Foreword* (to Roberta Wohlstetter’s 1962 ‘Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision‘)

“It would be reassuring to believe that Pearl Harbor was just a colossal and extraordinary blunder.  What is disquieting is that it was a supremely ordinary blunder. In fact, “blunder” is too specific; our stupendous unreadiness at Pearl Harbor was neither a Sunday-morning, nor Hawaiian, phenomenon. It was just a dramatic failure of a remarkably well-informed government to call the next enemy move in a cold-war crisis. 

If we think of the entire U.S. government and its far-flung military and diplomatic establishment, it is not true that we were caught napping at the time of Pearl Harbor. Rarely has a government been more expectant. We just expected wrong. And it was not our warning that was most at fault, but our strategic analysis. We were so busy thinking through some “obvious” Japanese moves that we neglected to hedge against the choice that they actually made. 

And it was an “improbable” choice; had we escaped surprise, we might have still been mildly astonished. (Had we not provided the target, though, the attack would have been called off.) But it was not all that improbable. If Pearl Harbor was a long shot for the Japanese, so was war with the United States; assuming the decision on war, the attack hardly appears reckless. There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable. The contingency that we have not considered seriously looks strange; what looks strange is thought improbable; what is improbable need not be considered seriously. 

Furthermore, we made the terrible mistake—one we may have come close to repeating in the 1950’s— of forgetting that a fine deterrent can make a superb target. 

Surprise, when it comes to a government, is likely to be a complicated, diffuse, bureaucratic thing. It includes neglect of responsibility, but also responsibility so poorly defined or so ambiguously delegated that action gets lost. It includes gaps in intelligence, but also intelligence that, like a string of pearls too precious to wear, is too sensitive to give to those who need it. It includes the alarm that fails to work, but also the alarm that has gone off so often that it has been disconnected. It includes the unalert watchman, but also the one who knows that he’ll be chewed out by his superior if he gets higher authority out of bed. It includes the contingencies that occur to no one, but also those that everyone assumes someone else is taking care of. It includes straightforward procrastination, but also decisions protracted by internal disagreement. It includes, in addition, the inability of individual humans to rise to the occasion until they are sure it is the occasion— which is usually too late. (Unlike movies, real life provides no musical background to tip us off to the climax.) Finally, as at Pearl Harbor, surprise may include some measure of genuine novelty introduced by the enemy, and possibly some sheer bad luck. 

The results, at Pearl Harbor, were sudden, concentrated, and dramatic. The failure, however, was cumulative, widespread, and rather drearily familiar.  This is why surprise, when it happens to a government, cannot be described just in terms of startled people. Whether at Pearl Harbor or at the Berlin Wall, surprise is everything involved in a government’s (or in an alliance’s) failure to anticipate effectively. 

Mrs. Wohlstetter’s book is a unique physiology of a great nation’s failure to anticipate. If she is at pains to show how easy it was to slip into the rut in which the Japanese found us, it can only remind us how likely it is that we are in the same kind of rut right now. The danger is not that we shall read the signals and indicators with too little skill; the danger is in a poverty of expectations—a routine obsession with a few dangers that may be familiar rather than likely. Alliance diplomacy, interservice bargaining, appropriations hearings, and public discussion seem to need to focus on a few vivid and oversimplified dangers. The planner should think in subtler and more variegated terms and allow for a wider range of contingencies. But, as Mrs. Wohlstetter shows, the “planners” who count are also responsible for alliance diplomacy, interservice bargaining, appropriations hearings, and public discussion; they are also very busy. This is a genuine dilemma of government. Some of its consequences are mercilessly displayed in this superb book.”

Thomas C. Schelling.

*note, as transcribed from this terrible photo copy!