re: "Pearl Harbor and 9-11: Imagination, Deception and Audacity"

Austin Bay at Strategy Page explains how old lessons remain relevant.

Money quote(s):

"Imagination, deception and audacity, in combination, are the deadly acme of warfare. Japan’s Pearl Harbor ambush of America’s Pacific Fleet, which occurred 70 years ago this week, displayed these traits. So did al-Qaida’s 9-11 savaging of American cities.

Despite clues and suggestive bits of intelligence, both attacks caught America by surprise and thrust the nation headlong into ongoing global wars that it either tried to avoid or ignore. In other words, both imaginative and deceptive attacks, executed with audacity, leveraged American self-deception and lack of imagination.

Both attacks spawned critical re-examination of intelligence data and grim reflection on the complex process of intelligence assessment and political decision-making."

Self-deception is a somewhat harsher term, if still accurate, than the more neutral terminology surround the concept of cognitive bias. But it'll all get you there. Lots of very bright folks have studied, and continue to study, the best way to leverage our collection and analysis capabilities into an architecture that keeps us safer. Mostly it works, except when it doesn't.

"Operational and tactical intelligence data, however -- in 1941, 2001 and in 2011 -- arrive in fragments. A useful analogy is a pointillism painting or a Jackson Pollock drip painting. In the process of creation, the painting is random dots or disjointed splashes. Over time, a lucid pattern emerges; the viewer can step away from the canvas; what looked like chaos appears as a coherent design.

In the midst of events, the significance of an intercepted coded Imperial Japanese Navy radio transmission indicating a fleet can be missed, especially if it didn’t fit a logically convincing (though preconceived) pattern. American strategists knew an attack on Pearl Harbor by carrier aircraft was possible, and they believed Japan might well expand its war. Their imaginative insight, however, was incomplete. They underestimated Japanese imagination and audacity.

After Dec. 7, 1941, the U.S. built a defense establishment designed to prevent another Pearl Harbor. America spent trillions of dollars spying on potential perpetrators of a surprise attack, building a security establishment to deter or defeat it, and engineering equipment to fulfill those missions.

Though the U.S. and U.S. allies suffered severe surprise attacks -- for example, Korea in 1950 and Tet (Vietnam) in 1968 -- in terms of protecting military capacities from pre-emptive attack, that effort has been successful."

Col. Bay hits a key point here: what used to be called our "second strike" capability has never, since Pearl Harbor, been successfuly attacked.

It's possible that 9/11 was genuinely intended as a decapitating strike against our economic, political, and military leadership. Which is a fascinating conversation unto itself; still, if it were, it failed. Even in (assumed) failure, 9/11 was plenty damaging enough.

"Al-Qaida declared war on the U.S., but American leaders preferred to treat the threat as criminal rather than military. Violent cults waging long-term cultural and theological struggles with the terms of social and technological modernity aren’t new. Their ability to employ massively destructive power at strategic distances is, however.

Al-Qaida used jumbo jets as ICBMs; all it lacked was a nuclear weapon. U.S. strategists had wargamed suicide aircraft attacks, but the conventional wisdom labeled the plot too Hollywood. Like Pearl Harbor, post-911 attack examination revealed that U.S. intelligence agencies had clues and facts, but failed to assimilate the data into a design -- the design of an audacious enemy."

Usually I've seen this argument phrased in terms of hijacked passenger jets being the poor-man's cruise missile, but Mr. Bay is still quite correct in his larger theme.

"A violent organization that announces it has declared war on America is no mere criminal problem."

And that is the lesson I wish more people would take to heart.

12/5