Are Intelligence Failures Still Inevitable?

02 Sep, 2025

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08850607.2023.2214328

Are Intelligence Failures Still Inevitable?

Crossposting audience: This is a new subreddit at r/zeronarcissists, the first anti-narcissism subreddit based on scientific evidence as far as I can tell. Please give us a follow at the original sub! We are new and growing.

There will be accurate signals in a pipeline before a significant failure. Why it is missed is clearly not being resolved by merely technological/methodological fixes. A deeper analysis of the analysis itself is required, including who does the analyzing and their pathologies and mental issues.

First, there will always be accurate signals in the “pipeline” before a significant failure of intelligence. Second, intelligence failures are inevitable. Combined, these propositions motivate much intellectual activity in the field of intelligence studies: to devise effective ways to use available information and analysis to avoid failures of intelligence, especially those leading to strategic surprise.

Devising effective ways to use good information is not replaced by simply having good information. If the people using it are not effective, good information will be squandered again and again and bad information may even be treated as good information.

First, there will always be accurate signals in the “pipeline” before a significant failure of intelligence; that is, analysts will possess the accurate information needed to anticipate what is about to transpire. Second, intelligence failures are inevitable. Combined, these propositions motivate much intellectual activity in the field of intelligence studies: to devise effective ways to use available information and analysis to avoid failures of intelligence, especially those leading to strategic surprise.

Minimizing the impact of cognitive limitations and organizational pathologies became critical after December 7, 1941

The Director of National Intelligence are found in efforts to “fix” problems that had led to intelligence failures before the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the September 11, 2001, terror attack against the United States. Others search for some sort of theoretical innovation or insight that might help minimize the impact of the cognitive limitations and organizational pathologies that in the long run make the occurrence of intelligence failure, strategic surprise, and war inevitable.

Many times the fact that intelligence was surprised is surprising, if not disappointing and in some cases horrifying.

Betts began a 1980 article in Political Science Quarterly by rejecting the simplest explanation for why sudden attacks succeed: Most major wars since 1939 have begun with surprise attacks. Hindsight reveals that the element of surprise in most of these attacks was unwarranted; substantial evidence of an impending strike was available to the victims before the fact. The high incidence of surprise is itself surprising.

Using process of elimination, officers could have found the grid where Oahu was targeted before December 7.

the final volume of the commission’s report provided a history of what officers and policymakers knew in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor and how they responded to the information and directives they received. The culminating message of the report was that policymakers and officers could have anticipated that Oahu was at grave risk by December 1941. The idea that accurate information about what is about to transpire can always be found within the intelligence pipeline is an idea that originated in this penultimate Pearl Harbor investigation. It is a lesson that continues to reverberate in American strategic culture and the field of intelligence studies.

Never even reaching the analysts means that there are issues in organizational and individual pathology; if there is collective narcissism, it is especially likely that critical information will be minimized for aggravating upsetting vulnerability which narcissists always suppress, repress, and deny. If there are many of these individuals, this information stands next to no chance. Thus, collective narcissism is the worst possible environment for intelligence.

It served as a corrective to the conventional wisdom that U.S. analysts should have seen the Japanese attack coming based on available information.11 Unlike the nincompoops who populate the pages of the report of the congressional committee, the analysts and officers who populate the pages of Wohlstetter’s book struggle to separate the “wheat from the chaff” to develop actionable intelligence. Further complicating matters is the fact that signals might remain trapped as raw intelligence—intercepted encoded communications, human intelligence reports, purloined documents—that never reaches analysts waiting for decoding or analysis until they are overtaken by events.

Recent scholarship has even suggested that this signals to noise ratio is getting worse. The data deluge produced by the Information Revolution is overwhelming citizens and analysts alike, making it increasingly difficult to not only issue accurate warnings of threatening events, but to also develop accurate situational awareness

Hierarchical and fragmented bureaucracies retard communications and block dissemination and coordination.

