Audacity is boldness tempered with a calculation of risk. In the famous Tokyo Raid of 18 April 1942, 16 B-25 Mitchell bombers under the command of U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle took off from the USS Hornet (CV-8) for Tokyo and other targets on the island of Honshu, and were to land in unoccupied China. The untested aircraft, laden with fuel and munitions, barely lifted into the air from the carrier’s deck, without its full complement of guns and without fighter escort. The goal was to demonstrate that the United States could strike at Japan’s heartland, despite Japan’s belief that such an “out of the blue” strike was impossible.
The Doolittle Raid demonstrated how audacity can neutralize adversary force advantages and be a deciding factor in battle. Many other successful military leaders possessed audacity. George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware and U.S. Army General Leslie R. Groves’ direction of the Manhattan Project are well-known examples. Military studies and training outline the risks and rewards of audacious strategy and tactics, but audacity is not currently recognized as a separate and distinct discipline.
Nineteenth-century military strategists such as Antoine-Henri Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz discussed the importance of audacious tactics.1 Today, in an era of irregular and asymmetric warfare, audacity is even more essential. It can involve electronic warfare, cyber warfare, information warfare, nonstate actors, precision weapons, drones, autonomous vehicles, and munitions. It can tap into tools across a wide range of systems and domains—command and control, communications, cyber, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. It can include nonlethal weapons, military swarming, psychological operations, and economic warfare.
Learning Audacity
History offers solutions to intractable military problems. Applying the historical lessons of audacious, unconventional approaches to new challenges is the first step. With suitable training and preparation, warfighters and their civilian counterparts can harness a small set of general principles to create audacious, out-of-the-box solutions to meet operational needs. Learning from the past can provide leaders with a playbook on how to implement and exploit the game-changing nature of audacity.
In World War II uncommon audacity became a common virtue. Leaders consistently sought unconventional solutions in response to extraordinary and challenging problems. Some examples include:
1. Leverage existing resources. To develop the first atomic bombs, the Manhattan Project required large amounts of scarce copper for electrical equipment to separate the Uranium-235. Copper, however, also was desperately needed for the construction of ammunition shell casings. To solve this problem, military innovators borrowed more than 14,000 tons of silver—a suitable substitute for copper—from the U.S. Mint’s massive bullion hoard to fabricate heavy electrical components such as magnet coils and bus bars. The silver was returned to the Mint over the next three decades.
2. Combine simple processes. The Allies needed many transport ships to replace those lost to German U-boat attacks in World War II. Innovative ship designers combined prefabricated components, welded rather than riveted structures, and a seemingly obsolete, yet easily constructed, steam turbine engine that allowed construction workers with little shipyard experience to deliver new transport ships. Eighteen U.S. shipyards built an astounding 2,710 Liberty ships in four years.
3. Repurpose novel innovations. Military thinkers borrowed from a system that allowed aircraft to retrieve gliders from the ground to develop a means to retrieve downed pilots. The All-American Engineering “trapeze” pickup system used a pair of poles, a line stretched between them, an aircraft with a grappling hook to snag and snatch the payload, and a winch to reel it in. The system would be dropped from an aircraft and downed airmen would set up the system on the ground for their recovery by trained pilots.2 It was used in great secrecy, with great success for air rescue missions and exfiltration.
4. Override flawed assumptions. The USS Yorktown (CV-5) was badly bomb-damaged during the Battle of the Coral Sea. Code-breaking revealed Japanese battle plans targeting Midway Atoll and an ambush on the U.S. fleet. The Yorktown was desperately needed to race toward Midway with the carriers USS Enterprise (CV-6) and Hornet in time to conduct a crucial counter-ambush. Although the maintainers had forecast a three-month repair, Admiral Chester Nimitz ordered the ship to be repaired and readied for action in 72 hours. Fifteen hundred men worked around the clock, applying massive patches and using wooden timbers to shore up bulkheads by providing compressive strength. They met Nimitz’s goal, and the Yorktown sailed for Midway on time.
Operationalizing Audacity
These examples are indicative of why Americans are known for their audacity. It is woven into the fabric of U.S. history. The Apollo Program’s lunar landings, for example, succeeded only because NASA engineers boldly advocated for an ambitious, highly unconventional plan: lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR) and trans-lunar injection. LOR required mastering a new and difficult skill—docking spacecraft in orbit—but it made the mission practicable by saving weight, eliminating the need to develop larger, more complex rockets, and allowing each spacecraft module to be tailored for its specific mission.3 Fifty years later, the audacity, creativity, and tenacity of the Apollo missions maintain a strong grip on the national consciousness.
The United States emerged through boldness, inventiveness, and ingenuity. Its citizenry inherited the heritage and spirit of the tinkerer, the blacksmith, the rigger, and the mechanic. Americans are entrepreneurs and self-starters; makers and hackers; self-made immigrants who traveled or were displaced to a new land. We venerate the concept and execution of doing great things with what we have at hand.
