Strategic Surprise Research Articles

Specialised Perception, Selection, and Strategic Surprise: Learning from the Moths and Bees

Specialised Perception, Selection, and Strategic Surprise: Learning from the Moths and Bees

Specialised Perception, Selection, and Strategic Surprise: Learning from the Moths and Bees

This paper draws on comparisons between organisations and organisms to illustrate how peripheral vision can influence behaviour. Like biological organisms, organisations have sensors to inform them of threats and opportunities. The process by which these sensors are developed is ‘selection, adaptation and learning’, or SAL. While SAL’s influence is helpful, it is not always on the side of the organisation. However there are systems that can help an organisation detect oncoming challenges. These include: leveraging the peripheral vision of the CEO; improving general purpose sensors; a better reading of specialised sensors; and installing new specialised or routine sensors in areas where none presently exists.

Paradoxes of Strategic Intelligence: Essays in Honor of Michael I. Handel

Intelligence and the problem of strategic surprise, Michael I. Handel politicization of intelligence - costs and benefits, Richard K. Betts intelligence failures - forecasting and the lessons of epistemology, Woodrow J. Kuhns theory of surprise, James J. Wirtz FORTITUDE in context - the evolution of British military deception in two world wars, 1914-1945, John Ferris intelligence failure and the need for cognitive closure - the case of Yom Kippur, Uri Bar-Joseph Grant vs. Sherman - paradoxes of intelligence and combat leadership, Mark M. Lowenthal.

Cognitive Factors in Homeland Defense: The Role of Human Factors in the Novel Intelligence from Massive Data (NIMD) Project

The Intelligence Community's Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) recently issued 17 contracts for innovative, creative, and high-risk research to advance the state-of-the-art in technologies and methods for supporting the intelligence analyst in discovering “novel intelligence from massive data” (NIMD). An important feature of this initiative is the role it gave to cognitive factors. The Call-for-Participation said, “Thus, NIMD is about human interaction with information in a way that permits intelligence analysts to spot the telltale signs of strategic surprise in massive data sources — building tools that capitalize on human strengths and compensate for human weaknesses to enhance and extend analytic capabilities.” This symposium will provide a brief overview of NIMD as well as project reports from four of the teams that won NIMD contracts. While the approaches and projects are diverse, all attempt to bring an understanding of cognitive factors and quantitative approaches to bear on improving the intelligence analyst's success at extracting hidden patterns from massive databases.

Hanoi's Strategic Surprise, 1964–65

In late 1964 and early 1965, American intelligence failed to predict North Vietnam's shift to a strategy of decisive large-unit warfare. The Americans acquired a large amount of accurate information on Vietnamese Communist capabilities but were late in identifying one key change in enemy capabilities, the deployment of North Vietnamese Army regiments to South Vietnam. Misled because of inadequate intelligence collection and analysis, the administration of President Lyndon Johnson pursued a strategy of restraint that encouraged the enemy to seek a swift victory.

Blindsided? September 11 and the Origins of Strategic Surprise

The devastating terror attacks of 11 September 2001 have often been characterized as a “bolt from the blue.” Drawing inspiration from the political psychological literature on strategic surprise, this article poses the deceptively simple question of why so many U.S. policymakers were caught so woefully off guard last year. Through a preliminary empirical exploration of three broad explanatory “cuts” derived from the relevant interdisciplinary literature—psychological, bureau–organizational, and agenda–political—the authors seek to shed light on the sources of failure that may have contributed to 9/11 and point to promising avenues of investigation for future research as the available empirical record becomes more complete.

Judgmental Errors, Interactive Norms, and the Difficulty of Detecting Strategic Surprises

The concept of strategic surprise has been used by writers on military strategy to explore the successful amplification of resources during battle. This paper applies the same concept to subcontracting relationships and develops a cognitive framework to explain the phenomenon of strategic surprises, using buyer-supplier relations as an example. We first examine the factors that produce vulnerability to strategic surprise in cooperative situations. Then, we explore the reasons why firms are caught by surprise in spite of their vigilance. We present a model representing false alarms and strategic surprises as judgmental errors. We argue that judgmental errors cause misinterpretation of evidence and a consequent sense of false security. Interactive norms, which exist in some industries and may be taken as proxies for enduring relationships, may increase the likelihood of misjudgment and strategic surprises.

