff School In 1937, “exist in modern armies in regard to intelligence. These may be called the method of intentions and the method of capabilities… the former, which has been used in the American Army until recently, endeavors to ascertain or deduce what the enemy intends to do. From knowledge of the hostile dispositions, it endeavors to reconstruct the enemy’s intentions. If information is lacking, it establishes the enemy’s probable intention, in part, by making an estimate of what seems most advantageous to him… but it may result in reaching an unjustified and preconceived idea of what the enemy will do, and failing to recognize that other lines of action remain open to him. The method of capabilities takes into consideration all the lines of action open to the enemy. It does not entirely discard from consideration any one of these lines of action until it appears that he is incapable of adopting it, even if he so desires… this method provides the commander with an accurate limit concerning what the enemy may do, and it is this quality of accuracy which is its most desirable characteristic. It thus tends to avoid surprise.”
The “method of intentions” was taught in the United States Army school until 1932, when it was replaced by the “method of capabilities.” Gen. Miles graduated from the Command and General Staff School in 1927. The chief of the war plana division at the time of Pearl Harbor, Gen. Gerow graduated from that school in 1928.
That this faulty approach to the method of making sound military decisions had much to do with the disaster at Pearl Harbor, it is impossible to question. It is not, remember, a matter of the making up of minds that the Japanese are definitely going to do so-and-so. It is a matter of establishing a mental atmosphere – the Japanese are probably going to do so-and-so, so it is more urgent that we act effectively, as far as we can, in that area.
And the enemy does something else.
It is this style of thinking that caused Gen. Miles to omit Pearl Harbor from his estimate of the situation of December 5, in which he was apparently concerned with the enemy’s “probable intentions” – with the search for precision.
The fault, as far as this particular aspect of the matter is concerned, is not that of any individual. The fault lies in a fossilized method of military thinking and teaching, which ought to have been abandoned long before it was.