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Counsel is one of the most important, least understood, and most elusive elements of politics in early modern France. Table talk in all households revolved around plots and schemes designed to further the lineage at the expense of one's neighbour. Plots were disguised as fair duels or chance encounters. Behind much of the surviving evidence of face-to-face killing in this period lies the hidden history of calculation and conspiracy. One of the best documented vengeance killings of the 17th century involving two feuding families provides a good opportunity to explore the dynamics of family decision making and group solidarity. This chapter also discusses ambush and surprise attacks, use of disguise and concealment to commit crime, and escape of those who committed the crime.

Beginning with a theoretical overview of surprise attacks, we discuss their important role in military strategy and success. We describe our case selection strategy, using criteria based on attacks that started a war, and subsequent events taken in response to those attacks. We discuss Roberta Wohlstetter’s pioneering and influential study of Pearl Harbor and describe the uniqueness of this case and why her argument about signal-to-noise ratio may be less relevant for other cases of intelligence failure. More often, high quality decision-making is impaired by specific obstacles in the psychological characteristics of leaders and the environments and organizations they structure.

This chapter starts by making the case that intelligence work is best viewed as a problem of the sociology of knowledge. Expanding on this insight, the chapter introduces the book's theoretical viewpoint, social constructivism, and details what is meant by ‘intelligence analysis’, in order to underscore its social nature. Then, a distinction is introduced between two types of strategic surprises: secrets and mysteries; this distinction is used to compare and contrast intelligence failures. Finally, the chapter introduces the intelligence cycle, a model of an agency's work that is used throughout the book to examine how the CIA's identity and culture impacts its work.

Like intervention, preventive war is another possible exception to the UN Charter prohibition of all war except defence against prior attack. 'Preemption' against an attack that is imminent is not preventive war and is widely accepted, but what the Bush Administration deceptively labelled ‘preemption is a doctrine of preventive war to eliminate weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Thomas Schelling famously demonstrated that the vicious circle of reciprocal fear of surprise attack created by the permissibility of preventive war makes the world far more dangerous. Although predatory terrorists will attack irrespective of whether they are threatened with attack, a policy that defines its enemies as sloppily and broadly as the Bush doctrine creates unnecessary enemies and thereby endangers the US.

Between 1967 and 1973 Israel's leadership believed that its military strength would deter the Arabs from launching a war to recapture the Golan Heights and Sinai. High-level discussions were held on the proper way to defend the borders according to an unwritten directive: “not one step.” The operational concept stated that in the event of war, even in the case of a surprise attack on two fronts, “the regulars would hold” because of Israel's deterrence, early warning, and overwhelming airpower. The following chapters describe Israel's national security doctrine regarding such issues as defense versus offense, the preemptive strike, and strategic depth. The main focus, however, is the tactical and operational analysis of the defensive battle in Sinai between October 6 and 15, 1973, and the missed opportunity to prevail in the defensive campaign on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal.

The introduction sets a theoretical framework for the study. It provides an overview of the role of surprise attack in military strategy and lists the main examples since 1939, chosen based on two criteria: attacks that started the war and attacks that were taken after it started, and their success or failure in achieving surprise. Reviewing the academic literature of surprise attacks, the introduction focuses on Wohlstetter’s pioneering and influential study of Pearl Harbor and explains the uniqueness of this case, which makes her main conclusions, primarily the noise-to-signal ratio explanation for the Japanese success, less relevant to the study of other warning failures. Analyzing the dynamics of other cases, the claim is made that the main cause of warning failure lies with specific obstacles to high-quality information processing created by the most influential individuals in the warning-response process, and set the study’s research agenda.

This chapter describes the surprise attack on Israel made by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in October 1973. The fighting erupted just past 2 p.m., Israel time, when thousands of Egyptian forces swarmed across the Suez Canal and Syrian tanks and troops struck in great force on the Golan Heights. Despite the Arabs' early success on the battlefield, Sadat had no intention of securing a military victory and fully expected that his forces would be overmatched as soon as Israel mobilized its reserves and recovered from the shock of the early hours of the war. This poses the question: If Sadat did not aim for a military victory against Israel, why did he take his country into a war that he knew he would lose?

This chapter focuses on epistemic vices that are character traits and, in particular, on the epistemic vice of closed-mindedness. The nature and significance of this epistemic vice is explained by reference of the failure of Israeli intelligence to anticipate the 1973 Yom Kippur surprise attack on Israel. Closed-mindedness is a high-fidelity epistemic vice, that is, one that requires a high degree of behavioural consistency. It is underpinned in many cases by a high need for closure and a low tolerance for ambiguity. Character accounts of epistemic vice are not undermined by situationism but they do need to acknowledge the insights of structuralism since flawed epistemic conduct can have structural as well as personal explanations.

Thanks to the misuse of language by the Bush Administration, many people now use ‘preemptive war’ to mean preventive war. The assumption that often underlies preventive war, that war is coming anyway, is frequently false; and war is fought needlessly. Americans specifically have historically considered preventive war incompatible with their identity. S. A. Silverstone suggests that the explanation of why preventive attacks seem more appealing today is that the international norm prohibiting preventive war is now being trumped by the newly emergent prohibition against nuclear proliferation, justifying preventive attacks against weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Such a practice could be safe only if it does not lead to the generalized reciprocal fear of surprise attack warned against by Thomas Schelling.