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The cold world they made : the strategic legacy of Roberta and Albert Wohlstetter
In the heady days of the Cold War, when the Bomb loomed large in the ruminations of Washington's wise men, policy intellectuals flocked to the home of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter to discuss deterrence and doomsday. The Cold World They Made takes a fresh look at the original power couple of strategic studies. Seeking to unravel the complex tapestry of the Wohlstetters' world and worldview, Ron Robin reveals fascinating insights into an unlikely husband-and-wife pair who, at the height of the most dangerous military standoff in history, gained access to the deepest corridors of American power. The author of such classic Cold War treatises as \"The Delicate Balance of Terror,\" Albert Wohlstetter is remembered for advocating an aggressive brinksmanship that stood in stark contrast with what he saw as weak and indecisive policies of Soviet containment. Yet Albert's ideas built crucially on insights gleaned from his wife. Robin makes a strong case for the Wohlstetters as a team of intellectual equals, showing how Roberta's scholarship was foundational to what became known as the Wohlstetter Doctrine. Together at RAND Corporation, Albert and Roberta crafted a mesmerizing vision of the Soviet threat, theorizing ways for the United States to emerge victorious in a thermonuclear exchange. Far from dwindling into irrelevance after the Cold War, the torch of the Wohlstetters' intellectual legacy was kept alive by well-placed disciples in George W. Bush's administration. Through their ideological heirs, the Wohlstetters' signature combination of brilliance and hubris continues to shape American policies.-- Provided by publisher
Book
Spying blind
In this pathbreaking book, Amy Zegart provides the first scholarly examination of the intelligence failures that preceded September 11. Until now, those failures have been attributed largely to individual mistakes. But Zegart shows how and why the intelligence system itself left us vulnerable.
Zegart argues that after the Cold War ended, the CIA and FBI failed to adapt to the rise of terrorism. She makes the case by conducting painstaking analysis of more than three hundred intelligence reform recommendations and tracing the history of CIA and FBI counterterrorism efforts from 1991 to 2001, drawing extensively from declassified government documents and interviews with more than seventy high-ranking government officials. She finds that political leaders were well aware of the emerging terrorist danger and the urgent need for intelligence reform, but failed to achieve the changes they sought. The same forces that have stymied intelligence reform for decades are to blame: resistance inside U.S. intelligence agencies, the rational interests of politicians and career bureaucrats, and core aspects of our democracy such as the fragmented structure of the federal government. Ultimately failures of adaptation led to failures of performance. Zegart reveals how longstanding organizational weaknesses left unaddressed during the 1990s prevented the CIA and FBI from capitalizing on twenty-three opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot.
Spying Blind is a sobering account of why two of America's most important intelligence agencies failed to adjust to new threats after the Cold War, and why they are unlikely to adapt in the future.
eBook
A historic lesson on security still rings true 40 years later
To make his point, he distributed copies of the foreword to a 40- year-old book explaining how the U.S. government failed to anticipate the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In that brief introductory essay, a Harvard professor named Thomas Schelling wrote the following: \"Surprise, when it happens to a government, is likely to be a complicated, diffuse, bureaucratic thing. It includes neglect of responsibility, but also responsibility so poorly defined or so ambiguously delegated that action gets lost. It includes gaps in intelligence, but also intelligence that, like a string of pearls too precious to wear, is too sensitive to give to those who need it. ... It includes the unalert watchman, but also the one who knows he'll be chewed out by his superior if he gets [the] higher authority out of bed.\" The book itself, \"Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision\" by Roberta Wohlstetter, backs up those conclusions with 400 pages of excruciating detail and explains how it is possible to have a lot of information -- as we did in December of 1941 and again last year -- and be unable to convert it into useful knowledge.
