Attack on Pearl Harbor: Foreign Policy Biases’ Effects

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Table of Contents

Findings and Analysis
Sectionalism and Groupthink
Insensitivity
Rigid Group Atmosphere
Security problem
Conclusion
Bibliography

Findings and Analysis

From series of secondary data gathered, it is apparent that there were series of lapses in intelligence analysis, interpretation, and action due to inconsistency in interpreter the primary intelligence information gathered b the U.S. intelligence community. The foreign policy biases, which led to the attack on Pearl Harbor, are discussed as follows.

Sectionalism and Groupthink

Sectionalism was the norm of the day within the U.S. intelligence management community in the pre-Pearl Harbor attack. This phenomenon was responsible for the unprecedented devastation upon the nation, which was in the clear was a path with its attacker. To begin with, each of the intelligence-gathering units was not willing to carry out the roles presumed to the mandate of other companies, even in instances where the corporation and teamwork are in the best interest of the country. For example, “while the major concern of the Hawaiian Army intelligence was to detect sabotage and subversion dictated primarily by Army intelligence tradition… in May 1941, General Marshall requested to establish an evaluation branch within G-2 (Army intelligence) to follow activities in the Far East”[1]. As a result, the personnel within the G-2 unit were tripled from 22 to almost 80 men following the request. However, the change was only in the headcount of the personnel with minimal effort to alter procedures and relevant organizational priorities. When this alteration occurred, the intelligence within the military cycles was still “specifically concerned, particularly concerned, and practically solely concerned with anti-subversive precautions and operations”[2].

This was revealed in the year 1946 during the proceedings of the fact-finding mission on what made America vulnerable during the attack. In one of the sessions, the Chief of Military intelligence confessed that “I do not think any Intelligence officer ever thought that he could be sure of picking up a convoy or attack force or task force in Japan before it sailed and know where it was going. That was beyond our terms of efficiency”[3]. Interestingly, from this confession, it is apparent that this chief mind was preoccupied with counter-subversive measures. There was little attention directed towards the possible intentions of the enemy despite the earlier request to spread the military personnel in the Far East region.

There were poor coordination and communication between the relevant intelligence gathering and action planning units. For instance, following the alert of a possible war on November 27, the Hawaiian army commander confessed to having received information from the Navy through reconnaissance of a hostile force, despite the fact that it was one of the duties of the Navy. Apparently, there was a lot of rivalry among the intelligence-gathering units. Conflict is known to interfere with the decision process and place directive along with personal and ‘ingroup’ inclination.

For instance, the Signal Corps unit could not hand over the full control of operations to the Army Aircraft Warning Service (AWS) unit despite a series of requests and appeals. Unfortunately, Signal Corps won the argument on who is to control the operations, thus limiting the activities of the AWS. In fact, there was no coordination between these two units on real-time aircraft identification and interception. This lapse was responsible for the lack of coordination in the counter-attack strategy. For instance, “on the morning of December 7, the AWS radar centers were manned from 4 to 7 A.M. When an officer at one of the radar stations found something completely out of the ordinary on the screen at 7:02 A.M. and called the information center, no one replied to it and later one inexperienced staff”[4]. The response of the inexperienced staff was that the images captured were those of friendly aircraft. In reality, those images were the Japanese submarine in the U.S. water space.

Insensitivity

Malfunctions within the organizational management may lead to insensitivity, especially when there is an emergency. Across the globe, military officers are very keen in peacetime and are likely to pass the information on everything apprehensive or unusual. However, when preparing for war, the level of sensitivity reduces since they are worked up by the high expectations and series of concurrent duties. For instance, on the morning of the fateful day, everything around Pearl Harbor was running as usual since there were no predictions of an imminent attack by the enemy. In fact, the threat detected an hour before the actual attack was not correctly processed, and no action was taken to follow it up. The commanders simply forwarded the information to higher authorities without making an effort to follow it up.

