(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.)
It's a little more complicated than that, or so I read. After the unexpected happened, the various generals - including the one in charge of the Red team - decided that the rest of the exercise would lose a lot of its value if they continued from the point they had arrived at (with much of the "U.S." forces unable to participate in the simulated landing) and collectively decided to hit the reset button to see what would happen in that part of the exercise.
Well, yeah, that was General Pace's justification. But the Red team was then forced to use a pre-set strategy for the rest of the exercise, which was restrictive enough that its commander, General Paul Van Riper, outright resigned midway through. He later said that "We were directed... to move air defences so that the army and marine units could successfully land. We were simply directed to turn [air defence systems] off or move them... So it was scripted to be whatever the control group wanted it to be." He also later explicitly compared General Pace's thinking to that of the Defense Department under McNamara, which is why I brought it up.
I'm looking for historical examples of "flinching away," so I can illustrate the concept to others and talk about motivated cognition and leaving a line of retreat and so on.
The ideal example would be one of motivated skepticism with grave consequences. Like, a military commander who shied away from believing certain reports because they implied something huge and scary was about to happen, and then the huge and scary thing happened and caused great damage. Something like that.
What examples can you think of?