The age of the genius general is over

Myths and symbols persist, and the most persistent myth of British military leadership is that of military genius, symbolised by the kingfisher bird. It is the chosen emblem of the pivotal course in any general’s career: the Higher Command and Staff Course, undertaken at the main Defence Academy campus at Shrivenham. The kingfisher was selected as the course’s symbol as it provides the metaphor at the heart of T.E. Lawrence’s quote on generalship: ‘Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books, but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals.’

And there is a secondary symbolism because Lawrence is an almost uniquely romantic, individual and heroic figure of military folklore: a man who achieved great success against the odds, not through leading a team of brother officers, but through his own foresight, brilliance, energy, dash and ability to impose his will. His quote is explicit. Any competent officer can be taught 90 per cent of what he needs to know and be; that is but rational assessment and studied management of a headquarters and its battle rhythm. But there remains that last 10 per cent, ‘the irrational tenth’, that is beyond such prosaic language. This is the unteachable but unmistakable quality of poetry in motion. It is the vision that pierces the fog of war to discern what no other mortals can see.

This even has a military term: coup d’œil, the sweep of the eye that takes in the essence of the tableau in front and subliminally makes immediate sense of it. And having done so, the general can then display the ‘kingfisher moment’ when, intuitively understanding the mind of his opposing general, and with his own troops firmly believing in his vision, he produces, deus ex machina, the unexpected but brilliant checkmate manoeuvre. There is even a name for this: operational art. And the unofficial but widely used associated term to define those so naturally gifted: an operational artist.

All this is defensible. Who wouldn’t want imaginative commanders with drive and energy who, through personal charisma and effort of will, can command the loyalty of the fighting troops beneath them and win?

And if a commander uses their staff appropriately, then they can add such personal value while maximising the talents of the whole – in support but also in challenging, loyal opposition that works through the options. This is the ideal of the wise general, but we must go back to the beginning of a career to look at how officers get to be selectable for the senior courses and highest positions, and so what is likely to transpire in reality.

Every officer cadet arriving at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst will quickly have drilled into them the mantra that ‘the only thing worse than a bad plan is no plan at all!’ For someone about to become a junior officer in direct control of troops this is but common sense. If you have just received a panicky message that the enemy is about to descend on you in 20 minutes, you have 19 minutes to cobble together a plan that is good enough, and one minute to sell it to your troops in such a way that they believe in you and, by extension, it. And so will fight with belief. Such situations for a junior officer are unlikely to pose ‘wicked’ problems, and so rules of thumb, heuristics and common sense dictate the plan. Salesmanship, looking confident even if you harbour some doubts, helps them sell the plan as they brief their subordinates. Competence in these two capacities will see future leaders through much of their time as a junior officer. Add in published doctrine’s emphasis on ‘tempo’ and ‘offensive action’, and you have a culture where he who darts in first with something plausible wins.

And which senior officer doesn’t want smart juniors who can be thrown a curve ball and deal with it? Such juniors do well, and so they get promoted at the first look, for our quite rigid promotion hierarchy only allows promotion of the cohorts who left Sandhurst within a set window. Those who leap through the window as it opens are openly referred to as ‘first look promotees’ and their cards are marked accordingly. The best jobs follow (known as ‘black bag’ jobs), which are likely to gather the strongest performance report tariffs, and so this cohort is the one in the van when the second window opens, and so on. It is all but impossible to catch up if you are a late developer. Or unlucky. Or don’t do everything you can to game the system.

So we now have the first step to make senior, strategic rank. And the qualities that define them are not necessarily the abilities required in more senior posts, where challenges are more intractable and complex, wicked problems present themselves. This cohort is likely to include those who can throw something together off the cuff (cuffers), those who can style it out (bluffers) and those who seize the moment with elbows sharpened (chancers). Which is not to say such streetwise attributes aren’t useful, and it is good to have leaders focused on outputs and winning. But it doesn’t necessarily make you Eisenhower.

The next pivotal selection within the British military is the one for the Higher Command and Staff Course. Indeed, this is such a Venturi for higher rank that failure to be selected can be the make-or-break moment that sees some officers deciding to leave their service. And this is the course that has the kingfisher as its motif, the symbol of brilliance so emblematic it features on the tie that graduates are allowed to wear.