“For example, [Barton] Whaley lists eightyfour warnings available to Stalin before Hitler’s invasion, ranging from reconnaissance overflights, through tips from Soviet and Polish spies, to German leaks. While many sources of surprise lie in the attacker’s skill in deception and operational innovation, orthodox studies emphasize the victim’s mistakes—how interactions of organization, psychology, and inherent ambiguity of information create pathologies in the process of absorbing and reacting to indicators. For example, hierarchical and fragmented bureaucracies retard communications and block dissemination and coordination; individuals along the line misunderstand or transmute the implications of messages; ambient “noise” from irrelevant data obscures the significance of revealing signals; or false alarms feed a “cry wolf” syndrome.”

There were a great deal of individuals in Phoenix learning to fly that made it to the FBI headquarters only a few months before 911. The FBI in Phoenix blew it off. 9-11 occurred.

Sometimes these estimates can be eerily prophetic, albeit somewhat incomplete. The so-called Phoenix memo written by a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) field agent in July 2001, for instance, warned about a large number of individuals from the Middle East attending flight schools in Arizona and that this situation required additional investigation.17 The Phoenix memo circulated within FBI headquarters, but was never shown to the FBI director, or provided to the White House or transmitted to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).18 The memo was never subjected to analysis or fusion with other information and it failed to lead to any action, although its discovery after the 11 September 2001 (9/11) terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon led to recrimination and much regret.

The systems being “blinking red” shows the problem of suppression and repression of critical conditions/information before the fact. Why would anything competent suppress/repress? Gross incompetence is the only possible conclusion; but these signs are not apparent because they are not merely based in intelligence. Personality disorders are often the real culprit.

Indeed, it is probably not uncommon before the occurrence of strategic surprise attacks for “systems to be blinking red” to paraphrase the way George Tenet, the director of the CIA, characterized intelligence reporting in the months leading up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.20

A successful prevention occurred but even then they couldn’t get the President to take it seriously, who thought he knew better. He was wrong. The attack happened, and no preemptive action that could have saved lives occurred. Sometimes the appearance of a “inside job” is merely gross incompetence due to preexisting personality disorders such as narcissism which overestimates its skill in determining what to do with information. The unbelievable failure to act raises suspicion, but in many cases it is narcissism, which can lead to real and unbelievable to witness gross incompetence. Thus the need to study denial and gaslighting in narcissists in much more detail.

, Charles Allen, the National Intelligence Officer for Warning, issued a “warning of war” memorandum, highlighting that Iraq would soon be capable of launching a corps-sized operation that could occupy much of Kuwait. On 26 July, Allen visited the National Security Council to provide satellite imagery demonstrating the extent of the Iraqi military buildup.22 Allen succeeded in producing an actionable warning about eight days before the invasion occurred, albeit one that did not prompt the George H.W. Bush administration to take preemptive action to head off Saddam Hussein’s scheme to occupy Kuwait.

Actionable intelligence was included in the Phoenix memo, showing form when something isn’t viewed as important to someone with a pathology doesn’t matter

The reporting contained in the Phoenix memo, which was written by FBI Special Agent Kenneth Williams, contained “actionable intelligence” that could have been used to head off the 9/11 disaster.24 The Hovey memorandum also painted an accurate picture of the looming Tet offensive, two months before the attack materialized at the end of January 1968.

Definitions of “high quality” have to be assessed for scientific, logical, unbiased, effective and responsive accuracy. Otherwise narcissistic criteria may not allow critical information to pass, leading to individuals kicking themselves in the future.

He does believe that “high-quality warning,” which by definition is both accurate and credible, is likely to be acted on effectively by policymakers, thereby avoiding the panoply of intelligence pathologies and idiosyncrasies that lead to surprise attack and intelligence failure.

Acting quickly is just as important as knowing what you are acting on. Getting it wrong can show serious weaknesses in enemy intelligence in terms of who they do and don’t realize is important and who will and won’t be detected/taken seriously. Thus enemies may target people not being taken seriously, profiting on mental weakness in personality disorders, especially narcissism after studying the enemy for these weaknesses in bias.

