The Enemy Achieves Surprise: Are Intelligence Failures Avoidable?

Abstract

While Intelligence Agencies around the world have achieved great feats in intelligence gathering and preventing surprise attacks against nations concerned, the most visible part of their work to the world is the failures that have been recorded in history. Notable among the record in history are the failure of British and American invasion in Iraq to uncover Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), the surprise attack by the Japanese against the United States Naval base at Pearl Harbor, the 9/11 Surprise attack against the United States in 2001, the Cuban Missile Crises, etc. These cases of intelligence failure have received several scholarly debates as to why the intelligence community failed in its work to avert the enemy’s surprise. The focus of this paper is on the Intelligence Failure of the United States 9/11 terrorist attack in 2001 and the Yom Kippur war of 1973 (also known as the Arab-Israeli War). This paper examines these two cases from a different perspective by analyzing whether the failures in these two cases were avoidable with references made to the conventional causes of the failures in literature. By situating analysis in Betts’ theory of intelligence failure, we argue that there are vulnerabilities in the intelligence process which can be located in the context of the structure of organizations (bureaucracy). This analysis reveals that the structure of organizations (bureaucracy) makes them prone to error. Some of the unforeseen vulnerabilities are created out of organizational reforms, communication gaps in the intelligence process and more importantly the overriding self-interest of decision makers which clouds their judgment during decision-making. We conclude that these identified weaknesses are natural to the intelligence process and efforts to perfect the system may only improve the results marginally. Therefore, the intelligence community is not insulated from surprise attacks which make intelligence failure an inevitable phenomenon.