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of all I go to my room; there's no hurry, this is not the first time, it's only been a warning... a number of men... are standing around, looking up at the sky and cracking jokes." But the purpose of the conditioning was to make credible the spoof raid on Berlin, not to desensitize the occupants of Peenemunde.
Indeed, rather than direct or peripheral effort on the part of the adversary, conditioning may result instead from some operational pattern altered or expanded without sinister motive. In this case, the effect is self-deception through misinterpretation. It should also be noted that efforts to reduce the vulnerability to surprise generally take the form of increasing the sensitivity of the warning system. This can also be expected to increase the number of false alarms, in turn reducing the sensitivity (33). Unhappily, we are faced with the troublesome conclusion that some degree of surprise through self-deception and conditioning may be unescapable.
A tongue in cheek decision rule for avoiding false alerts is provided in Figure 3. In a more academic vein, Axelrod (34) framed a decision theoretic model of the tradeoffs between false positives and false negatives, the analytical core of the issue as stated
