McNair Paper Number 52, Chapter 6, Notes, October 1996
1. Jules Henri Poincar( (1854-1912) was perhaps the first to develop a mathematically rigorous basis for believing that physical systems could exhibit long-term unpredictability [Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 64-72]. However, the significance of Poincar('s work "was fully understood only in 1954, as a result of the work of the Russian academician A. N. Kolmogorov, with later additions by two other Russians, Vladimir Arnold and J. Moser (the three being known collectively as KAM)" [John Briggs and F. David Peat, Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 41-42]. The current view of nonlinear dynamics is that the detailed behavior of nonlinear systems in their "chaotic" regions is unpredictable.
2. "The greatest obstacle to the establishment of the theory of evolution was the fact that evolution cannot be observed directly like the phenomena of physics, such as a falling stone or boiling water, or any other process that takes place in seconds, minutes, or hours during which ongoing changes can be carefully recorded" [Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1982), 310].
3. For a poignant account of the visceral impact that news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had on most Americans, see Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 229-231. And while Ardrey's views of human behavior have been much maligned, he was certainly right to connect the universality and depth of the feelings most Americans experienced when they heard of the attack to evolutionary biology.
4. Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 387.
5. Ibid., 1-2. Wohlstetter noted, however, that the nontechnical meaning of the word "signal" cited had been inspired by and was compatible with "its usage in the contemporary theory of information" (ibid.). This comment requires some clarification. In the mathematical theory of communication developed by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, information is a measure of one's freedom of choice when selecting a message, not a measure of its meaning [Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1949), 8-9]. It is precisely this association of the information content of communications processes with uncertainty, rather than with meaning, that enabled Shannon to show that information could be represented mathematically by an equation having the same form as Ludwig Boltzmann's famous equation for the entropy or disorder of a thermodynamic system (ibid., 27 and 48-51).
6. Wohlstetter, 31 and 382-384. To the six categories of signals cited, Wohlstetter added a seventh: public and classified information on American plans, intentions, moves, and military vulnerabilities (ibid., 384). Her point was that in the final months and weeks preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. evaluations of the accumulating signals could not be done in isolation from what was being done by or intended on the American side.
9. Ibid., 55, 387, and 392. The interwoven phenomena of noise obscuring relevant signals or rendering their interpretation problematic have been persistent features of cases of strategic surprise since Pearl Harbor. For unambiguous evidence of relevant "signals" being lost in background "noise" during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, see Dino A. Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball, ed. Robert F. McCort (New York: Random House, 1990 and 1991), 145 and 153. Evidence of surrounding noise making the interpretation of signals the main problem is evident in the 1973 Arab attack on Israel and Iraq's 1990 seizure of Kuwait (both of which are discussed later in this section).
10Wohlstetter, 393.
11. Ibid., 354-355. The deployment of the U.S. Pacific fleet to Pearl Harbor in the spring of 1940 was seen in Washington as a deterrent, whereas the Japanese saw a target (ibid., 89).
13. Ibid., 360-361. The devil lay in the details. Unbeknownst to American intelligence, the Japanese had found ways to extend the range of the Zero just enough to reach targets in Manila from Formosa.
16. Avi Shlaim, "Failures in National Intelligence Estimates: The Case of the Yom Kippur War," reprinted in The Art and Practice of Military Strategy, ed. George E. Thibault (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1984), 380 and 381. This article originally appeared in the April 1976 issue of World Politics.
17. Richard K. Betts, Surprise Attack: Lessons for Defense Planning (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1982), 75, note 95. For example, as late as 3 October 1973 the Defense Intelligence Agency assessed the force build-ups on the Syrian and Egyptian fronts as coincidental rather than related and "not designed to lead to major hostilities" (ibid.). The Central Intelligence Agency clung to a similar position as late as 5 October.
18. Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch, Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War (New York: The Free Press, 1990), 105 and 108.
19. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf with Peter Petre, The Auobiography: It Doesn't Take a Hero (New York: Linda Grey/Bantam Books, 1992), 294; Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals' War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), 7 and 26.
20. "If the study of Pearl Harbor has anything to offer the future, it is this: We have to accept the fact of uncertainty and learn to live with it." (Wohlstetter, 401). "The search for an infallible system of advance warning of an attack is the search for a will-o'-the-wisp" (Shlaim, 402). "Intelligence failures are not only inevitable, they are natural. . . . [T]he intractability of the inadequacy of intelligence, and its inseparability from mistakes in decision, suggests one final conclusion that is perhaps most outrageously fatalistic of all: tolerance for disaster" (Richard K. Betts, "Analysis, War, and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures Are Inevitable," reprinted in Thibault, ed., 378-379). "History does not encourage the potential victims of surprise attack. One can only hope to reduce the severity, to be only partly surprised, to issue clearer and more timely warnings, to gain a few days for better preparations, and to be more adequately prepared to minimize the damage once a surprise attack occurs" [Ephrain Kam, Surprise Attack: The Victim's Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 233].
22. Cohen and Gooch, 119. The likelihood that the Egyptians and Syrians intended to go to war in May 1973 but were stopped at the last minute by the Soviets is based on classified research by a number of prominent members of the Israeli intelligence community into their own files.
23. The intractability of the traveling salesman or Steiner shortest network problem is as follows. As the number of cities to be visited, n, increases, the number of calculations required to solve the problem increases with more rapidlyCin fact by an exponential function of n. With these sorts of problems, solutions eventually become infeasible using all currently known methods because the times required to solve themusing the fastest computers conceivable soon exceeds human, or even cosmic, time scales. For a summary of recent efforts to circumvent this kind of intractability by relaxing the requirement that the accuracy of the calculated result be counded by an arbitrarily small error threshold, see Joseph F. Traub and Henryk Wo(niakowski, "Breaking Intractability," Scientific American, January 1994, 102-107. Whether or not more efficient solutions exist to the class of "hard" problems represented by the Steiner problem remains "the preeminent problem in theoretical computer science" (Marshall W. Bern and Ronald L. Graham, "The Shortest Network Problem," Scientific American, January 1989, 88).
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