Slaughter in the Forest: Roman Intelligence Mistakes in Germany

The Roman military disaster in Germany in AD 9 has fascinated historicans for generations. Hundreds of scholars have questioned how a barbarian force could wipe out three crack Roman legions so easily, and whether this incident did indeed put to an end Rome's imperial dreams beyond the Rhine. This article will suggest that insufficent intelligence gathering played a large contributing factor to the Roman defeat. It was not ignorance of the geography which plagued the Romans; they knew exactly where they were going. The Roman commander Varus left his summer camp on the Weser and returned to his winter camp, taking with him the XVIIth, XVIIIth and the XIXth Legions, their equipment and all the other inhabitants of the camp. They never arrived. They were guided by a German chieftain whose intent was to lead an insurgency against Rome. Roman counterintelligence had not detected his true feelings, the extent of his popularity among other Germans, or the amount of discontent among Rome's German subjects. The uprising was a classic example of strategic surprise which caught the Roman off guard and changed the course of their foreign policy forever.

What if …"China Attacks Taiwan!"

Lacedaemonians gave sentence that the peace was broken and that war was to be made, not so much for the words of the confederates as for fear the Athenian greatness should still increase. For they saw that a great part of Greece was fallen already into their hands. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War when they are unprepared, make your move when they do not expect it. So a military force is established by deception, mobilized by gain, and adapted by division and combination. Sun Tzu, The Art of War In surveying the landscape of international politics, the Taiwan Strait stands out as an area with grave potential for seismic instability. Beijing argues that Taiwan remains a province of China, while Taiwan steadily establishes de facto independence and contemplates the formal announcement of national autonomy. Such a declaration would cross China's political red line and push Beijing to the use of force. The United States, meanwhile, clings to a policy of ambiguity, recognizing only one China, with diplomatic ties to Beijing and withholding diplomatic recognition from Taiwan. The United States argues that any Chinese military aggression against Taiwan would be a serious threat to American interests, but so far has stopped short of extending formal security guarantees to Taiwan, fearing that such agreements would embolden Taiwan to formally declare independence and trigger a conflict with China. The Bush Administration does appear to be edging toward a more assertive position in support of Ta iwan than was the case during the Clinton era, however. President Bush in April 2001 publicly stated that the United States would do whatever it took to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack. [1] Despite the intractable political dilemma, many commentators and observers dismiss the potential for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. They argue that China's public comments on reserving the right to use force to cut the Gordian knot amounts to little more than bluff and bluster because China will lack the military means to attack and occupy Taiwan for at least ten years. This confident assessment lends itself to the United States resting comfortably on its current policy position of strategic ambiguity and dismissing the potential for a military conflagration in the Taiwan Strait that could bring American and Chinese forces into direct combat. What if the prescience of these analysts is less than perfect? This article constructs a devil's advocate analysis to weigh against the analyses that see little prospect for major Chinese military action against Taiwan. It suggests that the Chinese could use strategic surprise to compensate for shortcomings in military capabilities and orchestrate a successful military campaign to take control of Taiwan. The Chinese could do so by readily deceiving outside observers about the scope of their sealift and airlift capabilities, which would fundamentally undermine the linchpin assumptions of sanguine analyses about Chinese force projection capabilities. The Chinese also could use massive barrages of surface-to-surface missiles armed with weapons of mass destruction to profoundly disrupt Taiwan's air force, air defenses, and other measures to counter Chinese amphibious and airborne assaults in a coordinated campaign to occupy Taiwan. What the Chinese military lacks in technological sophistication could be compensa ted for in military mass, contrary to the assertions of the optimists. This sort of devil's advocate analysis has significant implications for US policy. American policymakers can better protect national interests if policy and military options are thought through long before the outbreak of a cross-Strait conflict than if they wait and are caught off-guard by a Chinese surprise attack. Surprise Attack and Deception Surprise attack is the use of military force against an unsuspecting and ill-prepared adversary. …

Strategic intelligence and networked business

The chances of firms achieving, or being subjected to, strategic surprise have escalated with the growth of internetworking technologies and the opportunities these afford for various forms of information warfare (IW) and net terrorism. The more a business depends on sophisticated information systems, the greater its vulnerability to stealth attack. Defensive IW will soon become a necessary cost of doing business. In practical terms, this means identifying mission-critical information assets, conducting threat assessments, implementing information systems security procedures and developing strategic intelligence and counter-intelligence capability.

