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Strategic Blunders Can Happen When Leaders Rely on Defective Cognitive Models of Reality and Have No One to Correct Them.

• Strategic blunders can result from faulty intuition, egotism, arrogance, hubris, grand but flawed strategic ideas, underestimating the enemy and the difficulties and duration of conflict, overconfidence in war plans, ignoring what could go wrong, stifling debate, shunning independent advice, and penalizing dissent.
• These conditions are especially dangerous when combined with excessive risk taking based on an overestimation of one's ability to control events.

The Key to Bridging the Gap Between a Defective Model and Objective Reality Is Information, Amply Supplied and Well Used.

• Decisionmakers may be more receptive to information that supports rather than threatens their beliefs, preconceptions, and models.
• Institutions close to decisionmakers can be drawn into the same subjective perception of reality.
• Government institutions are not dependable safeguards against strategic mistakes.
• Improvements are needed in how leaders and institutions use information so that better cognitive models will enable them to make better choices.

The history of wars caused by misjudgments, from Napoleon's invasion of Russia to America's invasion of Iraq, reveals that leaders relied on cognitive models, or simplified representations of their worlds, that were seriously at odds with objective reality. Blinders, Blunders, and Wars analyzes eight historical examples of strategic blunders regarding war and peace and four examples of decisions that turned out well, and then applies those lessons to the current Sino-American case. Leaders' egos, intuitions, unwarranted self-confidence, and aversion to information that contradicted their views prevented them from correcting their models. Yet advisors and bureaucracies can be inadequate safeguards and can, out of fawning or fear, reinforce leaders' flawed thinking.

War between China and the United States is more likely to occur by blunder than from rational premeditation. Yet flawed Chinese and American cognitive models of one another are creating strategic distrust, which could increase the danger of misjudgment by either or both, the likelihood of crises, and the possibility of war. Although these American and Chinese leaders have unprecedented access to information, there is no guarantee they will use it well when faced with choices concerning war and peace. They can learn from Blinders, Blunders, and Wars.

As a general remedy, the authors recommend the establishment of a government body providing independent analysis and advice on war-and-peace decisions by critiquing information use, assumptions, assessments, reasoning, options, and plans. For the Sino-U.S. case, they offer a set of measures to bring the models each has of the other into line with objective reality.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  The Information Value Chain and the Use of Information for Strategic Decisionmaking

• Chapter Three

  Napoleon's Invasion of Russia, 1812

• Chapter Four

  The American Decision to Go to War with Spain, 1898

• Chapter Five

  Germany's Decision to Conduct Unrestricted U-boat Warfare, 1916

• Chapter Six

  Woodrow Wilson's Decision to Enter World War I, 1917

• Chapter Seven

  Hitler's Decision to Invade the USSR, 1941

• Chapter Eight

  Japan's Attack on Pearl Harbor, 1941

• Chapter Nine

  U.S.-Soviet Showdown over the Egyptian Third Army, 1973

• Chapter Ten

  China's Punitive War Against Vietnam, 1979

• Chapter Eleven

  The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, 1979

• Chapter Twelve

  The Soviet Decision Not to Invade Poland, 1981

• Chapter Thirteen

  Argentina's Invasion of the Falklands (Malvinas), 1982

• Chapter Fourteen

  The U.S. Invasion of Iraq, 2003

• Chapter Fifteen

  Making Sense of Making Mistakes

• Chapter Sixteen

  Possible Remedies

• Chapter Seventeen

  The Sino-U.S. Case

• Chapter Eighteen

  Findings and Recommendations