Insensitivity may also be seen in the way information on planning for a counter-attack to any threat by the Japanese was passed down. Phrased as a long-range plan for deterring a ‘surprise attack’ by the Japanese, the U.S. war preparation was more of an institutionalized theory. For instance, “there was no practical assessment of what surprise would mean, what such an attack could do to American fleets, aircraft, and ground forces, and no calculation of probable damage to soldiers and equipment”[5]. In contrast, the Japanese had made an estimate of a one-third loss should their plan materialize. In fact, despite having full knowledge of a possible attack, the U.S. military found it unnecessary to carry out any entire 360-degrees patrol around the vulnerable islands due to their insensitivity. Such patrols would have become instrumental in deterring the enemy almost 800 miles before reaching Pearl Harbor. If the military had carried out 360-degree patrols, the U.S. would have had the advantage of preparing for a counter-attack with a reasonable time allocation of more than one hour.

As an extension of insensitivity, the ‘cry wolf’ phenomenon could also be blamed for the surprising attack on Pearl Harbor. For instance, the sighting of a submarine an hour before the attack was treated casually simply because the military officials were used to so many false alarms. Before the attack, three false warnings had been raised. Therefore, judgment based on the past false alerts eventually made it easy for the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor and retreat before recording any significant losses[6].

Rigid Group Atmosphere

The Pearl Harbor attack may also be blamed on the prevailing group atmosphere within the U.S. intelligence community and the military. Before the Pearl Harbor attack, holding the position that there is a need for maximum security alert to avoid a probable Japanese attack would have been declared cowardice since the U.S. considered itself superior to any force or nation in the world. There was a widespread fear that talking of Pearl Harbor as vulnerable would imply the imposition of social sanctions among the military units.

In the minds of most of the military personnel, the U.S. officers were superior and had better weapons which could not be challenged. Since there was no concrete information on the possibility of Japanese attack coupled with the atmosphere of unanimity, “even most conscientious military officers would take a risk in seemingly a shallow probability threat of an enemy’s surprise attack rather than in the high-probability of being scorned by questioning the group’s recent reaffirmations of its commitment to a business-as-usual and a weekend-leave-as-usual policy”[7]. For instance, in one of the high-level security intelligence meetings, the request for a security alert by the commander of the Navy manning the Far East region was turned down by his superiors on the presumptions that the current Hawaii alerts were sufficient.

Security problem

The restrictions in the U.S. server called the MAGIC carrying secret information for different intelligence analysis organs was in itself a huddle that made it easy for Japan to access Pearl Harbor and destroy it. Before the attack, intelligence on Japanese threats was shared by ‘ingroups,’ and it never reached some of the policymakers since those mandated with the duty were still not ready to share some of the information. Basically, as a secrecy policy, the intelligence on a possible attack could only be viewed by a few individuals with the hope that broader access would have compromised the secrecy of the inception methods. However, this turned out to be ineffective.

The army chief in Hawaii confessed that “I was not informed that, upon receipt of the American note of November 26, the Japanese considered that negotiations had not merely ceased but that relations with this country were ruptured”[8]. As a result of such mutual misunderstandings, Washington’s assumption that the chief had full access to intelligence on the Japanese made it very difficult to organize an immediate and effective counter-attack. Thus, “selective distribution of information tends to build a wrong assumption that someone else knows what is going on and will handle the emergency. And this reliance, so often unjustified, on other officers, may help persist in biased beliefs and ignore inconsistent information”[9].

Conclusion

From the above facts around the Pearl Harbor attack, it is in order to conclude that the Japanese assault was inevitable. The U.S. political and intelligence community were aware of the fact that the emerging Asian giant would roll out military action in the shortest time possible after the collapse of peace negotiations. Apparently, the intelligence community could not acquire qualified information on the exact method of potential aggression and target. However, the U.S. had enough intelligence information to create an effective counter-attack policy. For instance, intelligence information in the MAGIC server was specific to Japan as the aggressor and the time limit of a possible attack. Besides, if the operations control was given to the Aircraft Warning Service, the military would have had a war advantage of almost one hour to counter the approaching aggressor[10]. For instance, one of the officers attached to the AWS noticed something unusual nearly an hour before the attack but had to wait for confirmation from the Air Corps unit, which declared the image as that of a friendly aircraft. Moreover, a series of reports recommended comprehensive security alerts in addition to series of 360degrees patrols in the Far East region.