For example, even with the aid of hindsight and the cataloged and organized collection of the evidence available to policymakers before the 9/11 terror attacks, it really is impossible to point to evidence that was available ex ante that would produce actionable intelligence that meets Dahl’s requirement. Al-qaeda was identified as the threat (who), various reasons could be suggested for carrying out the threat (why), and the betting money was that the threat was imminent (when). Nevertheless, without knowing what form the attack would take or where it would occur, policymakers failed to act as the intelligence picture slowly gained fidelity. Eventually, time ran out.

Signals are not the only reason why these preventative measures occur. Attending the signals is the critical factor. If there are incompetent points of action making judgments they are not supposed to make instead of cleaning the information and passing it on (mistaking judgment for cleaning), it will never make it to consciousness in the organization.

Nevertheless, the existence of this methodological bias in no way disconfirms Betts’s observation that timely and accurate signals can always be found in the intelligence pipeline. Put somewhat differently, the presence of timely and accurate signals in a successful response to a surprise initiative does not demonstrate the absence of signals in instances of intelligence failure.

There is no such thing as “perfect information” and believing all informational information can be siphoned out by a given process is informational narcissism. All evidence points to there always being at least a little noise no matter what method you use, and to suggest otherwise is certainly fraud.

By contrast, most warning situations are like a glass half full, a mix of accurate signals and noise, not a glass completely full, which might be thought of as “a set of indicators so unambiguous that scant room for doubt is left.”

Excessive denial of clear and obvious information may be signs of imminent attack or internal agents being bought off for imminent attack. The key is saving lives instead of going with whatever disgruntled anger/rage these individuals are in.

. Second, observers tend to downplay the “sportin’ assumption” inherent in intelligence work—the idea that opponents would use denial and deception to really “make a game of it” by doing everything in their power to hide their intentions from their opponent.

However, excessive reliance on form when other external sources check and balance the information in ways that statistically suggest its inaccuracy shows the gross incompetence of assuming there is “one pure pipeline” of information. Information should be able to check out in multiple ways, factoring in the costs of deliberately devaluing external agents with malicious motives before the analysis. In fact, disallowing these checks and balances to information can be a sign of an imminent threat in itself.

In other words, denial and deception are always a possibility and if information appears clear and compelling, there is a chance that the opponent wants this information to appear clear and compelling.

After all, moving the Japanese grid matrix south and east by one square would place the coordinates “AF” over Honolulu, broken desalinization plants notwithstanding.

Arresting innocent people trying to prevent a terror attack is a good way for an opponent to suss out just how non-intelligent the adversary is. If the evidence was so little, and the arrest so certain, ultra-reliance on those incompetence pieces of the intelligence network will see a lot of wrong information sliding through unchecked and unchallenged.

When it comes to preempting terrorists, officials risk little more than bad publicity or possibly compromising sources and methods if they happen to inadvertently arrest innocent people.

Areas known to have sleeper cells have people who literally exist to map out intelligence systems. They watch how to buy credibility and buy it specifically to cash out on it. This is the error of failing to have checks and balances, and a refusal to accept checks and balances and an extreme reliance on mere credibility vs. logical and statistical likelihood/accuracy should be a key area of serious suspicion.

. A focus on the Pearl Harbor–Midway comparison also obfuscates the fact that others have provided timely and accurate warnings of what was about to happen that nearly met Dahl’s requirement of actionable intelligence (the Hovey memorandum) or fully met the requirement (Allen’s warning of an Iraqi invasion) or might have prompted some sort of useful action (Phoenix memo). After all, the intelligence systems prior to the 9/11 terror attacks and Pearl Harbor were both “blinking red.”

Pipeline purists are the weak link if the points of entry of information are extremely weak and have narcissistic denial/corruption of information problems. Statistical methods can take any amount of “dirty data” and clean out the noise. Multiple types of these methods should be compared and contrasted as well.

First, accurate information, analysis, warnings, and various types of finished intelligence will have no discernible impact if they fail to reach decisionmakers in time for them to act on that intelligence. Timely warning, actionable or otherwise, must flow to decisionmakers for a response to occur. Second, decisionmakers who receive warning must realize that they are responsible for acting in response to that warning.

Low responsiveness is also the weak link. Even with excellent, almost perfect information, someone with insufficient responsiveness will still fumble.

