Limit Breaks #8: Overwhelming Force

EISENHOWER'S TWO LETTERS

On the evening of 5th June 1944, Eisenhower sends his public  Order of the Day  to the troops about to embark on the largest amphibious invasion in history –
 
“SUPREME HEADQUARTERS
ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCE
 
Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
 
You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
 
Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely.
 
But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!
 
I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory! 
 
Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.
 
(Signed, 'Dwight D. Eisenhower')”
 
Privately, Eisenhower wrote  a very different letter , to be released in the event the worst came to happen –
 
"Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."
 
***
 
UNKNOWNS
 
History has many lessons to teach us, but we often fail to learn them.
 
I personally believe that history is taught poorly in schools.
 
There’s a certain unfortunate inevitability  written into the history books.
 
“Here is what happened. Then here is what happened next. And here’s what happened after that.”
 
When you read more deeply into history, into the memoirs and private papers of past leaders and innovators, you realize just how much uncertainty  they dealt with.
 
Those great ancestors of ours wrestled with the same types of questions we wrestle with.
 
They did not know in advance what the outcomes of their actions would be.
 
The Allied Invasion of Normandy began on 6 June 1944. 160,000 Allied troops landed on the first day, and over 2 million Allied troops landed by the end of August. Eight months later, Adolf Hitler committed suicide while Berlin was in flames, and the war in Europe was over.
 
But they couldn't know that in advance.
 
***
 
NIGHT DREAMS OF AMPHIBIOUS TERRORS
 
The decision to invade Western Europe at Normandy was made in May 1943 at the Trident Conference between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Dwight Eisenhower was shortly afterwards promoted to Supreme Commander of Allied Forces.
 
All three of these men knew what the stakes were – Normandy would be the largest amphibious invasion in history.
 
The last major such invasion?
 
The British Gallipoli Campaign, 28 years previous, during World War I. It was the largest single military disaster in British history, where Allied Forces got pinned down on the beach lines at Galipolli and took 302,000 casualties while failing to break through to Istanbul.
 
The men of the Trident Conference knew that campaign well – Prime Minister Churchill had been First Lord of the Admirality, and much of the blame for the disaster had fallen on his shoulders.
 
You can see why, then, Eisenhower wrote his encouraging letter of the day to the Allied soldiers – and why he privately wrote the letter taking responsibility for the disaster, in the event the worst came to pass.
 
***
 
LIMIT BREAKS #8: OVERWHELMING FORCE
 
In almost all of life, the most expensive and disastrous thing is to barely fail.
 
This is true for anything as small as failing a university course or failing to get a job when you were in the final round of interviews, to something as large as a major legal reform or invasion in total war.
 
Whenever you undertake a campaign or project, you invest time and mental energy in them. Most of us are effected to some degree by morale and momentum, and failure at a major promising initiative is demoralizing; we can often build immediately on successes, but are forced to regroup and rethink all of our assumptions when we fail.
 
And when we fail, how much  did we fail by? Were all of our premises faulty? Should we have not tried that campaign at all? Or, did we miss by a little bit? Would more effort have gotten the job done?
 
These bitter recriminations and downgoings can be avoided by taking the approach of a military metaphor – overwhelming force.  We always want to pay attention to economy in action, but noting that the cost of failure is so incredibly damaging, it can often make sense to do every single possible thing to gain an overwhelming chance of success in any critical campaign.
 
***
 
ALLIED INVASION PREPARATIONS, 1943-1944
 
The codename for the Normandy Invasion was  Operation Overlord .
 
It can be very insightful to read about – the Allied Forces brought every single possible advantage to the Normandy battlefront.
 
Starting in 1943, Allied Air Forces started targeting German aircraft factories, air fields, and transportation logistics like rail networks.
 
They scattered other air raids and bombings against unrelated targets to make it not obvious where a future invasion might come, but slowly they whittled away the ability of the German Luftwaffe Air Force and the resupply network of France.
 
