This is primarily an examination of the information and analysis America had at its disposal and why she was caught off guard in the surprise attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor. The framing of signals, noise, actionable intelligence has clear takeaways for our time of big data analysis.
After reading it, here's my take why it happened, in order of my ranking:
1. BIAS
US thinking was heavily influenced by her own view of Japan's objectives and assessments, and it deduced that an attack on US soil was a very low probability. It placed much greater emphasis on Japan's next significant hostile moves taking place against Russia in Siberia or against one of the European colonies in Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Indonesia, etc). As such, testing of the hypothesis of an attack on Hawaii was virtually non-existent;
2. DATA SELECTION
Due to US low weighting of an attack on US soil, data collection that would have indicated Japan's intent toward that end was either not collected or downplayed. More generally, because a lot of data was in somewhat bulky physical format, much of it was destroyed which eliminated the technical possibility of recognizing patterns in time-series or changing sentiment;
3. SEPARATION OF DATA ACQUISITION AND ANALYTICS
The data gatherers in the field ("Intelligence Officers") were instructed only to acquire data, and not analyze it. This eliminated from the system important insights from those closest to action, and introduced delays in analysis;
4. BUREAUCRACY
As might be expected, inter-department barriers and rivalries kept information from being shared.
5. JAPANESE SOPHISTICATION
Japan placed much greater emphasis on the importance of "intelligence" (what today we'd more generally refer to as "Data Analytics"), and were better at hiding real signals, while releasing misleading ones.
The takeaways are further supported by the Author's overall fair and balanced view, wherein she will sympathize with the decision makers when it makes sense rather than just piling on blame. The book is detailed and granular (and somewhat repetitive), but it has to be when we're talking about data. Otherwise the book's conclusions would rely too much on commentary.
Throughout there's a gloomy undertone of a war that neither side really wanted, but was nonetheless inevitable due to errors and miscalculations on both sides:
- Japan thought America would lose it's will to fight after the attack, rather than the much more probable outcome of it instilling in the population a desire to fully defeat Japan;
- US thinking Japan would not strike US targets first, even though the US had treaties of mutual defense with nearly all other potential first strike targets, meaning an attack on them was equivalent to an attack on US anyway;
- US not understanding that its demand that Japan retreat in Asia meant an unacceptable humiliation;
The key insight here is that both sides were generally accurate (and thus on the same page) with the relative advantage of US in the advent of war, as well as troop and fleet movements, however they were diametrically opposed on how the other side would act on that information.
The most obvious analogue to more modern times is how the US could have been so caught off guard at home on 9/11. Answer seems that just like US hypothesis of probable Japanese attack points steered it away from information leading to Pearl harbor, thus did the Bush administration's bias toward a threat from Iraq steer it from information on Al Qaeda prep for attack on WTC...e.g. Richard Clarke's disclosure that Condi Rice deep sixed that very report as it did not fit into the Iraq/Saddam narrative; i.e. via tautology, one cannot test an hypothesis that hasn't been tested.
At the very end the author loses her way a bit by warning of the asymmetric benefit of launching first strike nuclear attack to take out of the other's sides capabilities, by not considering the doctrine of "Mutually Assured Destruction" that came to dominate and at least thus far preclude this from happening. But just like the US officials had been biased by their environments in thinking Japan would not attack US first, we can forgive the author for being influenced by the environment when this book was published in 1962, and just prior to the deployment of nuclear armed submarines which no longer made feasible the possibility of eliminating the all of the targets nuclear counter-strike capabilities.
ISBN-13:
978-0804705981
ISBN-10:
0804705984
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Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2016
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Syd Morgan
If you want to know what happened at Pearl, buy the book!
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Amazon Kunde
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