Newsletter
Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor analyst ; Award-winning study detailed intelligence failures
Roberta Wohlstetter, whose prize-winning 1962 study of intelligence failures leading to Japan's 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor has reverberated in national security discussions for decades and influenced the final report of the 9/11 commission, died of complications of pneumonia Jan. 6 in a New York City hospital. She was 94. Wohlstetter described a predicament in which the government was unable to distinguish important \"signals,\" including decoded Japanese cables and ship movements, from \"noise,\" the blizzard of conflicting or erroneous information that confronted policymakers, military leaders and intelligence officials in the weeks and months preceding the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Newspaper Article
Work cited by 9/11 commission
Wohlstetter, an analyst with the RAND Corp., the policy research group, from 1948 to 1965, examined 15 signals that in retrospect clearly seemed to foretell the Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941. Yet, she wrote: \"It is hard to keep in mind that there were many plausible alternative hypotheses that might have explained this set of signals. Most of the partisan reviews of the Pearl Harbor material forget these alternative explanations.\" That assessment has been cited by scholars as an argument to rebut critics of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, including some Republicans in the 1944 election, who said Roosevelt knew that the attack was coming but did nothing to stop it to rally the country behind entering the Second World War.
Newspaper Article
THE WORK OF INTELLIGENCE
THIS CHAPTER HAS FOUR SECTIONS. The first section makes the case that intelligence is a social problem, a recognition that has significant implications for the work of the CIA. The second section introduces the theoretical viewpoint, social constructivism, and explains why it is well suited to investigate the CIA’s work. In sum, this is because intelligence work happens not merely in the minds of individual analysts but in a distinctive community, the CIA. This section also spends time illuminating the details of exactly what is meant by “intelligence work,” especially “intelligence analysis,” to demonstrate its essentially social nature. The third
Book Chapter
Roberta Wohlstetter, 94, Military Policy Analyst
''What does Pearl Harbor tell us about the possibility of a surprise attack today, with possible consequences of an even greater and perhaps more fatal magnitude?'' Mrs. Wohlstetter asked 45 years ago in her book ''Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision'' (Stanford University Press). In 1963, Columbia University gave her the Bancroft Prize for American history. In 1985, Mrs. Wohlstetter and her husband, Albert, an analyst of nuclear proliferation at RAND, received the Medal of Freedom from President Ronald Reagan ''for their great contributions to the security of the United States.'' ''If the study of Pearl Harbor has anything to offer for the future, it is this,'' Mrs. Wohlstetter wrote in her book: ''We have to accept the fact of uncertainty and live with it. No magic, in code or otherwise, will provide certainty.''
Newspaper Article
OBITUARIES; Roberta Wohlstetter, 94; wrote Pearl Harbor study
A longtime resident of Los Angeles, Wohlstetter was a researcher for Rand Corp. when she wrote \"Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision,\" a classic in its field that explained why the United States and its leaders were caught unawares by the catastrophe that drew the nation into World War II. Wohlstetter described a predicament in which the government was unable to distinguish important \"signals,\" including decoded Japanese cables and ship movements, from \"noise,\" the blizzard of conflicting or erroneous information that confronted policymakers, military leaders and intelligence officials in the weeks and months preceding the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She began to work on the Pearl Harbor study in the mid-1950s, drawing largely on 39 volumes of congressional hearings on the attack published in 1946. Meticulous in its detail, it offered a convincing argument against simplistic blame-laying, even though, as Wohlstetter wrote, \"Never before have we had so complete an intelligence picture of the enemy.\"
Newspaper Article
Roberta M. Wohlstetter; Military Intelligence Expert
Mrs. Wohlstetter, a historian of military intelligence, explained in her 1962 book \"Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision'' how analysts failed to sort the important signals about an impending attack from the overwhelming noise of irrelevant information. Although intelligence analysts had broken the Japanese diplomatic code, that information was so highly classified and jealously guarded that it was never shared with those who could have acted on the information. \"[Roberta Morgan Wohlstetter] and [Albert Wohlstetter] are to national security what Will and Ariel Durant were to history,\" said Henry D. Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, where Mrs. Wohlstetter served on the board. \"She was the go-to, both for Albert and for anyone seeking sound counsel.\" In 1975, after India surprised the world by detonating a nuclear device, Mrs. Wohlstetter, with her husband and other colleagues, published a 400-page study for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency about the military dangers posed by the international spread of nuclear activities. \"Moving Towards Life in a Nuclear Armed Crowd?\" is credited with influencing changes in U.S. energy export policies.
Newspaper Article