It is here that the idea of military genius is rehearsed most energetically, and from it our leading graduates will emerge as fully fledged generals. They will have studied the major role models of wartime generalship; and when it comes to British role models, theses are still drawn from the Second World War. They will have studied the political-military interface. And so Churchill and the relationship he had with his Chiefs of Staff Committee and his field generals will have featured. It is worth, then, looking at Churchill’s own assessment of what makes a great general. The following quote from Churchill was cited by Field Marshal Carver in his monograph on Montgomery. It came from Churchill’s biography of his ancestor, the great general John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, written just before the Second World War.

Churchill wrote that ‘[the war’s] highest solution must be evolved from the eye and brain and soul of a single man’, and, dismissing the efforts of ‘almost any intelligent scribe [who] can draw up a lucid and logical treatise full of laboriously ascertained facts and technical phrases on a particular war situation’, he asserted that ‘Nothing but genius, the daemon in man, can answer the riddles of war, and genius, though it may be armed, cannot be acquired, either by reading or by experience.’

The language here is emotive. Through it, Churchill can be seen to be an evangelical advocate of the ‘general as born genius’ theory. Add in Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, whose wartime diaries, still a bible for the modern, ambitious general, for all their frustration with Churchill, also reinforce the charismatic, genius general trope, and a pattern to emulate starts to emerge.

‘Getting on’ in the higher echelons of the British military still hinges on giving your superiors the impression that you have ‘it’. ‘It’ is undefined, and, indeed, unmeasurable. But it clearly suggests you are one of Napoleon’s ‘lucky generals’, a charismatic practitioner of the operational arts. You have the mark of genius, an intuitive capacity to win that transcends rational explanation. And all this is bolstered by the fact that the superior general assessing whether one has ‘it’ or not doesn’t himself have to justify it either – this too being an intuitive judgement. No wonder that the military’s senior leadership tends to follow tribal cycles.

Why should we worry about any of this? Why would we not want our generals to be charismatic, flair players? There are two answers to this, one general and one specific to today.

The general point I shall hurry over. In short, it is striking that when one lists the impressively competent generals from the Second World War, Churchill tried to have several of them removed, usually for not being swashbuckling enough and providing, instead, realistic assessments of often dire situations; and sometimes, one senses, for simply not having what Churchill considered to be ‘the right stuff’. Thus, for example, both Tedder, commanding Allied air forces in the Mediterranean, and Slim, commanding Fourteenth Army in Burma, were on the receiving end of Churchill’s ire and desire for them to be replaced. Yet history finds no two better commanders than these. Meanwhile, some pretty monstrous egos, such as late-era Montgomery, were tolerated long after replacing them might have been wise. And those upon whom Churchill had a professional crush based more than a little on ‘appearance and bearing’, such as Harold Alexander, were always favoured regardless of results.

In linking to the specifics of today, we might first, paradoxically, go back to the transition into the current era, the age of industrial warfare – commonly accepted to have begun with the rapid evolution of warfare during the American Civil War of 1861-5. The macro-observation is that the Southern states are widely considered to have had the best battlefield commanders, in Jackson, Longstreet and Stuart, but they lost the war. And it was lost for many geostrategic reasons that demonstrate that war and warfare are not the same thing. Among them are the finances of war and the use of modern methods of production and communication, against which fighting with tactical flair and charisma in set-piece battles did little more than stave off strategic defeat for a while.

The linking figure that brings us back to the specific arguments of today is Ulysses S. Grant. When the war started, Grant was a struggling figure, having left the army after an unremarkable career largely spent in the back-room divisions of supply and administration. A reserved character, he had, as John Keegan writes, always lost out to ‘bustling, bonhomious, chance-grabbing optimists’. But come the war, civilian-led advances in these vital logistic capacities, in which he had specialised, were fundamentally rewriting the character of war. Officers who had only recently joined up, but who brought expertise in the railway and the telegraph, were rapidly promoted to senior rank.

One hundred and sixty years later, as we move from the Industrial to the Information Age, we find ourselves in a similar position of warfare being in a state of flux, as it ineluctably follows the socioeconomic transition.

Ukraine has revealed what a country with a peacetime defence budget one-twelfth of that of the UK, or less than 1 per cent of that of the USA, can do when it applies just some of these largely civilian, or ‘dual-use’, technologies to reimagine modern warfare. Behind the horrors of Industrial Age warfare that persist, the brutal battles of artillery, the advantage that Ukraine has crafted is built on better, more imaginative and flexible organisation of its fighting forces. SpaceX’s Starlink, Palantir’s data-analysis tools, myriad civilian drones – all have been repurposed and integrated via the cloud into a slick system of advanced military command and control. Remarkably, the Ukrainians have rebuilt not from an already advanced Western baseline, but from a recent post-Soviet one. It has been a stunning achievement.

