Intelligence Failure and Need for Cognitive Closure: On the Psychology of the Yom Kippur Surprise

Abstract

This paper uses newly available evidence to shed light on the circumstances and causes of the 6 October 1973 Yom Kippur surprise attack of Egyptian and Syrian forces onIsraeli positions at the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights. The evidence suggests that an important circumstance that accounts for the surprise effect these actions managed to produce, despite ample warning signs, is traceable to a high need for cognitive closure among major figures in the Israeli intelligence establishment. Such a need may have prompted leading intelligence analysts to "freeze" on the conventional wisdom that an attack was unlikely and to become impervious to information suggesting that it was imminent. The discussion considers the psychological forces affecting intelligence operations in predicting the initiation of hostile enemy activities, and it describes possible avenues of dealing with the psychological impediments to open-mindedness that may pervasively characterize such circumstances.KEY WORDS: Yom Kippur war, strategic surprise, need for cognitive closure Along with the German attack against the Soviet Union in June 1941 (operation "Barbarossa") and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the coordinated Egyptian-Syrian attack against Israel on Yom Kippur, 6 October 1973, is considered a classic example of a successful surprise attack and a costly intelligence failure. The similarity of the three cases is obvious: Despite ample evidence concerning the ability and the intention of the initiator to launch an attack, the intelligence agencies involved failed to provide a timely and accurate warning. Expert analyses of the three cases, however, tend to impute them to dif-

The Impact of Closed-mindedness on the Assessment of Threat: An Empirical Study

“…Kruglanski has elucidated this construct to include five sub-components that lead to a truncation of information accessing and processing. The findings of studies by Bar-Joseph & Kruglanski [18] and Ask & Granhag [21] show that high closed-mindedness results in problematic behaviors in complex, ambiguous, information environments. The present study is an exploratory investigation of the impact of closed-mindedness on an analogue intelligence analysis task.…”

“…These tendencies could have negative effects in many applied settings such as medical diagnoses, financial analysis, and security and defence intelligence analysis. In the domain of intelligence analysis the consequences of cognitive and personality predispositions such as closed-mindedness influencing threat estimates away from that warranted by the available data is at best highly problematic and at worst catastrophic [18]. We now turn to a study that explored the impact of high closed-mindedness on a major intelligence analysis failure.…”

“…Bar-joseph & Kruglanski [18] have analysed the Yom Kippur war of 1973 using the concept of closed-mindedness as operationalized using the Need for Cognitive Closure scale components [but not the scale itself]. This study was conducted using a qualitative analytic approach of archival material.…”

“…reports from the front which indicated large scale movements of the Egyptian army). Bar-Joseph & Kruglanski [18] assert that the schemas used by intelligence analysts and managers 3 generated a threat assessment of the situation that was much less urgent than warranted by the available data. They assert that the assessment that was provided to the Israeli government was one that satisfied the closed-mindedness predispositions of the command elements of AMAN.…”

“…These data were used to identify behaviour that the authors labelled as consistent with high closed-mindedness. We would note that this method did not allow the identification of which dimensions of closed-mindedness were active at the time that the analysis was occurring in the minds of the senior AMAN officers studied by Bar-Joseph and Kruglanski [18]. In order to gain a more fine grained understanding of the potential impact of each of the NFC components we have conducted an analogue study of an intelligence analysis type task to explore the role of each NFC dimension on an estimate of threat.…”