Surprise, Scholasticism, and Strategy: A Review of Ariel Levite's Intelligence and Strategic Surprises (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987)

Abstract

Levite's attack on dominant theories of strategic surprise raises significant questions and deserves attention as the first serious revisionist attempt. It fails because his methodology narrows the issue artificially, excludes essential political variables, relies on faulty definitions and standards of comparison, and does not support the assumption that the analysis of success in wartime intelligence would apply to decisions in pre-war crises. The apparent academic rigor of the book, however, abets optimism in wider analytical debates about NATO's vulnerability to surprise, and whether the main problems for strategic stability are aggression and deterrence or accidental war and provocative mobilization. Different decisions in August 1914 and October 1962 illustrate why the fundamental dilemma between choices of avoiding surprise and avoiding war, which Levite ignores, cannot be resolved.