If policymakers fail to receive warning or fail to realize that they are in fact responsible for leading a response, “intelligence failure” will occur regardless of the accuracy of the information held by analysts or the quality and credibility of their estimates. Ironically, both Levite and Dahl’s work suggests that it is variability in the reception and receptivity to warning, not the presence or absence of superior information, that helps to distinguish intelligence failure from intelligence success.

The siphoning of “perfect information” does not itself create “perfect information consumption”; each agent who has a part in comprehending the issue will corrupt “perfect information” all the way up the chain if these parts are neglected due to being viewed as “unimportant pieces” of the situation. An example I recently came across is “decisionmaker syndrome” where the way a non-decisionmaker is treated can affect whether or not it ever gets to a decisionmaker. This can be mere narcissism, but it also can be deserved. For instance, in the 50s it was not untold for secretaries to be hired specifically because they were far more competent than their bosses and did all the work. Later, wage crime would fix the situation and put at least a few of the women in the positions they were due–but it is still awful to this day, with only 10% of women CEOS. In general, if you treated the secretary poorly in these situations, you could be assured that your business would not be selected. Of course, some of these individuals did not deserve this assessment and were merely narcissists, but many of them did, especially many women.

Curing some pathologies with organizational reforms often creates new pathologies or resurrects old ones; perfecting intelligence production does not necessarily lead to perfecting intelligence consumption; making warning systems more sensitive reduces the risk of surprise but increases the number of false alarms, which in turn reduces sensitivity.

Testing for pandering to power and the ability to even basically state those in power could be in the wrong and those not in power could be in the right was critical in intelligence with Iran, showing the nearly debilitating effect of narcissists who always think power is in the right (narcissists have excessive dog-eat-dog thinking).

News of this key finding, however, prompted an eruption of partisan political acrimony as supporters of sanctions against Iran cried “politicization,” while those seeking a more accommodative approach congratulated analysts for ending their practice of pandering to power. In other words, getting it right and getting it wrong led to the same outcome—political acrimony, charges of politicization, and calls for additional intelligence reform

Analytical skill at every point is the key. Even with a perfect organization, if there is any point where those who have not had their analytical skill trained are receiving critical information, it doesn’t matter how “respectful” they are. In fact, excessive reliance on hierarchy incentivizes narcissism and has a squashing effect on bottom up information, which is where any good information about things unknown is going to come from (primarily inductive).

In contrast, intelligence reform rarely focuses on improvements in intelligence tradecraft, or empowering analysts, or increasing the flow of information or debate about ongoing estimates within and across organizations. As Douglas MacEachin has observed, this focus on organizational solutions at the expense of improved analysis can create a situation whereby old problems are simply sent “to live in new residences.

Stalin’s narcissistic denial in the obvious signs of Hitler’s invasion show high potential for explaining what has previously gone explain; failure to respond.

While these scholars admit that the availability of signals and the quality of analysis and warning available prior to an attack or incident can vary, they also assume, like Betts, that signals will be present in the intelligence pipeline prior to surprise and intelligence failure. These scholars focus on explaining why it is so hard to get policymakers to respond to warning.4

Information in organizational design heavy institutions vs. analytically empowered institutions causes narcissism of the organization where it is more interested in its own survival as a design than it is to actually doing its job.

Organizational affiliation influences the facets of an issue that draws bureaucrats’ attention, members of an agency tend to take on their organization’s interests as their own (e.g., what’s good for General Motors is good for America), bureaucrats defend their organizational.

Personality disorders can literally kill people when they “rear their ugly heads” in these institutions, especially narcissism.

Bureaucratic infighting becomes a proxy for the real issues at stake, stemming from wounded amour-propre, while sheer stupidity, personality disorders, and other physical ailments rear their ugly heads.50 Individuals’ preferences and personalities influence outcomes, especially their response to information that threatens their organizational and personal priorities.

Several devastating surprise attacks were the result of this organizational narcissism.

As Bar-Joseph and McDermott note, in the case of Operation Barbarossa, Chinese intervention in the Korean War, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Soviet, U.S., and Israeli forces, respectively, suffered devastating surprise attacks despite the fact that senior officers, officials, and analysts received scores of increasingly ominous warnings, informal estimates, and finished intelligence products indicating what was about to unfold.51 Instead of having a logical impact on policy, these indicators were blocked, ignored, or explained away by some analysts and leaders, producing disaster.

