This page needs to be proofread.
| TIME PERIOD | EVENT | QUOTE | CITATION | REMARKS |
| WORLD WAR II | Pearl Harbor | First, there is the "Cry Wolf" phenomenon. Admiral Stark actually used this phrase in deciding not to send Admiral Kimmel any further warnings about the Japanese. An excess of warnings which turn out to be false alarms always induces a kind of fatigue, a lessening of sensitivity. Admiral Kimmel and his staff were tired to checking out Japanese submarine reports in the vicinity of Pearl Harbor. In the week preceding the attack they had checked out seven, all of which were false. | Wohlstetter, Roberts, "Cuba and Pearl Harbor: Hindsight and Foresight", Foreign Affairs, Vol.43, July 1965, p.699. | There was an extensive cover and deception plan associated with the Pearl Harbor attack. As far as can be determined, however, deliberated desensitivation was not included as an element. |
| "Australia's Pearl Harbor" The attack on Darwin | I was confident that [the coastwatcher] must have seen something very unusual. I wanted to sound the alarm at once but was overruled. There had been a series of earlier false alarms which it was undesirable to repeat. | Lockwood, D, Australia's Pearl Harbor: Darwin 1942, Cassell, Melbourne, Australia (1946), p.24 | Remarks of Lt. Commander J.C.B. McManus, the senior intelligence officer at Navy Headquarters, Darwin in explaining why warning information which reached him 30 minutes prior to the attack was disregarded. The attack on Darwing occurred on 14 February 1942, some ten weeks after Pearl Harbor. | |
| KOREA 1950 | Outbreak of Korean War | ... Intelligence sources had "cried wolf" so often before June 1950 that nothing in the reports at that time "put us on notice that anything was going to happen in Korea". | De Weerd, H.A., "Strategic surprise in the Korea War", Orbis VI (Fall 1963), p.440 | Testimony of then Secretary of Defense Johnson in explaining intelligence failures. In June 1950 the State Department, the CIA and the Department of the Army all agreed that the possibility existed for a North Korean attack but that "this attack did not appear imminent" |
| VIET NAM 1968 | Opening of the Tet Offensive | Analysts who reflexively warn of disaster are soon derided as hysterical. General William Westmoreland recalled that the warnings that had been issued before the 1968 Tet Offensive were ignored. U.S. Headquarter in Saigon had each year predicted a winter-spring offensive, "and every year it had come off without any dire results... Was not the new offensive to be more of the same?" | Betts, R.K., "Analysis, War & Decision: why intelligence failures are inevitable", World Politics, Vol.31, No.1 (Oct.1978), p.75 | |
| ISRAEL 1973 | Opening of 1973 War | This effect is what Prime Minister Meir had in mind when she said plaintively: "No one in this country realises how many times during the past year we recieved information from the same source that war would break out on this or that day, without war breaking out. I will not say this was good enough. I do say it was fatal." | As quoted in Shlaim, Avi, "Failures in National Intelligence Estimates: The Case of the Yom Kippur War", World Politics, Vol. 28, No. 3, April 1976, p. 356 | Israel had actually mobilized (unnecessarily?) in response to an earlier warning. The cost of this mobilization was clear to senior intelligence officers in 1973. |
| A DECISION RULE FOR ELIMINATION OF FALSE ALERTS...? | ||||
| As that ancient retiree from the Research Department of the British Foreign Office reputedly said, after serving from 1903-1956, "Year after year the worriers and fretters would come to me with awful predictions of the outbreak of war. I denied it each time. I was only wrong twice." | Hughes, The Face of Facts in a World of Men — Foreign Policy and Intelligence-Making (NY: Foreign Policy Association, Headline Series 1233, Dec. 1976) p.48, as quoted in Betts, R.K., "Analysis, War & Decision: why intelligence failures are inevitable", World Politics, Vol.31, No.1 (Oct.1978), p.62 | |||
