Historical examples of flinching away

World War II seems to have some possible examples. Many Jews who didn't think about escaping until it was too late, because it was too horrible to believe. Neville Chamberlain thinking he could appease the war away. Possibly Stalin's reaction to Hitler's invasion:

Accounts by Nikita Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan claim that, after the invasion, Stalin retreated to his dacha in despair for several days and did not participate in leadership decisions.[145] However, some documentary evidence of orders given by Stalin contradicts these accounts, leading some historians to speculate that Khrushchev's account is inaccurate.

Hitler's delusions of a German victory toward the end of the war. The Japanese holdouts.

These are the first things I thought of, anyway, although it now occurs to me that comparing your audience to Hitler would have some rhetorical drawbacks.

The US bombing escalation in Vietnam.

• Prior to the escalation in bombing in the Vietnam War, the Americans wargamed potential North Vietnamese responses in the Sigma I and II wargames. Regional experts were able to almost exactly predict the Vietnamese response, and working-level officers from the State and Defense departments, and the CIA, predicted the actual outcome. William Bundy, the guy running the games, thought the conclusion was "too harsh," and the wargames never influenced actual policymakers. (see H R McMaster's Dereliction of Duty)

(On a related note, something similar occurred with the Millennium Challenge 2002- the Red team used unexpected tactics to pull off unexpected early victories against the simulated US forces, so the general running the war game 'refloated' the sunk ships, then forced both sides to use prescripted plans of action, ignoring the unexpected initial events.)

• The State Department's Policy Planning Council published a separate study in 1964 which essentially also concluded that bombing wouldn't work. Walt Rostow, its chairman, disagreed with its conclusions, so he work to suppress its conclusions; it did eventually influence policymakers, but only after the war had escalated, and even then its conclusions had to be bootlegged out of the council. (see David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest)

The fall of Dan Rather.

His rise to fame was in the days when a few broadcast TV channels and the local newspaper was The News to almost everyone. By 2004, he was an established and powerful elder statesman-type at CBS. To make a long story short, his people were given a set of documents that seemed to substantiate what would have been a scandal regarding George W. Bush's time in the Air National Guard. Rather went with the story. Almost immediately, a lot of people -- especially bloggers -- noticed that the documents not only looked like fakes, but really amateurish, silly fakes.

At this point, Rather could have cut his losses. He could have gone on the air and said, "Folks, I'm really sorry. We were lied to, and we retract the whole story. My staff and I would never deliberately try to deceive you, our viewers, but we just didn't check this story out properly ahead of time. Ultimately, I'm the boss, so it's my responsibility. I deeply regret the error, and I personally promise that this will never happen again." This would have been extremely embarrassing, but Rather had a lot of stature, and if he handled it well, he might even have gained some respect.

But no, he decided to double down.

Would you consider the actions of Stanislav Petrov an example of flinching away? It seems like there might be historical examples of where flinching has overwhelmingly beneficial consequences, if I understand flinching away right.

The subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2008 seems like an obvious example, as is every other bubble. Warnings get ignored because "this time it's different".

This post by Noah Millman is a good discussion of the role "flinching away" played in causing the Eurozone crisis, the Iraq War blunder, and the housing bubble. The examples might be too politically controversial for pedagogical use, but it is a worth reading, thought-provoking article. Excerpt:

What these situations have in common is not arrogance – the assumption that, of course, whatever we do will work out and, if it doesn’t, well, that’s a problem for the little people, not for us. It’s insecurity. Dissenters weren’t dismissed because they were upstarts and nobodies who weren’t worth listening to – they were dismissed because if they were right then what were we going to do? If Greece wasn’t really meeting the criteria for EU membership, then what on earth are we going to do about it? Better not to see what they are up to. If housing valuations are wildly out of line with fundamentals, then what are we supposed to do to keep consumption up? And what are we going to do about the mountain of new, unstable mortgage debt? Better not to countenance the possibility of a nationwide housing correction. If invading Iraq is only going to make us weaker, then how are we supposed to establish that we are in control of events in the region?

Larison thinks that ideological thinking is what causes a refusal to accept threatening facts. I think that has the arrow of causation backwards: threatening facts are what prompt a turn to ideological thinking as a way of getting said facts out of the mental frame. And it is an insecure mind – insecure of its own judgment, or its own expertise, or its own authority, or what-have-you – for whom facts are threatening things.

I recently read a book on Richard Sorge, a German Communist who pretended to be a Nazi and spied on the Japanese for Moscow. He had acquired a large amount of information indicating that Germany was preparing for an invasion of the Soviet Union, and was attempting to secure Japanese support for this invasion. His reports were viewed by Stalin and his cabinet, but Stalin refused to believe that his good buddy Hitler would betray him (I believe he referred to Sorge as "a little shit"). This was a bad decision.

A few months ago when EU leaders insisted that it was unthinkable that Greece would ever leave the euro.

Check out the comments on Ugh Fields, a lot of LWers shared their own experiences with 'flinching away.'

Field Marshal von Bock had under his command one and a half million men, but his panzer divisions were weakened by the lack of replacement tanks and spare parts. When he assembled his commanders on the eve of the offensive, he set 7 November (the anniversary of the Russian Revolution) as the deadline for surrounding the Soviet capital. The ambitious Bock longed to be known as the conqueror of Moscow.

The Stavka, meanwhile, had been expecting a German offensive against Moscow ever since Army Group Centre had halted in mid- August. Stalin had sent General Yeremenko to organize armies into a new Bryansk Front, while two other fronts, Western and Reserve, were prepared to protect the capital. Yet in spite of these precautions, Yeremenko's forces were taken by surprise when, early on the morning of 30 September, Guderian's panzer Schwerpunkte struck their southern flank out of an autumnal mist. The sun soon broke through, making a warm, clear day, ideal for the offensive. The Germans had nothing to fear from the air. At that moment, less than five per cent of Red Army aviation in European Russia still survived.