Allied air and sea reconnaissance mapped the entire French coastline – they already knew the spots they wanted to land, but again, they wanted to preserve the element of surprise. As such, they mapped all of the coastline, even areas they knew were irrelevant to the invasion.
 
Allied engineers set to making custom new technologies specifically for the problems of landing a huge force at the Normandy beaches – most impressively, the designed a series of artificial harbors that could be rapidly assembled on landing, meaning they didn’t need to capture an established port to land troops and equipment.
 
They spared no expense or brainpower in making custom equipment specifically for landing and driving the German defenders back from the beaches. The  series of modified tanks  are particularly impressive –
 
“A series of specialised tanks, nicknamed Hobart's Funnies, were created to deal with conditions expected during the Normandy campaign. Developed under the supervision of Major-General Percy Hobart, these were specially modified M4 Sherman and Churchill tanks. Examples include the Sherman Crab tank (equipped with a mine flail), the Churchill Crocodile (a flame-throwing tank), and the Armoured Ramp Carrier, which other tanks could use as a bridge to scale sea-walls or overcome other obstacles. In some areas, the beaches consisted of a soft clay that could not support the weight of tanks. The "bobbin" tank would overcome this problem by deploying a roll of matting over the soft surface. The material was then left in place to create a route for more conventional tanks. The Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers (AVREs) were modified for many tasks, including laying bridges and firing large charges into pillboxes.”
 
Every possible advantage was stacked up. The Allies conspicuously assigned one of their most famous commanders, General George Patten, to a  fictitious invasion group  –
 
“A fictitious First U.S. Army Group was created, supposedly located in Kent and Sussex under the command of Lieutenant General George S. Patton. The Allies constructed dummy tanks, trucks, and landing craft, and positioned them near the coast. Several military units, including II Canadian Corps and 2nd Canadian Division, were moved into the area to bolster the illusion that a large force was gathering in the area. As well as the broadcast of fake radio traffic, genuine radio messages from 21st Army Group were first routed to Kent via landline and then broadcast, to give the Germans the impression that most of the Allied troops were stationed there. Patton was stationed in England until 6 July, thus continuing to deceive the Germans into believing a second attack would take place at Calais.”
 
“Dummy tanks” in particular are both genius and amusing in retrospect – they made tanks out of cardboard, wood, and inflatable canvas similar to a balloon. There historical photos of a group of 4-5 soldiers carrying what looks like a full-scale American tank in the air with ease are particularly amusing: the thing looks real; the feat looks impossible.
 
The British had captured and turned senior Nazi spies, and had them broadcast false counterintelligence back to headquarters, again aiming to mislead the Germans as the location of the attack.
 
***
 
BARELY UNDERCOMMITTING
 
In the disaster at Gallipoli, one generation before the Normandy Invasion, Allied troops landed 30,000 soldiers with another 40,000 in reserve.
 
It’s harder to find reliable numbers on the Ottoman defenders, but it looks that there were around 35,000 Ottoman defenders immediately at Gallipoli around the time of the invasion, with perhaps another 30,000 who were battle-ready and able to reach Gallipoli within a few weeks, and perhaps another 100,000 a month or two away.
 
The First World War Allies would be outnumbered if their initial invasion didn’t capture Istanbul – the thinking was that the element of surprise, superior equipment, and better training of the Allies would allow them to prevail in the battle and secure a rapid victory, which might lead to the complete collapse of the Ottoman military government.
 
Indeed,  the Allied invasion of Gallipoli  almost  succeeded –
 
“As at Anzac, the Ottoman defenders were too few to defeat the landing but inflicted many casualties and contained the attack close to the shore. By the morning of 25 April 1915, out of ammunition and left with nothing but bayonets to meet the attackers on the slopes leading up from the beach to the heights of Chunuk Bair, the 57th Infantry Regiment received orders from Kemal, commanding the 19th Division: "I do not order you to fight, I order you to die. In the time which passes until we die, other troops and commanders can come forward and take our places". Every man of the regiment was either killed in action or wounded.”
 
But the Turks held.
 
