Stardate 20020227.1608

(On Screen): Sometimes you lose a game because someone on your team did something stupid. A pop-fly into center that should have been caught gets dropped, and a guy on third goes home for the winning run against you. Your kicker slices a field goal from 10 yards out with 30 seconds to go and you lose by 1.

But sometimes you lose when you played well because the other team played better. In one sense, any defeat is a defeat (which sounds like something that the great Yogi Berra might have said), but in another sense it doesn't actually prove that you didn't play your best. Sometimes you do the best you can and you still don't win. That's how life is. There's a difference between failing and not succeeding.

The same thing goes for intelligence operations. It isn't possible for your intelligence to invariably learn everything that the enemy plans on doing. The default is no knowledge; anything beyond that is gravy. One expects that the intelligence services will do much better than nothing, but it is unreasonable to expect that they will predict absolutely everything that the enemy will do. If they don't predict an enemy operation, it may be that they screwed up, but it may simply be that the enemy played better that day. You can't ignore the fact that your enemy has capabilities and intent and the will to try to deceive you.

It is a truism of war that everyone makes mistakes but that the side which makes the fewest mistakes usually wins. By the same token, everyone gets handed surprises at one time or another, but the side which is surprised the fewest number of times generally wins. World War II surely proves that; the Germans pulled many surprises out of their hat (the invasion of France through the Ardennes, the attack on the USSR, the Battle of the Bulge) but were surprised far more often by the USSR, UK and US. The Japanese managed one big surprise in the war (Pearl Harbor) but were on the receiving end of many (the attack on Guadalcanal, island hopping tactics, the surprising range of the B-29, the use of incendiaries, atomic weapons).

Was there an intelligence failure last summer? I don't know. Neither do you. Only those who have access to classified information are capable of making that judgment. The mere fact that the September attack wasn't detected and foiled is not sufficient to prove that there was one, though.