Richard A. Posner has written a book titled Preventing Surprise Attacks. Why do surprise attacks succeed? "When a satisfactory response to a threat is difficult to devise, the tendency is, ostrich-like, to deny the threat," Posner says. Denial is on everyone's lips when convenience is at stake. And besides, Americans cannot imagine why anyone would want to attack them. Furthermore, America's potential enemies are relatively weak. Why would the weak start a war with the strong?
Military calculation is an art, not a science. What Americans call "impossible" or "insane" might seem reasonable to Arabs, Russians or Chinese. Before the Arab surprise attack against Israel in 1973 the Israeli strategists believed the Arabs were too weak to win a war. Unfortunately, the Arab leaders did not agree with this assessment. An attack was launched during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. Israeli losses were substantial despite the successful containment of two Arab offensives. Isreal's Agranat Commission placed blame for the fiasco on excessive centralization (of Israeli intelligence). The Agranat Commission also blamed specific individuals. Prime Minister Golda Meir resigned even though she was not blamed. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan offered his resignation. Compare this with the political aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks against America. After thousands of Americans were killed, the 9/11 Commission blamed lack of centralization and organizational deficiencies. Nobody was held accountable. And nobody held themselves accountable.
It is fascinating that the Israelis blamed the 1973 surprise attack on centralization, while the post-9/11 Americans blamed their intelligence failure on a lack of centralization. Posner suggests that centralization merely serves to accentuate the groupthink that typically blinds leaders to impending danger. U.S. leaders love their groupthink so much they will do anything to preserve it. Considering the hedonistic imperatives of American life, no other political outcome is conceivable. No public official would dare to say that far-reaching sacrifices have to be asked of the American people. Reorganize the intelligence agencies, by all means, but leave the shopping malls undisturbed. Centralization of intelligence safeguards the irresponsibility of leaders who refuse to implement meaningful civil defense half a century after the introduction of thermonuclear weapons. The proposed centralization of intelligence under the American system narrows all discussion of potential surprise attacks to that same institutionalized complacency that gave us a nuclear-armed country without nuclear defenses.
In his book (Preventing Surprise Attacks) Richard Posner derides the 9/11 Commission's recommendations. He blasts the Commission's herd animal quest for unanimity, its bipartisan as opposed to non-partisan approach, and its slipshod analysis. The reorganization of U.S. intelligence, he says, is already a fiasco. The literature on organizational theory was hardly consulted. Despite the beautiful style in which the 9/11 report was written, the Commission was not intellectually serious. "And where are the media ferrets, the naysayers and skeptics, and public intellectuals, when we need them?" They, too, are complicit in the fiasco.
Somebody is to blame for all this. In military history the effectiveness of one man is well understood if not celebrated. Napoleon said he would rather fight an army of wolves led by a sheep than an army of sheep led by a wolf. Such is the significance of a single person who holds the power of strategic decision. But where is this person in America? Who is taking strategic decisions and on what basis? President Bush is the commander-in-chief. But he is neither a professional strategist nor a long-time student of strategy. Our system does not advance strategists into the job of chief strategist. Our system advances the most popular man.
Despite what conspiracy theorists allege, there is no secret decision-making body in America. There is no MJ-12 or nefarious gang lurking beneath Iron Mountain. Naïve people suppose that government "cannot be that stupid." Such people haven't read much history. Leaders are human beings and "to err is human." The idea that those in charge know what they're doing reflects a faith in the blind march of happenstance. The world is a jumble of mischance where men are guided by habit more than reflection. And so far the West has been lucky.
The problem is: Luck can spoil a country. America's leaders have a false sense of reality because the American people have a false sense of reality, and this is reinforced by five decades of good living. The mood of the country, flattered in its conceits by expert opinion, produces a poison of universal self-deception that deludes as it anesthetizes. The comforting imperatives of political correctness, capitalist profit, free trade and open borders may inevitably result in the total destruction of the United States. Wealth makes stupid when it insulates from pain. The great corrective is pain. But those who are accustomed to a feeling good do not welcome a painful awakening. "One of the things that makes it especially difficult to defend the United States against surprise attack," notes Posner, "is an individualistic and consumer mentality that places a high value on privacy, autonomy, freedom of movement, comfort, and convenience, and that therefore resents the restrictions on privacy, autonomy, and so forth entailed by effective security measures."
Those who predict future surprise attacks are seldom credited, even when the country hasn't been rotted by prosperity. Nearly 20 years before Japan attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, Billy Mitchell predicted that a war in the Pacific would begin with a surprise strike on Hawaii. The fact that Mitchell was court-martialed for criticizing his superiors underscores the manner in which disagreements over military policy degenerate into battles of personal annihilation. Once a heated argument turns to name-calling, the ranking officers simply destroy the challenger. Nasty words will not succeed where rational arguments or vivid demonstrations have failed. Men who have power over other men defend their errors as they would defend their own children. If a country's military leaders cannot imagine a threat, they will not prepare to meet it. The sociology of knowledge teaches that some ideas are inaccessible to a ruling group. Facts carry no weight when power and prestige are at stake. If a powerful man is convinced that reality has a certain hue, he will stomp the messenger who dares to report otherwise. Those who defend error can be magnificently creative, especially when rank and reputation are on the line. Those who advance the truth - at the same time - often appear arrogant, nasty and miserable.
The same can be said about today's economic policy. Irresponsible stewardship within the American economy exists on every side. The sociological causes of this irresponsibility have simultaneously given us our national security policy. If the main objective of life is to feel good, and the central fact is inevitable death, people will not make sacrifices today for the sake of the future. And that is a problem.