Uncovering foreign military innovation

An analysis of US assessments of Germany's development of armored warfare illustrates the problems that intelligence agencies face as they attempt to understand military innovation. The covert nature of German Army's tank research in the years immediately following World War I limited the number of indicators of Berlin's interest in armored warfare. Similarly, the United States possessed at best a fragmentary picture of German experimentation with armor. By the outbreak of World War II, however, US military attaches had nonetheless developed an accurate understanding of German concepts of armored warfare. If the United States is to avoid strategic surprise in the future, it must cultivate intelligence sources and employ considerably different methods from those of the Cold War.

FARSYS: a knowledge-based system for managing strategic change

In theories of strategic management, organizational flexibility is considered as a strategic asset in situations in which anticipation is impossible and strategic surprise likely. In these situations, the use of traditional planning strategies will be increasingly supplemented and sometimes replaced by flexible configuration strategies. This paper distinguishes four of these strategies to configure the resources of the firm for effective responses to strategic change, namely the rigid, the planned, the flexible, and the chaotic mode. On the basis of this typology, the paper describes a method for diagnosing organizational flexibility and guiding the transition process, the flexibility audit and redesign (FAR) method. This method was applied successfully within an administrative unit of the Dutch Postbank, a production unit of Philips Semiconductors, and an R&D unit of the Dutch National Gas. Nonetheless, the application of the FAR method is very time-consuming for the consultant and very expensive for the organization. Hence, a system is developed that supports consultants in the application of the FAR method and helps them to derive a better solution for the organizational flexibility problem. This tool, called FARSYS, supports the data-gathering (FARSYS I) as well as the decision-making process of the consultant (FARSYS II).

Raising the intelligence stakes: Corporate information warfare and strategic surprise

In war as in business, surprise can be a powerful strategic weapon. This article draws parallels between military and business planning, and explores the role of strategic intelligence in achieving and preempting surprise in the commercial marketplace. Sherman Kent (1949) defined strategic intelligence as the “kind of knowledge a state must possess regarding other states in order to assure itself that its causes will not suffer nor its undertakings fail because its statesmen and soldiers plan and act in ignorance.” With one or two word changes (business/organization for state; executives/managers for statesmen/soldiers), this definition could apply equally well to the world of business. In highly competitive global markets, ignorance of other players' actions or of developments in the wider business environment can prove costly. The chances of achieving, and/or being subjected to, strategic surprise have increased correlatively with the growth of networked, multinational organizations and electronic commerce. In an age of information warfare, strategic surprise has become virtually synonymous with technological surprise, thereby putting a premium on high-grade intelligence and threat assessment. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Raising the intelligence stakes: Corporate information warfare and strategic surprise

Raising the intelligence stakes: Corporate information warfare and strategic surprise

The Duration of Interstate Wars, 1816–1985

We present a model of war duration which incorporates both realpolitik and domestic political variables. We hypothesize that strategy, terrain, capabilities, and government type, among other variables, will play key roles in determining the duration of war. We test these hypotheses using hazard analysis and find empirical support for our key arguments. We find that the realpolitik variables play a greater role than regime behavior and type in determining war duration. We also find that historically, on average, mobilization and strategic surprise have little effect on war duration and that wars are not duration dependent.

Saddam Surprises the United States: Learning from "The Revolution of August 2"

Little attention has been paid to Saddam Hussein's strategic surprise in the invasion of Kuwait. This is unfortunate, because in Saddam's invasion lies an exceptionally useful extension of what is known about surprise in strategy and diplomacy, an extension of particular value in the post-Cold War world where the risks of nuclear proliferation and the possible spread of other weapons of mass destruction heighten the importance of properly understanding surprise. This article argues that Saddam surprised Kuwait and its allies because they had deceived themselves about his intention to attack. It also argues that decision-makers and analysts are especially likely to indulge in self-deception when they believe they have found a way to avoid the dangers of their chosen path. American decision-makers minimized Saddam's rapacity and unpredictability because they thought the policy of tilting toward Iraq would convert him into a responsible international actor. The article first examines the literature on surprise attack for guidance in understanding Saddam's achievement of surprise. It then develops the concept of self-deception and illustrates the part it played in preparing for Saddam's surprise. The article. concludes with some advice to policymakers on how to avoid self-deception in evaluating another state's intentions.

