Foreign Policy56%
How 'On the Psychology of Military Incompetence' Predicted Hegseth's Iran Debacle 44%
By Keith Johnson73%
7/31/2026, 12:00:20 PM
Keywords: Books, Pete Hegseth, Iran War, Military Incompetence, Norman F Dixon, Psychology, Leadership
BS Summary: This article contains 26 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Confirmation Bias, and Hasty Generalization, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 25.5% saturation with 306 hits. Analysis detected 2,405 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,201 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 41.8% and a BS Rank of 44% (14,377 of 25,563 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 56.20% of the article peer group.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of a very British book seeking to make sense of what seemed at the time a very British problem.
Half a century later, however, it turns out it was about Pete Hegseth all along.
*On the Psychology of Military Incompetence*, by British psychologist Norman F.
Dixon, has long been considered a must-read, even within U.S. military circles that relentlessly cull their own reading lists.
Dixon sought to answer a question that had long bedeviled the British military, most especially in the wake of World War I: Why are lions always seemingly led by donkeys?
Dixon had plenty of material to work with for his case studies, which make up the first part of the book.
The series of military disasters that befell the British Army—and even occasionally the Royal Navy—began with a pair of catastrophic 19th century forays into Afghanistan, continued with a ham-fisted nightmare in the Crimean War, somehow got worse in an unequal battle with the Boers, and then culminated in the bloody mud flats of Passchendaele.
World War II had its awful moments as well, especially at the beginning (the surrender of Singapore in early 1942 while heavily outnumbering the Japanese invasion forces remains Britain’s worst defeat) but also near the end, when the British Army attempted a paradrop push combined with an armored thrust into the Netherlands that proved to be a “bridge too far.”
Dixon’s book reaches back to the middle of the 19th century and is thoroughly grounded in antiquated British military and civilian mores (Dixon places much of the blame on Victorian public school traumas and codes of behavior) and somewhat archaic psychology.
There’s a lot on mommy issues and other Freudian cliches of the time.
Yet, it is impossible to read the book today without thinking of the self-proclaimed U.S. “secretary of war” and his hapless efforts to root out “beardos,” do a pull-up, or subdue a third-rate country with history’s most awesome military at his disposal.
Dixon rules out pure stupidity as a root cause for most of the explanation of the continued incompetence.
Many of his case studies focus on general officers who were either academic high achievers, such as Douglas Haig, the commander of British forces for most of World War I, or at least reasonably free from intellectual defects.
Instead, Dixon, who spent 10 years in the army, including service as a combat engineer in World War II, seeks an answer in deeper waters: a particular mindset attracted to institutions such as the military, which then exacerbate by design the very tendencies that will tend to undermine military competence.
By and large, the (British) military shunned innovation; prized physical prowess and sporting achievements over book smarts (“lethal warrior” mentality); cherished tradition, spit-and-polish, regulations, and petty rules that all come under what Dixon defines as “bullshit.”
Soldiers that had those traits to a great degree naturally advanced to higher ranks, eventually the highest, precisely to positions where those characteristics were either useless or catastrophic.
Another characteristic Dixon found in decades of military dysfunction was an ingrained fear of “effeminacy,” producing a combination of homophobia and misogyny that translated into a crusade against anything feminine, especially women potentially doing military jobs previously done only by men.
“Anti-effeminacy” even extended to battlefield behavior, Dixon suggests, including a previous disdain for taking cover, wearing protective gear, or even running protective convoys to shepherd merchant shipping during wartime.
Other constant characteristics among incompetent senior military leaders were an inability to suffer criticism of any sort, and a predilection for picking subordinates whose loyalty far outweighed any particular competence.
Most of Dixon’s book focuses on generals, with a few admirals and air marshals thrown in for leavening.
There have been plenty of similar examples in the United States, such as the self-obsessed and pusillanimous George McClellan in the U.S.
Civil War, or the disastrous disorganization of Lloyd Fredendall at Kasserine Pass in North Africa in World War II.
Yet traditionally, U.S. failure has been marked more by chaotic arrogance than spit-and-polish obsessions.
Pete Hegseth is not a general.
He topped out as a major in the National Guard, after serving tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he has managed to carry his junior officer’s mindset into the office of the secretary of defense in a way that clearly echoes much of what Dixon lamented about wartime leadership in the British military.
When it comes to prickly skin, Hegseth ticks all of Dixon’s boxes.
Earlier in the ongoing war with Iran, Hegseth chided the press as “unpatriotic” for reporting objectively on the war.
Likewise, in late July, Hegseth melted down when some lawmakers pointed out that the U.S. failure in the war was ultimately his responsibility.
Like Dixon’s incompetents, who shunned publicity of any sort, Hegseth’s Pentagon not only purged the professional press corps and banished it from the building, but rewrites casualty totals on a whim and hasn’t held a press briefing during wartime for nearly three months.
Dixon’s belief that fears about masculinity drive some senior leaders’ behavior finds expression both in “bull” and in personnel and force structure decisions.
Dixon cites “[t]he importance attached to such outward signs of sex-role identification as hair-length,” and a “deeply rooted prejudice toward women who try to adopt traditionally male roles.”
One doesn’t have to look far to find Hegseth mandating testosterone tests (and possible injections) for U.S. “warfighters,” or a systematic bias against the promotion of female officers or the expansion of female combat troops.
Finally, there is an “authoritarian” mindset, in Dixon’s words, that necessarily defines much of the military hierarchy, but which finds unfortunate expression in a rigidity of thought.
“Authoritarians will be less likely to understand enemy intentions,” Dixon wrote, as well as have a tendency to underestimate the enemy’s ability.
He was thinking of the disastrous Allied battle plan in the spring of 1940, but today it reads as if he was writing about the Pentagon’s failure to prepare for Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, despite the scenario being war-gamed out for decades beforehand.
Trump’s disdain for technological advances in the military: For years he has begged for the return of old steam-powered catapults for U.S. aircraft carriers, and forced the Pentagon to allocate billions of dollars for the future construction of a Trump-class “battleship.”
Dixon’s book is dated, both in its martial case studies and much of its science.
Even the notion that Britain’s generals were “donkeys,” especially in World War I, has given way to more recent scholarship suggesting a nearly competent class of officers struggling with a whole new way of war.
Yet it is still a fascinating glimpse at why the very things that make the military work most of the time tend to act against best performance at the most crucial of times.
Creativity, openness to new ideas and dissent, overcoming petty conventions and regulations, promoting the best and brightest, and embracing the unconventional are among the traits Dixon identified in successful commanders.
Those are qualities that the U.S. military has sometimes sought—but under Hegseth, it’s far more important to be white, male, and clean-shaven.
Analysis
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