Richard Bernstein: Intelligence Has Its Limitations
It’s not surprising that everybody from President Barack Obama on down has expressed consternation over the intelligence failure that enabled the underwear bomber to get on an airplane and try to blow it up. And yet, the truth is that we’ve known for at least 48 years that intelligence alone is never going to stop attacks on the United States.
The event was the publication of Roberta Wohlstetter’s groundbreaking study of the most massive intelligence breakdown to that date in American history — namely the failure to detect the looming Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor even though the United States had cracked the Japanese code and was secretly reading its messages....
In her deep investigation of the matter, Ms. Wohlstetter found 15 signals that, in hindsight, could have provided warning of Japanese plans — signals, she wrote, that “seem so obviously explicable today in terms of the Japanese attack that it is incredible in retrospect that they weren’t so interpreted.”
Why weren’t they? Mainly, she wrote, because all 15 cases were accompanied by competing and contradictory signals — by what she famously called “noise.” The intelligence establishment was overwhelmed by data and didn’t have the capacity to separate the “noise” from what, benefiting from the lucidity of hindsight, we know now to have been useful pieces of information.
We’ll have to await a thorough study of the failure in the underwear bomber case — the report on the Pearl Harbor instance takes up 20 volumes — but certainly it seems likely that a similar theory of noise operated in that case as well.
Read entire article at NYT
The event was the publication of Roberta Wohlstetter’s groundbreaking study of the most massive intelligence breakdown to that date in American history — namely the failure to detect the looming Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor even though the United States had cracked the Japanese code and was secretly reading its messages....
In her deep investigation of the matter, Ms. Wohlstetter found 15 signals that, in hindsight, could have provided warning of Japanese plans — signals, she wrote, that “seem so obviously explicable today in terms of the Japanese attack that it is incredible in retrospect that they weren’t so interpreted.”
Why weren’t they? Mainly, she wrote, because all 15 cases were accompanied by competing and contradictory signals — by what she famously called “noise.” The intelligence establishment was overwhelmed by data and didn’t have the capacity to separate the “noise” from what, benefiting from the lucidity of hindsight, we know now to have been useful pieces of information.
We’ll have to await a thorough study of the failure in the underwear bomber case — the report on the Pearl Harbor instance takes up 20 volumes — but certainly it seems likely that a similar theory of noise operated in that case as well.