Norman Dixon’s Classic Study of Failed Leadership Has Found Its Most Vivid Modern Subject
Norman F. Dixon published On the Psychology of Military Incompetence fifty years ago as an attempt to explain a distinctly British affliction: why the nation’s armed forces kept producing catastrophic leadership failures, from the bloody trenches of Passchendaele to the doomed airborne assault at Arnhem. Half a century on, Dixon’s framework has found a strikingly precise American application in Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host and National Guard major whom Donald Trump installed as Secretary of Defense.
Dixon’s core argument is not that bad military leaders are stupid. Many of his case studies — including Field Marshal Douglas Haig, who commanded British forces through the worst years of World War I — were academic achievers or at least men of ordinary intelligence. The problem, Dixon argued, runs deeper: certain personality types are drawn to military institutions, and those institutions then systematically amplify the very traits that produce failure at the highest levels of command.
The Anatomy of Incompetence
Obsession With “Bull” Over Substance
Dixon coined the term “bull” to describe the ritualistic enforcement of hierarchy, the preoccupation with outward appearances, and the fetishization of petty rules and spit-and-polish order. It is a mindset that mistakes the performance of discipline for discipline itself, and it consumes energy that should flow toward strategic thinking.
Hegseth’s behavior maps onto this pattern with uncomfortable precision. He summoned every senior U.S. military commander from postings around the world to attend an in-person lecture on the dangers of overweight soldiers, long hair, and beards. He posts videos of himself doing physical training — a vanity exercise with no precedent among secretaries of defense, who nominally bear responsibility for the world’s most powerful military force.
Fear of “Effeminacy” and the War on Inclusion
Dixon identified what he called anti-effeminacy as a recurring engine of military dysfunction — a deep-seated hostility toward anything coded as feminine, translating into homophobia, misogyny, and a reflexive resistance to women entering combat roles. This was not, Dixon argued, mere cultural conservatism; it actively degraded operational effectiveness by shrinking the talent pool and rewarding conformity over competence.
Under Hegseth, the Pentagon has mandated testosterone testing — and possible injections — for servicemembers, pursued a systematic bias against the promotion of female officers, and moved to roll back the expansion of women in combat positions. Dixon was writing about Victorian public school codes and Crimean-era generals; the behavior he described is now Pentagon policy in 2025.
Authoritarian Rigidity and the Failure to Innovate
Dixon argued that the authoritarian mindset endemic to military hierarchies produces a dangerous rigidity of thought: a tendency to underestimate adversaries, dismiss dissenting analysis, and resist technological change. He was thinking of the Allied collapse in France in the spring of 1940, when commanders refused to believe the intelligence in front of them. The pattern recurs.
More than four years after the war in Ukraine demonstrated the decisive battlefield role of cheap, mass-produced drones, the United States still lags a mid-sized, war-battered European country by a significant margin in drone output. Trump himself spurned Ukraine’s offer of drone-technology assistance during the early phases of the Iran conflict, while simultaneously pressuring the Pentagon to allocate billions toward a new “battleship” and demanding the restoration of obsolete steam-powered aircraft-carrier catapults. Hegseth has not pushed back on any of it.
Intolerance of Criticism and the Suppression of Accountability
Dixon’s incompetent commanders shared an inability to absorb criticism of any kind and a habit of selecting subordinates for loyalty rather than ability. The result was a feedback loop: bad decisions went unchallenged, and the people best positioned to identify failures were the first to be removed.
Hegseth called journalists “unpatriotic” for reporting factually on the ongoing conflict with Iran, and publicly melted down when members of Congress pointed out that the war’s failures fell within his area of responsibility. His Pentagon has purged the professional press corps from the building, rewritten casualty figures without explanation, and gone nearly three months without holding a press briefing during active wartime operations.
What Dixon Got Right — and Where His Framework Falls Short
Dixon’s book is dated in important ways. Its psychological framework leans heavily on Freudian concepts that have not aged well, and the “lions led by donkeys” verdict on World War I British generalship has been substantially revised by more recent military historians, who have found a more nuanced picture of officers grappling with a genuinely unprecedented form of industrial warfare.
Still, the book’s central insight holds. The traits that military institutions select and reward — deference to hierarchy, physical toughness as a proxy for competence, contempt for intellectual dissent, rigid adherence to convention — are precisely the traits that tend to fail catastrophically when circumstances demand creativity, adaptability, and honest assessment of the enemy.
The Larger Stakes
Dixon identified the qualities that distinguished successful commanders from disastrous ones: openness to new ideas, willingness to tolerate dissent, a commitment to promoting the genuinely talented over the merely loyal, and the flexibility to discard convention when convention is killing people. These are not soft virtues; they are operational necessities, and their absence has cost lives in every era Dixon examined.
The United States military has, at its best, cultivated those qualities — imperfectly, inconsistently, but recognizably. Under Hegseth, the selection criteria have narrowed sharply: what matters now, in practice, is being white, male, clean-shaven, and ideologically compliant. Dixon spent a career explaining why that formula produces disaster. The evidence, historical and contemporary, strongly supports him.