Audacity can exploit new and emerging inventions that are not fully developed. Waiting for conclusive technological maturity sometimes forfeits an important tactical or strategic advantage. History shows that an invention intended for one purpose but not perfected may be suited for another application. Many disruptive military technologies, such as drones, night-vision goggles, laser-guided bombs, and radar, began as needs-based technology-push concepts that used prototyping and experimentation to demonstrate what was possible.4
Audacity also has defensive applications. The 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks showed that long-established military structures are vulnerable to technological surprise and unexpected assaults. Such tactics can be identified and evaluated to address vulnerabilities. After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. Army hired the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies to assemble a group of two dozen Hollywood screenwriters, producers, and directors to develop terrorist scenarios as part of a confidential vulnerability assessment.5
Practicing Audacity
History offers a playbook for producing audacious solutions to complex problems. For example:
1. Recruit a team with individuals of varied backgrounds with a knack for problem solving, lateral thinking, and improvised action.6
2. Include someone familiar with the bureaucracy to help navigate organizational hurdles, scrounge supplies and equipment on short notice, and secure locations for testing.
3. Identify an ambitious, necessary goal well beyond present abilities or expectations.
4. Impose resource and schedule constraints to spur innovative thinking and solutions.
5. Identify all underlying assumptions of the problem, then remove each in turn to reframe the goal.
6. Elicit any and all ideas, and don’t allow anyone to dismiss or ignore unusual or offbeat ideas until they have been discussed. Most audacious solutions described in the historical literature originated with one individual having an offbeat idea.7
7. Consider “good enough” solutions, even if they are not optimal.
8. Consider solutions involving a group of components that individually lack the ability to succeed, but that, working collectively and coherently, have the power to accomplish the goal.
9. Sell the commander on the concept.8 Enlist a high-ranking individual to champion the project, help get it funded, move it forward, and overcome turf concerns.
10. Test and practice candidate solutions extensively but rapidly in a variety of conditions to identify and overcome problems that could occur in use.
Using these principles to develop and deploy unconventional solutions can require a high degree of coordination. Extensive practice—and some degree of cross-training—helps participants anticipate their teammates’ actions, improvise effectively within the plan, and play outside the plan when appropriate.
Practice allows participants to react in synchronicity to take advantage of sudden changes in circumstances. Football receiver Raymond Berry trained closely with famed Baltimore Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas, using film and endless practice to perfect an array of 88 plays to handle a variety of situations. Some of these plays were used during the legendary 1958 Giants–Colts NFL Championship (later called “The Greatest Game Ever Played”).
Berry said:
He [Unitas] has to know that after three and two-tenths seconds, this is where you are going to be. You’ve got to time it up with him. It’s like music. The same beat has to be playing in all of our heads.9
A properly audacious plan is not reckless; it is well-calculated, taking into consideration potential difficulties or obstacles and incorporating measures to address and overcome them. Audacious problem solving should be empowered as a technical and tactical skill across all military ranks and within all military establishments. Empowering and unleashing audacity at all levels of leadership will allow us to solve difficult problems in new ways and will give the United States the added advantage to prevail in a challenging world.
1. Antoine-Henri Jomini, The Art of War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971), Article 23; Carl von Clausewitz, On War (1832). See also Anand Sagar Bhagat, “Relevance of Surprise, Audacity and Unconventionalism,” Combat Journal, Mhow, India: College of Combat, 22 no. 1–2 (1995): 71–98.
2. “Man Pickup, Pilot Rescue Manual,” Wright Field Technical Order 03-13-57 (c. 1943).
3. Courtney G. Brooks, James M. Grimwood, and Loyd S. Swenson, Jr, Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft, NASA-SP-4205 (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1979). See also “The Rendezvous That Was Almost Missed: Lunar Orbit Rendezvous and the Apollo Program,” NASA Publication NF175 (December 1992).
4. Lou DiStasi, “Modernizing the U.S. Military by Learning from the Past,” Defense News, 29 November 2018.
5. M. L. Cavanaugh, “Can Science Fiction Help Us Prepare for 21st-Century Warfare?” Los Angeles Times, 28 May 2018; Sharon Weinberger, “Hollywood’s Secret Meet,” Wired, 15 March 2007.
6. See Gerald Pawle, The Wheezers Dodgers: The Inside Story of Clandestine Weapon Development in World War II (London, Seaforth Publishing, 2009).
7. James Jay Carafano, G.I. Ingenuity: Improvisation, Technology, and Winning World War II (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2007).
8. Barton Whaley, Practice to Deceive: Learning Curves of Military Deception Planners (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2016), 127–47.
9. Mark Bowden, The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008), 68, cited in Michael Roberto, Know What You Don’t Know (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2009), 163.