This Saturday, we will remember the Americans who lost their lives during the Japanese Empire’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. 

This single offensive began America’s involvement in World War II and marked a significant shift in human history. 

Despite various warnings that the Japanese Imperial Fleet was on the move and an attack in the Pacific was possible, the general consensus believed the target would be British or Dutch possessions — or American forces in the Philippines. 

There was a lack of imagination on the American side about Pearl Harbor’s vulnerability — even though a decade-old American Navy exercise proved it could be attacked decisively.

Many assumed Pearl Harbor was too shallow for an aircraft-based torpedo attack. The theory was torpedoes would enter the water too fast, hit the seafloor, and explode. This was despite the British’s brilliant airborne torpedo attack which crippled an Italian battle fleet at Taranto a year earlier on November 11, 1940.

The Japanese had developed a shallow-run torpedo that would work in Pearl Harbor’s waters. They had also practiced with elaborate secrecy. They knew they would achieve complete surprise in delivering a devastating blow to the Pacific Fleet.

Pearl Harbor was a disaster, and a great shock for America, however we recovered and eventually won the war.

There are many aspects of the December 7, 1941, attack on which we should reflect, though. Pearl Harbor was the first of several shocking surprise attacks on modern democracies.

We should also consider the Yom Kippur War of October 6, 1973, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on October 7, 2023.

In all four cases, the democracies were caught by surprise even though there were indicators which warned us that bad things were about to happen.

The lessons are that even the best intelligence can be misread, people’s hopes can outweigh their common sense, and bureaucratic cultures can ignore inconvenient signals. 

We should do everything we can to have excellent intelligence systems to monitor all of our potential enemies.

When in doubt, we should prepare for the worst case, rather than the best hope. Three of the four examples – Pearl Harbor, Yom Kippur, and October 7 — could have gone much differently had the indicators been taken seriously.

The stunning terrorist stack on September 11, 2001, had a different lesson. After it happened, many defense specialists said they had never considered the possibility of terrorists using passenger planes to attack buildings. That was a sad commentary on their lack of imagination. 

In 1994, Tom Clancy wrote “Debt of Honor,” a best-selling novel in which an airliner was flown into the Capitol with devastating results. Clancy understood perfectly that a plane full of aviation fuel could be a weapon. Apparently, none of the experts read fiction — even if it related directly to their line of work.

Since surprises can happen even with the best analysis and preparation, we must also prepare for rapid response to minimize casualties and damage.

In the 1999 Hart Rudman Commission report, we argued that the greatest threat to the American people was a nuclear weapon going off in an American city. We suggested it would probably be the work of terrorists. We called for a Department of Homeland Security capable of dealing with up to three nuclear events on the same day. 

Sadly, that recommendation got translated into a bureaucratic quagmire which mashed a bunch of agencies together in a difficult-to-manage system. 

The recent disastrous failure to respond rapidly and effectively to the hurricane in the North Carolina mountains is a sad example of how far we are from a department capable of dealing with real challenges.

It is a fact of the human condition that we can and will be surprised again.

However, if we remember and study the surprises of the past, we can at least minimize the damage and maximize the speed and effectiveness of our response.

That is the real lesson of December 7, 1941.