You Can't Yell Loud Enough: Intelligence and Warning

Abstract

Intelligence and Surprise Attack: Failure and Success from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 and Beyond. By Erik J. Dahl Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013. 277 pp., paperback (ISBN-13: 978-1-58901-998-0). The history of US intelligence is, in many ways, a history of intelligence failures. The attack on Pearl Harbor shocked the nation's embryonic intelligence structures into life. The failure to predict the Chinese intervention in the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Tet Offensive, among many more, was formative in the history of the CIA and American Intelligence Community (IC) in general. The disaster of 9/11 is but the most recent in a long line of intelligence failures which—with their inevitable inquests, investigations, and congressionally imposed reforms—have shaped the US IC into its current form and driven the growth of the formal academic study of intelligence. From the 1940s onwards, books by authors such as Sherman Kent, Roberta Wohlstetter, Amy Zegart, and David Betts have pushed a series of conflicting arguments about the causes of intelligence failure (Kent 1949; Wohlstetter 1962; Zegart 1999; Betts 2007). Some, such as the “father” of intelligence studies, Kent, argued early on that by good social science methodology intelligence failure could be avoided. Wohlstetter argued that intelligence failure is ultimately inevitable because of the intrinsically impossible task of predicting an opponent's behavior. Zegart has argued that the inflexibility of the US government bureaucracy renders intelligence failure almost certain—intelligence failure is not natural, it occurs because of bad government, and only that renders it …