Strategic Surprise in the Age of Glasnost. By David Thomas Twining. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1992. 314 pp. Bibliography. Index. $39.95, hard bound.

Strategic Surprise in the Age of Glasnost. By David Thomas Twining. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1992. 314 pp. Bibliography. Index. $39.95, hard bound.

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

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.

Changes in Integrative Complexity Prior to Surprise Attacks

Previous archival analyses of governmental communications show a decrease in integrative complexity prior to the outbreak of war between nations. No such decrease is found when a conflict is resolved through peaceful negotiation. Integrative complexity is a structural measure, based on the source's recognition of alternative perspectives and several dimensions (differentiation), and the combination of these perspectives and dimensions in synthesized solutions (integration). The current study, using documents from nine international crises in the twentieth century that culminated in a surprise attack, found that the attackers showed a decline in complexity between three months and two to four weeks before the attack. The attacked nations increased in complexity between two to four weeks and one week, dropping to approximately the same level as the attacker on and immediately after the day of the attack. A drop in the integrative complexity of the communications issued by an opposing government thus may be one predictor of imminent strategic surprise.

Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 239 is not currently economically feasible, in the future seabed deposits may prove to be a significant source of some of the minerals discussed. On the whole, however, Maull provides a sound analysis of resources and Western security and gives worthwhile suggestions for managing the risks involved. Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair. By Michael Beschloss. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. 401 pp. $19.95/cloth. Reviewed by ChristopherJ. Littel, M.A. candidate, SAIS. In the preface to Mayday Michael Beschloss states that the U-2 incident "deserves renewed attention because of the light it sheds on U.S. -Soviet diplomacy and other battles being fought in our own day." Given the roller coaster path of superpower relations over the past three years, Beschloss's book could not have come at a better time. Mayday is an insightful and analytical attempt to place the U-2 incident of 1 May 1960 in a clearer historical perspective; his reconstruction of the history of the U-2 program clearly identifies the underlying assumptions of the postwar U.S. strategy toward the Soviet Union. Beschloss has two basic premises: first, the intelligence community— particularly CIA director Allen Dulles— was determined to prevent another strategic surprise attack like the bombing of Pearl Harbor and sought to use the surveillance capabilities of the U-2 as part of this defensive strategy; and second, despite president Eisenhower's tightfisted management of the program, bureaucratic politics and inadequate supervision were partly responsible for the president's actions in April 1960, when Ike became "a bit careless with success ." Beschloss further argues that none of Eisenhower's top aides shared either his priorities or his optimism that détente "would or should be established." On the Soviet side, the author portrays Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev as an outspoken, volatile, and inconsistent leader who usually angered his own party members more than his U.S. counterparts. Beschloss does maintain, with some credulity, that Khrushchev was also a "leader with an extraordinary sense of vulnerability" who genuinely sought better relations with the United States. On balance, the author's analysis is thoughtful and detailed. He argues that "involving the public can strengthen the conduct of foreign policy," a popular notion, but not one supported by the circumstances of the U-2 incident . Beschloss is, moreover, a master of integrating the factual and the dramatic, portraying the spy plane's pilot, Gary Powers, as a pawn in a larger game of global chess. The real story of the U-2 affair, not lost on the author, is how governments respond in crisis situations. Although Beschloss criticizes Eisenhower's improvisatory approach to damage control, perhaps it was and still is the most appropriate model for crisis management. As Beschloss indicates in his conclusion , uncertainty often fuels speculation. It is perhaps less important how Power's aircraft was downed than the impact the event had on the actors involved. In Beschloss's words, "The U-2 was a flaming javelin unwittingly thrown into the dry forest of suspicions and 240 SAIS REVIEW misperceptions that surrounded American-Soviet affairs of the period." Beschloss has made an important contribution to the conduct of U.S. foreign policy with a thorough discussion of all parties involved in this exercise in diplomatic sensitivity. ...