This page needs to be proofread.
| TIME PERIOD | EVENT | QUOTE | CITATION | REMARKS |
| WORLD WAR II | D-Day, the Invasion at Normandy, 1944 | All along the chain of German command the continuing bad weather acted like a tranquilizer. The various headquarters were quite confident that there would be no attack in the immediate future. Their reasonning was based on carefully assessed weather evaluation that had been made of the Allied landings in North Africa, Italy and Sicily. In each case conditions had varied, but meteorologists like Stobe and his chief in Berlin, Ok. Karl Sonntag, had noted that the Allied had never attempted a landing unless the prospects of favorable weather were almost certain, particularly for covering air operations. To the methodical German mind there was no deviation from this rule: the weather had to be just right of the Allies wouldn't attack. And the weather wasn't just right. | Ryan, C., The Longest Day, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1959, pp.79-80. See also Stagg, J.M., Forecast for Overlord. (New York, Norton, 1971, pp.61, 125) | Though extensive deception operations were employed at Normandy, the timing of the invasion was not included in these plans. To be sure, the Germans did not have access to the data upon which the Allied weather forecast was based (partially as a result of allied attacks on weather reporting stations) and thus did not have foewknowledge of the possible break at D-Day. |
| Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia, 1941 | One example of an assumption of strategic possibility is reflected in Stalin's belief that Hitler would issue an ultimatum before war would break out. The fact that prior to April 9, 1941, Germany had made ultimate demands before undertaking military action, convinced Stalin that this pattern would continue in the future. | Ben-Zvi, A. "Hindsight and Foresight: A Conceptual Framework for the Analysis of Surprise Attacks", World Politics, Vol. 28, No. 3 (April 1976), pp. 381-395 | The sample size upon which this was based was less than five | |
| CUBA 1962 | The Missile Crisis | ... (a failure of intelligence evaluation) was the predisposition of the intelligence community to the philosophical conviction that it would be incompatble with Soviet policy to introduce strategic missiles into Cuba. Khrushchev had never put medium- or long-range missiles in any satellite country and therefore, it was reasoned, he certainly would not put them on an island 9,000 miles away from the Soviet Union and only 90 miles away from the United States, when this was bound to provoke a sharp American reaction. | Wohlstetter, Roberts, "Cuba and Pearl Harbor: Hindsight and Foresight", Foreign Affairs, Vol.43, July 1965, p.701 | The sample size upon which this was based was less than five |
