Ukraine’s counterattack against Russian invaders appears to have stunned a lot of Russian soldiers and their commanders—and a growing number of influential people in Moscow who are starting to openly criticize Vladimir Putin for his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
Putin expected a quick conquest. Why didn’t he get it? And why is he, as of this writing, getting his butt kicked by a supposedly smaller, inferior, force?
You might find it interesting to explore a book that explains why. It’s the same reason Hitler didn’t conquer England, why the United States fled from Vietnam, and probably why the Taliban controls Afghanistan.
The book is Malcom Gladwell’s David and Goliath, a study of why bigger is not always best, why stronger does not always prevail, and why—believe it or not—the underdog wins so often.
While most analyses of military actions focus on military capabilities and/or failures, Gladwell focuses on people and what happens when their country is attacked by a seemingly overwhelming force.
He writes that the British government was worried as Europe sank into World War II that there was no way to stop a German air offensive against the country. The country’s leading military theorists feared devastating attacks on London would 600,000 dead, 1.2-million people wounded and mass panic among the survivors, leaving the Army unable to fight invaders because it would be trying to keep order among the civilians.
The eight-month blitzkrieg began in the latter part of 1940 and included fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing.
But the people did not panic. Military leaders were surprised to see courage and almost indifference. The reaction puzzled them as well as psychiatric workers expecting the worst.
And they discovered the same things were happening in other countries under attack.
What was going on?
Gladwell writes that a Canadian psychiatrist, J. T.MacCurdy, determined that the bombings divided the populace into three categories: the people killed, the people who were considered near misses—the people who survived the bombs, and the remote misses—people not in the bombed areas. MacCurdy said the people in the third category developed “a feeling of excitement with a flavour of invulnerability.”
While the toll in the London bombings was, indeed, great (40,000 dead and 46,000 injured), those casualties were small in a community of eight-million people, leaving hundreds of thousands of “emboldened” near misses, people that MacCurdy said became “afraid of being afraid,” a feeling that produced exhilaration and led them to conquering fear and developing self-confidence “that is the very father and mother of courage.”
Hitler, like the British military command, had assumed that a populace that had never been bombed before would be terrified. It wasn’t. Instead, it was emboldened.
“Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the touch times start,” writes Gladwell. “Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.” He maintains that the German expectations that the bombings would terrorize the people and destroyed their courage was a “catastrophic error” because it produced the opposite result. He concludes the Germans “would have been better off not bombing London at all.”
Gladwell explores the “catastrophic error” this country made in Viet Nam when its political and military leaders believed they could bomb the Viet Cong into submission. Thousands of pages of interviews of Viet Cong prisoners indicated the result instead was that the bombings made people “hate you so much that they never stop fighting.”
Many of the prisoners maintained no thoughts of winning but they didn’t think the Americans would win either. Nor did they think they would lose. “An enemy indifferent to the outcome of a battle is the most dangerous enemy of all,” Gladwell writes, and leads to a shift in advantage and power to the underdog.
His thoughts might help us understand why, after 30 years, the Gulf War has failed to install democracy in that area and instead has left Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan far from what we dreamed they would become.
We hope the ideas are not tested on Taiwan.
Those who go to war expecting to win through might and power alone are Goliaths. And, as Gladwell sees it, all they’re doing is creating a lot of Davids. And—although Russia’s invasion is not mentioned—in Ukraine, the shepherds with slings are swarming.
(The book is David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, New York, Little Brown and Company, 2013 (with a revised paperback edition by Back Bay Books, 2015. His thought-challenging musings also cover such topics as class size, prestigious colleges, art, dyslexia, and crime. If you want a sample of his perceptive interpretation of how underdogs so often prevail, go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziGD7vQOwl8 and if you want more on other topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RGB78oREhM)
(Photo credit: youtube Ted Talk)