Quick Take: Making a Picture

Preliminary comments on Israel's failure to detect the Hamas attack

A scene from Israel’s 9/11: They never saw it coming

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People are asking how and why Israeli intelligence—supposedly the standard of the industry—failed to spot Hamas’ preparation for its large-scale attack. That’s a good question—but no one can answer it yet. Still, there are historical precedents: Tannenberg, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, 9/11 and the list goes on. Why does it happen, over and over again?

The Duke of Wellington remarked that “The whole art of war consists of guessing at what is on the other side of the hill.” To understand how this guessing game is played, it helps to think of an intelligence target as one of those giant jigsaw puzzles with many pieces. Put together correctly, it forms a picture, more or less accurate, of the situation on the other side of the hill. The pieces themselves consist of information and data of many kinds, from many sources. This was well put in Fail-Safe, the 1962 novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler:

By radio, teletype, message, written report, letter, computers, memory banks, card sorters, conveyors, tubes, telephones, and word of mouth, information came to the War Room. It came in the form of calculations, fear, courage, intuition, deduction, opinion, wild guesses, half-truths, facts, statistics, recommendations, equivocations, rumor, informed ignorance, and ignorant information.

The job of the intelligence analyst is to reduce this mass of facts, estimates, suppositions, and fancies to a statement of probability.

It seems likely—though we may never learn the details—that various pieces of the puzzle did come to the attention of Israeli intelligence prior to the Hamas attack but were not properly joined together. Perhaps some critical pieces were missing; perhaps the more-or-less complete picture was misinterpreted, doubted, or simply ignored.

There may, indeed, have been insufficient data on hand. Given its small size and its rule by a terrorist organization, Gaza might not yield much in the way of human intelligence: Running a network of agents there would be a perilous undertaking. That leaves signals intelligence and aerial surveillance, both of which can be spoofed by countermeasures. The Germans did just that during the preparations for their 1944-45 Ardennes offensive (the Battle of the Bulge), even to the extent of forbidding the crews of tanks to wear their distinctive black panzer troops uniform. It being likely that the attack on Israel was planned long in advance, Hamas may have been able to do the same, taking active and passive measures to minimize the footprint of its preparations.

The other possibility takes us into the realm of human nature: Prior assumptions or sheer complacency may have led Israeli intelligence astray. It seems, for instance, that the Israeli military deployment on the border with Gaza was not large. No doubt it was configured to deal with a threat to which the Israeli Defense Force and police were well accustomed: incursions by small groups of terrorists. Perhaps, therefore, the possibility of a large-scale incursion was never seriously considered.

And as history reminds us, even a generally correct intelligence assessment may turn out to be wrong in some crucial detail, leading to catastrophic consequences. In the weeks prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, there was no doubt among American leaders, civilian and military, that war in the Pacific was likely to break out soon. All the intelligence supported that conclusion. But it was thought that the Japanese would launch their first attacks against the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Dutch East Indies. Thus though the war itself came as no surprise, the manner of its arrival— the attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor—was a shocking surprise.

Wellington’s great antagonist, the Emperor Napoleon, said that one of the most dangerous habits of a commander is “making a picture,” by which he meant planning a campaign or a battle on the basis of unexamined assumptions. The enemy has always behaved thus and so in the past, therefore he will behave in the same way today and tomorrow. This may be called a failure of imagination, and I believe it explains why the vicious Hamas attack took Israel by surprise.