Dear Birger,
You asked, “Was the D-day invasion of Normandy an evidence based activity and if yes to what degree and in what way? Maybe answering this question carefully can clarify the issues a bit.”
The answer is yes.
When an alliance of nations plans to land more than 160,000 troops along a heavily fortified coastal front, immense planning precedes the landing. Everything from troops and troop transport to the armaments they will fight with and the supplies they will consume must be planned. Contextual factors from enemy defensive measures to the weather come in. So do such significant details as deceptive measures that cause the enemy to focus defences on the wrong point and producing false information to cover real plans.
It is not possible to know in advance what will happen in a landing or an attack. The success of a battle plan, like the success of any design, remains to be seen. The “fog of war” makes prediction impossible. All military strategists know this — as do all historians.
Evidence is therefore a matter of drawing together as much information as possible from as many sources as possible. This involves careful comprehensive logistic and operations information for one’s own troops. It involves weather forecasts, tide charts, and geographic information for the time and place of the landings. It involves clues to arms production and deployment acquired through espionage, and using such tools as content analysis to determine from the enemy press what the real situation of the opposing forces may be. These forms of evidence and dozens more cover the many thousands of factors — large and small — on which basis the D-Day landings were planned.
A great deal was known. What was the life expectancy of a platoon commander in the first wave? What was the life expectancy of a platoon commander going ashore on the second or third day? To what degree would platoons and fighting units need to be reorganised based on expected mortality rates? What kind of arms and munitions were required for each fighting unit to succeed? What other supplies were required? When would it be possible to send them ashore? What sort of air support would be needed for an ideal landing?
How do commanders acquire this evidence and use it? It’s a combination of experience and even book learning. The great military academies, the senior command schools, and the advanced war colleges teach officers to understand these issues. To some degree, that is why generals often “fight the last war.” And that is why advanced military organisations always seek new ways to understand past and present evidence, bringing them together in a rich map for conceptualisation and planning.
Today, design process and design thinking play a role in training officers and creating strategy. The United States Army, for example, uses design thinking to educate officers and develop strategy
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/milreview/graves_teaching_design.pdf
http://www.army.mil/standto/archive/2009/03/17/
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a558054.pdf
The School of Advanced Military Studies even publishes a design textbook. You can get it here:
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/sam/art_of_design_v2.pdf
But these don’t teach the art of command or the capacity for decision. There is no perfect way. This is why future leaders study the past. The commanders of the United States Civil War studied Antoine-Henri Jomini on the Napeolonic Wars. Even today, future commanders study the past — see, for example, John Keegan’s two great books, The Face of Battle and The Mask of Command, or Adam Nicholson’s Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero.
The great problems involved in planning an invasion or a battle remain much the same today as they were for Alexander the Great, for Lord Nelson, or for Ulysses S. Grant. Technologies change and what we need to know changes with technology — even so, no can know what will happen when the battle begins. When opposing forces meet in combat, the fog of war turns to friction — ideal plans degrade, chance and chaos take over. But even here, planning makes a difference.
Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar had fewer ships than the opposing Combined Fleet, but his sailors were better trained, and his command structure more effective. Constant practice meant that a British gun crew could fire nearly any gun at a rate of less than two minutes per shot. In contrast, ships in the French, Spanish, and Portuguese Combined Fleet took up to eight minutes to fire a large gun, and nearly four minutes for even the smallest guns. Overall, Nelson’s fleet had nearly four times the firepower of the opposing fleet, even with a smaller fleet. The gunnery practice scene in Master and Commander gives an accurate depiction of firing practice aboard a ship whose fictional captain once served under Nelson — at just over two minutes per broadside, says the Lucky Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe), the crew is not yet good enough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goW9yUUvhb0
This single fact — a decisive difference in training — is one crucial bit of the evidence that Nelson used in planning the Battle of Trafalgar. Multiply it by a thousand facts and you begin to understand the role of evidence in a major military conflict.
So how much evidence did the allies gather to plan the D-Day invasions? The national archives and military archives of the United States, the United Kingdom, and many of the allied nations and their forces are filled with information on that topic. Anthony Beavor’s D-Day and John Keegan’s Six Armies in Normandy will give you a sense of this enterprise and the massive scale of this battle. No one launches 160,000 human beings into a fight on that scale without careful planning. This is a serious undertaking where most steps of the design process require evidence-based decisions.
There is no way to move forward without evidence. Even when you know that much will go wrong, even though evidence is imperfect, partial, and often mistaken, this is an evidence-based activity.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
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