A need for cognitive closure (sometimes associated with autism), paranoia and narcissism are identified as confirmation bias that prevents them from integrating new information into their existing expectations (deductive heavy, without doing due diligence to inductive; healthy analyticity shows strength in both, not just one.)

The source of this situation is found in individuals’ need for cognitive closure (maintaining certainty about policies selected and the likely course of future events), paranoia, and narcissism, which fuels a confirmation bias that prevents them from integrating new, discrepant information into their existing expectations and theories about the future.

Because of Stalin’s narcissism, there was incredible fear all the way up the information pipeline to tell him about impending attack. Because he thought he was gifted with competencies in fields he was not, because he loathed certain identities without reason, and because he genuinely believed he was the most intelligent in the room and the ultimate decisionmaker in most cases, he genuinely missed all the signs of Hitler’s attack. It is one of the most bizarre examples of narcissistic denial in history, completely denying in the face of obvious incoming evidence. His narcissism was the only explanation.

Before Operation Barbarossa, for example, the conspiratorially minded Joseph Stalin surrounded himself with sycophants whose modus operandi was “sniff out, suck up, survive.” Stalin suspected that provocateurs were behind increasingly dire warnings of impending attack. Under these circumstances, only the bravest officers and government officials would bring Stalin unpleasant information about Nazi preparations to invade the Soviet Union, and the “boss” generally responded to these indications and warnings with an order to shoot the reporting official as a traitor.

Afraid of MacArthur’s narcissism that his strategy was not as strong as he thought it was, information about an incoming attack was sugarcoated and lead to complete failure since, due to the sugarcoating, he thought he didn’t have to take it seriously.

As a result, officers and analysts who should have transmitted warnings sugarcoated reporting that indicated that the People’s Liberation Army had moved across the Yalu in force and would ambush UN troops as they continued north. MacArthur and his staff failed to act on this intelligence. As a result, U.S. units were forced to undertake the longest retreat in U.S. military history.

One central intelligence officer decided that attack in a certain way was unlikely, and therefore lied about a whole body of incoming data being turned on. This is the problem of a narcissist in high power being in charge of the lives of other people.

Elia Zeira, director of Israeli Military Intelligence. Zeira believed in the “concept,” the idea that without air superiority, Egypt would not attack Israel. Zeira believed so strongly in the concept that he felt no need to activate a clandestine penetration of the Egyptian telephone network, which allowed the Israelis to listen to discussions among Egyptian officials and officers. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Zeira did not think that the time had arrived to risk detection of the phone taps by activating them. Instead of telling Israeli officials of his decision, he simply told them that the system had detected nothing. After the war, Israeli officials were shocked to hear from the investigating Argranat Commission that the reason why the phone taps detected no indication of attack was because Zeira had never activated the system

“It is wrong for the field of intelligence studies to assume that analysts and policymakers share at least a modicum of intelligence, professional competency, and do not suffer from some mental pathology.”

Indeed, the real “miracle at Midway” might not have been the availability of accurate signals and quality intelligence, but the presence of a high-functioning staff and a commander who managed to act effectively on available warning, which happens to be the most important lesson revealed when Dahl and Levite “process traced” success. The insights provided by Bar-Joseph and McDermott are thus important—it is wrong for the field of intelligence studies to assume that analysts and policymakers share at least a modicum of intelligence, professional competency, and do not suffer from some mental pathology. Nevertheless, their work does make a convincing case that more items should be added to the Pandora’s Box of problems that make intelligence failures inevitable.

“Dominant schema” as deductive narcissism (failure to check and balance, or overtly even preventing checking and balancing) is one sign of incoming intelligence failure.

Moreover, within the analytical process and the intelligence– policy nexus, there are also signs that untoward and unanticipated events might be imminent—indicators that often emerge when the system “is blinking red.” Persistent discussions about the same unusual activities, which drift around among different observers housed in separate offices or agencies, is one sign that analysts are encountering developments that are not conforming to dominant schema.