Even so, they have achieved but a fraction of what is theoretically possible, were the combinations of AI, data-at-the-edge and autonomous systems to be unleashed by a NATO budget. The networks are flatter and faster, less hierarchical, more adaptable. They require more cooperation across traditional command boundaries, which often have a simple hierarchical and geographic framing. Understanding how these networks function in practice will become a vital command skill. And that is before you further enhance a commander’s understanding with the products of artificial intelligence. AI will alter decision-making and, as military leadership is ultimately about making decisions under pressure, it should alter our approach to leadership too.

The febrile world of finance provides intriguing parallels, not least in the way fund managers are conceived, too, as lucky generals. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb notes in Fooled by Randomness, if you analyse the performance of multiple hedge funds over time, then they produce slightly fewer successes than would be the case if random decisions were taken. But we don’t tend to see it that way; we create backward narratives that explain why some financial geniuses have been successful so that we may follow them.

Whole industries are created around emulating what the author Tom Wolfe characterised as the ‘Masters of the Universe’. And they are only slightly dented when a ‘Master’ then falls spectacularly, so atavistic is our longing for compelling narratives and for explanations of success in heroic terms. In reality, much trading is now driven at frantic speed by algorithms.

For a time, the edge lay in understanding the data latency in fibre-optic transmission of laser pulses. Physical geography had more of a bearing than the intuitive genius of the guru. In reality, it is the ‘quants’, the mathematical and computational ‘nerds’, who have made companies fortunes while the public front remains Wolfe’s Masters.

There is another argument to be explored here: is being good at the stock market dependent on being good at the fundamentals of business and economics, or on understanding, and perhaps manipulating, the herd mentality of investors? If the latter, then it makes perfect sense to create a persona of confident invulnerability, as your own words and deeds might well shape that market to profitable effect. Is this not a similar argument to that made of our generals: that all victories in the end come down to battles between the moral components of each side, and so a belief in, or fear of, the genius general could sway both sides profitably? Soviet generals used to scoff at their British counterparts, noting that every German the British came up against was ‘a genius’, while they had no trouble beating them all. There is evidence of this ‘Rommel Effect’ in the behaviour of some British generals of the Second World War. In peacetime, of course, such manoeuvrings can be useful in Whitehall funding battles.

There must be some truth in the idea of charismatic generals bolstering the belief of troops under their command and, therefore, their essential morale. Such attributes are not harmful per se. The danger is that if we fetishise the idea of good generalship being an innate product of genius – one the general himself might not be able to explain – then we risk a version of moral hazard: in their desire to demonstrate these qualities, our officers might be encouraged to gamble, overreach and, perhaps, cover up until they can make good. And when they do finally make general rank, then they can inhale their own smoke and believe they don’t have to justify decisions that may in reality be little more than whimsy. The heroic school of leadership can lead to superheated command systems where competitive personalities and egos dominate.

These general criticisms of heroic leadership apply in any era, and are countered to an extent by the argument already raised that we need decisive generals able to function in the fog of war. But as we move into the Information Age our generals will have quants of their own. AI will chew over many orders of magnitude more data – Top Secret to Open Source – than any previous ‘mandraulic’ system could hope to have assimilated, let alone cross-referenced. Its algorithms will have self-trained by endlessly churning mass data such that they will be beyond the initial programmer’s understanding of how they ‘think’. They will generate both counterintuitive analysis and options for action. How, then, is a system predicated on the intuition and instinct of a single genius general going to cope?

The answer is we don’t know. But I will offer that we ought to approach the question in a spirit of open-minded inquiry and curiosity, not with an instinctive sense of the answer before we start. We need to be like savvy bank bosses who can see that the nerds might make better bets. In short, it is time to revisit the fetishes of our current teachings on command and generalship. The demands of the future are not those of the past. Those whose success was built on an intuitive sense of how to game the previous era’s incentives are the least likely to be able to adapt to the counterintuitive possibilities of tomorrow.

The conclusion is not that the UK military has got everything wrong, nor that it cannot produce some excellent commanders across all three services. It is one of shade and emphasis. If you fetishise a leadership style centred on the genius of the individual, within a peacetime structure that is explicitly competitive, then you must expect to get more of the behaviour that plays explicitly to such incentivisation. It also has a self-sustaining quality that makes it hard to shift. These traits can be corrosive at the best of times, even if considered necessary in some circumstances. In the emerging epoch, where the general’s intuition might be trumped by the collective wisdom of a man-machine team, they may be actively regressive.