The intelligence community in the U.S. ought to have acted on sectionalism as a remedy for efficiency and agency motivation instead of supporting the status quo in the sharing of information in the MAGIC server. This would have gone a long way in minimizing mutual-misunderstandings. Despite the high risk, intelligence dissemination via the MAGIC would have prepared the military chiefs for an effective counter-attack. As a result of the ‘cry wolf’ phenomenon, the focus of decision-making was twisted to groupthink and the assumption that the US was more superior than the enemy. Instead of drawing plans to counter an imminent attack, the Hawaiian forces’ perception of the enemy was clouded with superiority complex as a result of inverted group cognition.

Apparently, wrong perception and organizational ineffectiveness were the primary factors in the foreign policy biases that led to the Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese. Despite collecting a lot of information on a possible confrontation and eventual attack by Japan, this intelligence data was not fully integrated and used in making policies and decisions on how to deter Japan from inflicting damages on U.S. soil. In fact, bureaucratic pathology was an impairment to creating efficient and rational measures to counter or altogether avoid a possible attack on Pearl Harbor.

Through critical analysis of cognition and groupthink theories, it is apparent that inconsistencies in intelligence processing and lack of high-quality decision making led to the surprise Pearl Harbor attack. There were information processing errors in the U.S. foreign policy. These errors led to the poor decision making and subsequent Pearl Harbor attack. These errors included sectionalism and groupthink, insensitivity, security management problem, and a rigid group atmosphere. These findings confirm the hypothesis that inconsistency in decision making resulted in the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. This research adds the approach of relating cognition and groupthink to biases in decision making. There is a need to carry out further research on the relationship between groupthink and understanding and the impact of this relationship on intelligence processing in order to avoid a similar incident, such as the Pearl Harbor attack.

Bibliography

Genda, Minoru. “Analysis No. 1 of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Operation A.I.,” edited by Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, The Pearl Harbor Papers: Inside The Japanese Plans. Washington, DC: Brassey’s 1993.

Heuer, Richards. Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence 1999.

Tur, Ozlem. “The Lebanese War of 2006: Reasons and Consequences.” Perceptions 6, no. 6, (2007): 109-122.

Turner, Marlene. “A Social Identity Maintenance Model of Groupthink.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 73, no. 2, (1998): 210-235.

Welch, David. “The Organizational Process and Bureaucratic Politics Paradigms: Retrospect and Prospect.” International Security 17, no. 2, (1992): 112- 146.

Yet, Steve. “Groupthink and the Gulf Crisis.” British Journal of Political Science 33, no. 3 (2003): 419-442.

[1] Minoru Genda, “Analysis No. 1 of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Operation A.I.,” edited by Donald M.Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, The Pearl Harbor Papers: Inside The Japanese Plans (Washington, DC: Brassey’s 1993), 29.

[2] David Welch, “The Organizational Process and Bureaucratic Politics Paradigms: Retrospect and Prospect.” International Security 17, no. 2, (1992): 136.

[3] Marlene Turner, “A Social Identity Maintenance Model of Groupthink.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 73, no. 2, (1998):228.

[4] Minoru Genda, “Analysis No. 1 of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Operation A.I.,” edited by Donald M.Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, The Pearl Harbor Papers: Inside The Japanese Plans (Washington, DC: Brassey’s 1993), 31.

[5] Minoru Genda, “Analysis No. 1 of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Operation A.I.,” edited by Donald M.Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, The Pearl Harbor Papers: Inside The Japanese Plans (Washington, DC: Brassey’s 1993), 29.

[6] Ozlem, Tur, “The Lebanese War of 2006: Reasons and Consequences.” Perceptions 6, no. 6, (2007): 109-122.

[7] Minoru Genda, “Analysis No. 1 of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Operation A.I.,” edited by Donald M.Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, The Pearl Harbor Papers: Inside The Japanese Plans (Washington, DC: Brassey’s 1993), 29.

[8] Steve Yetiv, “Groupthink and the Gulf Crisis.” British Journal of Political Science 33, no. 3 (2003): 419-442.

[9] Minoru Genda, “Analysis No. 1 of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Operation A.I.,” edited by Donald M.Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, The Pearl Harbor Papers: Inside The Japanese Plans (Washington, DC: Brassey’s 1993), 29.

[10] Richard Heuer, Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence 1999), 19.

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