Credibility attacks and narcissistic contempt can be seen describing the incoming accurate information and serves later as a reason why it was ignored.

Rumors that the opponent is contemplating fantastic or “harebrained” schemes and the emergence of “dissenters” who champion disturbing views or hold contrarian opinions about the “consensus view” are all indications that it is time for analysts, intelligence managers, and policymakers to take matters especially seriously.

Reassessing success can be seen in threatening or even hurting/taking action against an individual who “got it right” and a push can ensue to try to remove them from the situation so the illicit activity/spying/potential attack can continue to fester. (Matching dates in terrorism, for example)

. Instead, they could adopt modest and relatively low-cost changes in alert postures, standard operating procedures, intelligence surveillance, and reconnaissance activities or even diplomatic activities and public diplomacy that might potentially force an opponent to reassess their prospects of success, especially their prospects of gaining the element of surprise

The stinginess of narcissism also causes action that could be taken without the high cost they suggest it must always have (Draconian terms) to not be taken, risking and even destroying lives that could’ve been saved.

By not painting the requirements, risks, and costs of response in such draconian terms, it just might be possible to increase competent policymakers’ receptivity to what will be inevitably less than certain or compelling signals, analysis, and warning of an opponent’s impending action.

Signals are not enough; narcissism, analytical skill, mental issues, etc., all have a compounded corrupting effect on information and preventative action up streamlined processes. A signal-quality heavy analysis is very weak if these other factors are not factored in. For instance, George Bush not taking the Kuwait memo seriously shows even a perfect report will be ignored by someone without the capacity to take it seriously due to narcissistic blocks about their limitations.

In any event, it is time to move on; if signals (or even useful analysis and warnings) are a constant, they cannot explain the variations in outcomes between intelligence failure and intelligence success.

Furthering “don’t piss off the secretary” theory, just because someone is in a position of decisionmaking doesn’t mean they are a good decisionmaker and the one that ultimately makes the best decisions at that organization (issues with misogyny, issues with underpayment and failure to recognize are all narcissism problems fundamentally)

On the other hand, those who address the proposition concerning the inevitability of intelligence failure focus on the decisionmaker as the critical variable. Bar-Joseph and McDermott suggest that it is a mistake to assume that decisionmakers will respond in a rational and effective way to accurate and compelling signals, analysis, or warning.

Receptivity to warning is the key requirement for effective action. Narcissism hates vulnerability and thus has a block when finding out about vulnerability. Thus, narcissism is endangering and can result in bizarre and extremely incompetent denial.

When combined, these two lines of effort suggest that receptivity to warning is the fulcrum on which the paradox of intelligence failure rests.

Signal quality and data analysis are not even remotely sufficient for effective response. Other factors are critical.

It was not just the presence of high-quality signals in the intelligence pipeline that guaranteed success. Instead, it was the ability of the defenders of Midway to complete the entire process of collection, analysis, warning, and response that produced success.

Extreme projection is a huge issue, and the paper validates narcissism is a huge problem in this field.

By contrast, as Bar-Joseph and McDermott suggest, this process can be sabotaged by leaders who project their own personal or policy desires, character flaws, or mental disorders onto those around them, while others have suggested that a general failure to recognize the urgency of a warning situation, and a general reluctance to take costly action in response to warning of uncertain accuracy, stymies effective response

Rational, effective, and unbiased traits were critical fixes to narcissism. Overcorrecting for bias just created new biases, showing the importance of rational and effective.

In other words, intelligence was used effectively at Midway because it benefited from effective and unbiased staff work that targeted the right individual for support and a decisionmaker who not only knew they were responsible for acting on warning, but who was also capable of using warning in a rational way to improve their chances of heading off disaster.

A full picture of the information ecosystem, especially narcissism at critical points of leadership, resolves the problem. Checks and balances are not “just for civil” cases. They are a critical feature of good information. It was not included by mistake. Failure to understand the reasoning shows comprehension problems that belie narcissistic endangerment.

Intelligence failure is still inevitable, but those who consider the warning and response problem in its entirety can create a situation whereby intelligence failure and an associated surprise attack become less likely.