Barely.
 
***
 
BARELY FAILING
 
How much did the Allied invasion in 1915 fall short by?
 
Very, very little.
 
In 1797, Napoleon Bonaparte had written, “All great events hang by a hair. The man of ability takes advantage of everything and neglects nothing that can give him a chance of success; whilst the less able man sometimes loses everything by neglecting a single one of those chances.”
 
Eventually, the Gallipoli invasion swelled to 489,000 ground troops on the Allied side against 315,500 Ottoman defenders.
 
Fearing the loss of such a major engagement would demoralize and dishearten Allied prestige, the British and French high commands kept pouring more soldiers into Gallipoli – and repeatedly barely failed  to break through and capture Istanbul.
 
If the original Gallipoli invasion had been 100,000 and even slightly better coordinated, they very likely would have broken through; contemporary observers thought the Ottoman government was on the verge of collapse.
 
But by barely failing , they took immense and horrifying losses for no gain.
 
***
 
APPLYING THE LESSONS OF NORMANDY AND GALLIPOLI TO OUR THINKING
 
Obviously, the stakes of our own lives are not so great as the millions of soldiers and civilians mobilized in the World Wars.
 
But while the Allied Supreme Command preparing for the Normandy Invasion painstakingly sought every single advantage possible, the Gallipoli planners were rife with overconfidence. A  famous leaflet  was given to soldiers preparing for the Gallipoli invasion –
 
“Turkish soldiers as a rule manifest their desire to surrender by holding their rifle butt upward and by waving clothes or rags of any colour. An actual white flag should be regarded with the utmost suspicion as a Turkish soldier is unlikely to possess anything of that colour.” 
 
Overconfidence is often fatal, and humans are naturally overconfident.
 
***
 
THE COSTS OF DOING THINGS
 
The British and French planners of the Gallipoli invasion calculated that they had significant strength to break through to Istanbul. They were almost  correct, and fell short by a very small amount.
 
This is a natural human behavior, though. We’re all susceptible to it. Almost everyone underestimates the amount of time and resources that successful campaigns and projects take to complete.
 
The programmer and startup founder Matthew Jewkes is an expert at estimating how long software projects take to complete, and he explained it to me like this –
 
When you’re doing a software project (and indeed, many sort of projects), it’s like rolling a ten-sided die.
 
If the die comes up 1-9, it only takes 1 unit of time to complete that task.
 
If the die comes up 10, it takes 10 units of time.
 
Jewkes described this as an “L-shaped curve” – almost all of the curve is cheap and easy to complete, but the single “ugly case” takes 10 times as long as the more common simple cases.
 
And very often, you can’t know in advance which parts of the project will be the more difficult – or fail outright.
 
***
 
SETBACKS AT NORMANDY
 
Many Allied technologies and maneuvers failed at Normandy.
 
A new technology, a Pipe-Line Under The Ocean, was designed by engineers to supply fuel to France. But the pipeline had technical difficulties, and only became operational months after the invasion.
 
Of the new tanks invented, a floating-on-the-water tank model, the Duplex-Drive tank, turned out not to work in combat conditions and many sunk.
 
When Allied paratroopers were dropped behind enemy lines, only 10% landed in their designed landing zones, with 90% of paratroopers landing in random places that were not desirable to land.
 
Notably, the Allies failed to capture almost all of their Day One objectives for the Normandy landings and were behind their timetables going into the battle.
 
And yet they still won.
 
***
 
OVERWHELMING FORCE
 
By the middle of July, the Nazis had moved 380,000 defenders to defend against the Normandy Invasion.
 
By the middle of July, the Allies had landed 1,452,000 troops  to dislodge and beat back the Germans.
 
By the end of August, the Nazis had moved over 1 million defenders to fight the invasion.
 
By the end of August, the Allies had moved over 2 million  troops  to break through.
 
With numbers like that, a lot of things can go wrong – and one can still win.
 
***
 
A FEW PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
 
Underestimation and overconfidence are natural human deficiencies.
 
