I guess by this time I can dispense with the introductions, or at least I can just direct people to the index if they’re wondering where this series comes from. Anyway, what we’re going to discuss today is one out of many aspects in writing militarily skilled characters into a work of fiction. One thing I see very often is writers trying hard to make such characters unpredictable, always able to take their enemies by surprise, coming from unexpected directions, all that kind of stuff. This isn’t really a bad thing in itself. The element of surprise is an important ingredient in military success. But it can be taken too far, and the results in such cases aren’t pretty.
The thing to remember here is that military operations don’t really just involve the military character’s forces and the enemy. There’s usually going to be some friendly and/or allied forces they’d have to account for, and the principle of surprise works the opposite way with these forces: one doesn’t want to surprise them, for several important reasons. First is the prevention of fratricide. One of the most common causes of friendly-fire incidents is a friendly force moving to an unexpected position and being misidentified as the enemy. This can be mitigated to some extent with good communications, but the fact is that means of communication tend to fail in the chaos of combat. Radio sets break or get jammed. Field telephone wires get cut or tapped. Verbal or letter-carrying nessengers get lost or killed. This was an especially serious problem in eras before the invention of the telegraph and wireless (i.e. radio) communications. So, to account for these communication issues, most effective armies and navies in history developed the kind of thing we’d know today as standard operating procedures. Sometimes these were permanent and instituted in peacetime, but just as often they were ad hoc rules developed at the beginning of hostilities or even in the middle of it. What matters is that friendly forces following the same set of procedures would tend to behave predictably to some extent, so that it would be possible to make a reasonable guess at their location and/or speed and direction of movement even when communications had been lost. This is equally important for the second reason, which is planning and execution. Any kind of manoeuvre that splits a force into more than one element requires those elements’ movements (or lack of movement) to be predictable to each other or the plan is likely to fail. One of the most extreme examples is the friendly-fire incident at Karansebes (1788), where scouting elements of the Austrian army fell to fighting among themselves over a stash of alcoholic beverages and sparked a panic that led to other parts of the Austrian army firing at each other in the mistaken belief that the Turks were mounting a night attack against their camp. Less extreme examples also exist and don’t even have to involve friendly fire. For instance, the largest Japanese attack against the US perimeter at Henderson Field in October 1942 was supposed to begin with two near-simultaneous assaults on the 23rd, one a diversionary attack from the west along the coast while the other would strike from the inland jungle to the south. But difficulties in traversing the jungle meant that the southern pincer of the attack had to be delayed to the 24th. Most of the western attack force received the message, but the leading elements — including a light tank company — had already set out on their advance to contact and could not be raised on the radio. As a result, this isolated spearhead carried on with the original plan to attack on the 23rd despite the fact that they’d have no support from subsequent echelons coming up on their rear or the main attack force in the south, and they ended up being overwhelmed and massacred by the firepower of the American defenders.
All of the examples above are at the tactical level since the consequences of unpredictability at the operational and strategic levels (let alone national policy) are subtler and more difficult to isolate, partly because they tend to unfold very gradually (and are thus hard to notice until it’s too late) but also partly because the timescales involved tend to allow some chance to mitigate them through communications. Maybe one of the least ambiguous examples is Hannibal’s invasion of Italy; nobody back home in Carthage seemed to have expected him to be so successful, so nobody anticipated this success by preparing to send supplies and reinforcements. As such, Hannibal was forced to rely upon a mixture of war booty obtained from the Romans and support from Italian allies to keep his forces in the field, and neither source could be relied upon to provide a consistent amount from one year to the next. It wasn’t until several years into the war that the Carthaginians made a serious attempt to reinforce Hannibal and it certainly didn’t help that this attempt was ambushed and defeated at the Metaurus before it got anywhere close to Hannibal’s field army. All of these certainly contributed to Hannibal’s failure to bring the war with Rome to a rapid conclusion.
So, bringing it back together, military leaders in history generally had to balance unpredictability towards the enemy with predictability towards friendly forces — and presumably so do skilled military characters in well-written fiction. Overemphasising one at the expense of the other is obviously going to lead to some pretty bad consequences. But striking the right balance is never an easy thing either, since the two elements involved generally act in contradiction to each other. And now that you know this, remember that the principle can be pretty handy in developing twists or complications to military arcs in your plot. Have some fun with having your military characters cope with the unexpected downsides of their own unpredictability!
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