Pearl Harbor US Intelligence Failure

It was a Sunday morning, on December 7, 1941 when Pearl Harbor, US naval base located on Hawaii, was attacked by the Japanese. They caught unguarded the whole nation, and for that, this attack is considered one of the top ten failures of the US intelligence. The Japanese were able to attack Pearl Harbor by surprise because of the mindset of US officials, whom they saw Japanese as a weak enemy, who wouldn’t risk attacking US territory, caused by a supremacy factor; As well as the not good enough US intelligence efficiency to encrypt Japanese codes, and the handling of such information. After the negotiations between the Japanese and the United States ended, there was no doubt that they would make an attack, but they didn’t know the target of it.

One of the factors that contributed to the US intelligence failure was that the United States believed that they, together with Britain and France and other world power nations were the only ones that counted with the type of developmental army to be able to pull out an attack of a high degree, having in mind as well, the farness from their territory. Historian Warren Kozak wrote for the Wall Street Journal, “This was a failure to think outside the box, coupled with a strong belief that the Japanese were inferior and incapable of mounting such an attack.” Submerged in that superiority, they didn’t perform the enough investigations; they saw Japanese as weak and not a high degree enemy. Admiral Arthur Davis declared at the hearing on proceedings of the Hart Inquiry Monday, March 13, 1944: “I did not, however, realize to what a high degree of proficiency Japanese naval aviation had been developed. I do not believe that anybody else in the American Navy had any proper conception of this devel...

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... army of the enemy and the capacities they had. Although US intelligence said they had improved their efficiency so another Pearl Harbor doesn’t happen again, the true is that there are still imperfections on the structure of the agencies, and the rival relationship between those, makes things worse.

Works Cited

"Full Text of "Pearl Harbor Attack : Hearings before the Joint Committee..."" Internet Archive. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Apr. 2014.

"PROCEEDINGS OF THE HART INQUIRY: SEVENTH DAY." The Public's Library and Digital Archive. N.p., 18 Dec. 1996. Web. 25 Apr. 2014.

Kobayashi, Masahiko. "U.S. Failures in the Pearl Harbor Attack: Lessons for Intelligence." Thesis. Fletcher School, TUFTS University, 2005. May 2005. Web. 20 Apr. 2014.

Kozak, Warren. "Pearl Harbor, Iran and North Korea." The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, 7 Dec. 2011. Web. 20 Apr. 2014.