Why Armies Keep Fighting Plans That Have Already Failed: 108

Why do armies keep fighting plans that have already failed? In military history, defeat is thoroughly studied. But there is a second, far more insidious kind of failure that occurs long before an army is beaten: invalidation. This happens when the core causal logic organizing a campaign ceases to hold-often while every visible indicator on the battlefield remains favorable. Why do military institutions persist with strategies that have been emptied of their rationale? In No One Can Stop the Plan, Cornelis van Houte challenges the conventional wisdom of military adaptation, intelligence failure, and command dysfunction. Through a rigorous comparative examination of iconic campaigns-including Verdun (1916), Barbarossa (1941-42), Grant's 1864 Overland Campaign, Haig at Passchendaele (1917), Malaya, Algeria, and Iraq (2003-2007)-this groundbreaking study demonstrates that the difficulty of displacing a failed design does not lie in cognitive failure or stubbornness, but in a structural institutional void. Modern command systems excel at producing knowledge, alternatives, and resources, but they lack a designated authority to declare a campaign design invalid. Exploring the separation between assessment, design, and invalidation, van Houte builds a new analytical instrument to measure adaptation-depth mismatch, offering a profound reinterpretation of how military organizations handle strategic surprise. Essential reading for military historians, strategists, defense analysts, and anyone interested in the institutional pathologies of large-scale organizations under stress. Cornelis van Houte