Studies on ‘surprise’
Barton Whaley published a path-breaking study of Hitler’s
surprise attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. The study sought to draw
out many of the important psychological aspects of both surprise for the victim
and the strategies used by the aggressor to achieve effective deception. Whaley
sought to distil the concept of ‘stratagem’ that placed considerable emphasis
on the art of surprise and deception as a component of statecraft (Whaley 1973,
2007)
In 1978, Richard Betts published a sophisticated comparative
analysis of surprise attack. He asked why surprise attacks succeed so often,
despite the existence of elaborate intelligence communities. Betts argued that
weak collection of raw data – in other words, inadequate field espionage – was rarely
the cause of failure. Instead, the main culprits fell into three categories:
1.
Bureaucratic dysfunction
2.
Psychological perception issues or ‘cognitive
dissonance’
3.
Excessive political interference by
policy-makers
Betts conceptualize the intelligence process as a long
chain, arguing that mechanistic efforts to improve one part of the intelligence
process only resulted in the chain pulling apart another weak spot.
Betts famously concluded that ‘intelligence failures are
inevitable’ (Betts 1978).
Betts’ work was paralleled by Michael Handel, who argued
that these problems could be viewed as a series of paradoxes.
Studies on ‘perception’
In 1977, Robert Jervis published one of the first major
works in the realm of international relations to take intelligence seriously,
entitled Perception and Misconception in
International Politics. It suggested that perceptions matter and that quite
often states that develop a hostile image of their opponents will interpret
information to fit that fixed image, leading to unnecessary conflict over minor
issues. Jervis began to ask where these ‘images’ come from and how this related
to intelligence. It suggested that intelligence analysts could be trained to
avoid some of the perception problems (Jervis 1977: 25, 74, 172).
Aldrich, Richard J. "Intelligence" in Williams, Paul D. Security Studies: an Introduction. pp. 228-239.