During the first days of October, the offensive went perfectly for the Germans, with the panzer groups and Field Marshal Kesselring's Second Air Fleet working closely together. Yeremenko asked the Stavka for permission to withdraw, but no permission was given. On 3 October, Guderian's point units on the right reached the city of Orel, 125 miles behind Yeremenko's lines. Surprise was complete. As the leading panzers raced up the main street past trams, passers-by waved to them, assuming they were Russian. The Red Army had not even had time to prepare charges to blow up the important arms factories. On 6 October, Yeremenko and his staff narrowly escaped capture by German tanks soon after midday. All communications were lost. In the chaos of the following days, Marshal Budenny, supposedly commanding the Reserve Front, even lost his headquarters, and Yeremenko, who was badly wounded in the leg, had to be evacuated by air.

Soviet leaders in the Kremlin at first refused to acknowledge the scale of the threat. On 5 October, a fighter pilot reported a column of German panzers a dozen miles in length, advancing rapidly up the road to Yukhnov, not much more than a hundred miles from Moscow. Even when another pilot was sent out on reconnaissance and confirmed the report, the Stavka still refused to believe it. A third pilot was sent out, and he too confirmed the sighting. This did not stop Beria from wanting to arrest and interrogate their commander as a 'panicmonger', but it finally succeeded in galvanizing the Kremlin.

Stalin called an emergency session of the State Defence Committee. He also ordered General Zhukov, who had brutally invigorated the defence of Leningrad, to fly back immediately.

--STALINGRAD, Antony Beevor

General Custer attacked an Indian village on the Little Bighorn River despite reports from his scouts that the village was larger than any of which they had heard.

Possibly the Type 93:

In the early surface battles of 1942–43, Japanese destroyers and cruisers were able to launch their torpedoes from about 20 km (11 nmi; 12 mi) at the unsuspecting Allied warships attempting to approach to gun range. The American, Australian, and New Zealand warships were expecting enemy torpedoes to be fired at less than 10 km (5.4 nmi; 6.2 mi), their own typical torpedo range. The many torpedo hits suffered by Allied warships in such engagements led their officers to the belief that these torpedoes had been fired from Japanese submarines operating in concert with the surface warships. On rare occasions stray very long-range Type 93s struck ships much further away than their intended targets, leading the Allies on occasion to suspect their ships had been mined. The capabilities of the Type 93 went mostly unrecognized by the Allies until one was captured intact in 1943.

There were many opportunities to figure out that the Japanese torpedoes had much, much range of Allied ones, but the inference that torpedo hits were all from hidden submarines rather than superior technology may have been reasonable. Apparently, it took until after a torpedo was captured to figure it out.

The frustrations provoked quarrels between commanders. A majority

• General Heinz Guderian was the most outspoken - despaired of Hitler's diversions. Moscow was not only the capital of the Soviet Union, they argued, it was also a major centre for communications and the armaments industry. An attack on it would also draw in surviving Soviet armies to their final destruction. The Führer, however, kept his generals in order by exploiting their rivalries and disagreements. He told them that they knew nothing of economic matters. Leningrad and the Baltic had to be secured to protect essential trade with Sweden, while the agriculture of the Ukraine was vital to Germany. Yet his instinct to avoid the road to Moscow was partly a superstitious avoidance of Napoleon's footsteps.

Army Group Centre, having secured Smolensk and encircled the Soviet armies beyond it at the end of July, was ordered to halt. Hitler sent most of Hoth's panzer group northwards to help the attack on Leningrad, while 'Panzerarmee Guderian' (the new designation was a typical Hitlerian sop to a disgruntled but necessary general) was diverted southwards to act as the upper jaw of the great Kiev encirclement.

Hitler changed his mind again early in September when he at last agreed to Operation Typhoon, the advance on Moscow. Yet more time was lost because Hoth's panzer divisions were still engaged in the outskirts of Leningrad. The forces for Operation Typhoon were not finally ready until the very end of September. Moscow lay just over 200 miles away from where Army Group Centre had been halted, and little time remained before the period of autumn mud, and then winter. When General Friedrich Paulus, Haider's chief planner for Barbarossa, had raised the question of winter warfare earlier, Hitler had forbidden any mention of the subject.

--STALINGRAD, Antony Beevor

Irrationality by Sutherland had some good military examples, particularly about Pearl Harbor and some wwII European operations, IIRC the culprit there was Gen. Montgomery.

I recommend looking for examples to the "nodding donkey"/"lackey" Wilhelm Keitel and the "lapdog" Ernst Bush - both thought of rather poorly by their colleagues in the Wehrmacht, as evidenced by their nicknames. One good quote I can't find was a series of remarks by Busch while he was presiding over the destruction of Army Group Centre, the most severe German defeat of WWII ("destruction" is the word ubiquitously associated with the debacle, there are over 300,000 hits for "destruction of army group centre/center" combined - which is still far fewer than the number of soldiers the Germans lost in the series of battles).

In many cases where Hitler gave orders and those orders led to military disaster, there were debates among officers between those arguing that following the orders will/would lead to success and those arguing it will/would lead to failure, and these are cited in German memoirs and other sources. Towards the end of the war, there was ever less plausible uncertainty through which one could believe the orders sound, even in the inherently uncertain environment of war. Busch was mostly trying to rationalize what he was told aloud, according to the recollection of the witnessing officer...I don't remember where I read this. But anyone who has read about Operation Bagration might want to jog their memory.