In almost all of human affairs, there are infinitely more things that can go wrong than can go much better than expected.
 
This can be dealt with by refusing to be overconfident, under-resourced, and over-extended.
 
To that end, there’s a few things you can do –
 
The first is to single-task as many of your projects and campaigns as possible, and to have excess time in case things can go wrong. It can be helpful to have secondary objectives lined up, in case things go as planned, but which are not sought until after core points are completed.
 
In terms of single-tasking projects, I recently made a little spreadsheet that shows the day I started any project with a field for which day the project completed. The spreadsheet then automatically calculated how many days passed from the project starting to the project completing.
 
I then mark down how many days I actually worked on the project in the interim.
 
So if a project started on 1 April and ended on 4 April, then four days passed. I manually mark how many days I work on it. Let’s say I worked on that project on 1 April, 2 April, and 4 April. That means I worked 3 days out of the 4 days the project was open.
 
I then divide the number of days worked by the number of days passed. In this case, it would be 75%.
 
The ideal, for me, is to have projects complete in as few of days as possible, to have as few projects overlapping at the same time as possible, and to have the number of days worked on a project that it was open as close to 100% as possible.
 
[For spreadsheet geeks, it looks like this:
Column A: ProjectName
Column B: DaysWorkedOn (manually increased by 1 each day I worked on it)
Column C: StartDate
Column D: EndDate
Column E: DaysElapsed (=D2-C2+1)
Column F: DaysWorkPercent (=B2/E2)
 
This outputs results like:
UWP3 Service/Automation 2 1-Apr 2-Apr 2 100% ]
 
I didn’t make this out of a love of spreadsheets or data, but because projects dragging on too long without progressing wastes days and time, and leads to risk. I try to budget multiple free days each week in case anything takes longer than expected, and by ensuring projects are closing as fast as possible and with as much emphasis on an open project as possible – and then use this spreadsheet to make sure things aren’t getting stale, things are moving, and I’m not getting overconfident and dipping into my excess budget time.
 
Regardless – you don’t need a spreadsheet. Limit the number of active projects, ensure they’re moving regularly and on pace to complete, and have extra time that you never “count on” in your estimates. Since most projects will complete on time if you do this, the bonus time can be used to get ahead of schedule – or for leisure, or whatever you like.
 
When doing things that involve a lot of unknowns, I’ve seen many successful project managers multiply by four  how long they expect the project to take.
 
This might seem excessive, but the people I know who do it tend to be more successful than those who don’t.
 
***
 
CONCLUDING
 
You should learn to truly hate and fear “failing by a little bit” – and organize your affairs accordingly. If you barely fail to reach an objective, you expended all the effort and morale to run a nearly full project, but you get none of the gains.
 
In our own affairs, this can be a small thing. At medium scale, this can bankrupt organizations and destroy otherwise worthy efforts.
 
At large scale, it can lead to unmitigated disasters like the Gallipoli Invasion.
 
With hindsight , we can say that the Normandy Invasion would likely have succeeded if it was 40% smaller – probably .
 
But does it matter? The objective was to liberate Western Europe from the Nazis, and the campaign succeeded. If you’re choosing projects and campaigns that are meaningful and important enough, then it’s imperative to give yourself enough extra time, space, and resources to ensure  the campaign is successful.
 
And then – neglect no advantages. What type of good people can you bring in? What’s truly essential that can be prioritized over what’s secondary? What technology and other resources can you create or acquire to lead to success? What other factors matter, and how can you gain advantages there?
 
“All great events hang by a hair. The man of ability takes advantage of everything and neglects nothing that can give him a chance of success; whilst the less able man sometimes loses everything by neglecting a single one of those chances.”
 
If what you’re doing is important enough, neglect nothing . Take every advantage. Bring more resources than you need, to ensure  things succeed even in the face of things going wrong.
 
Humble thyself to fight overconfidence and bring overwhelming force to your campaigns – ensure success, collect the relevant achievements, and then gear up for the next rounds of campaigns and projects in life.