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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?

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.”

On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, Norman F. Dixon, Basic Books, 528 pp., $22.99, first ed. 1976

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........

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