Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War

Australians assault Turkish trenches, Gallipoli, 1915.

Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War is a nonfiction book written by Eliot Cohen and John Gooch, first published in 1990. It attempts to analyze military failures in a systematic way, using devices such as a "failure matrix".

It has several chapters of general observations, then focuses on specific historical case studies.

Examples

• Failure to Learn: Battle of the Atlantic in 1942 (American antisubmarine warfare)
• Failure to Anticipate: Israel during the Yom Kippur War (1973)
• Failure to Adapt: British at Gallipoli (1915)
• Aggregate failure: UN in Korea, 1950, at the time of Chinese intervention
• Catastrophic failure: Fall of France, 1940.

Legacy

The book was quite successful and has been influencing military thinking for decades. The framework of the book was used to analyze the Israeli failure to anticipate the October 7 attacks in 2023.