Roberta Wohlstetter

Roberta Wohlstetter (born in 1912 under the name of Roberta Morgan) is an American historian specialized on the question of the military Renseignement. Its more famous work is Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision . It is also the woman of Albert Wohlstetter, analyst with

RAND Corporation and thinker of dissuasion.

Contribution with the strategic thought

In its book Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision , Roberta Wohlstetter seeks to establish the causes of the warning failure (generic term which indicates the failure of an intelligence service to envisage a surprised attack) of Pearl Harbor. It releases from the " pathologies of communication" who are responsible for this failure:

“noise” ( noise ): the difficulty of paying attention to relevant information in the middle of thousands of information.
“prejudices” ( preconceptions ) and generally incapacity to put itself at the place of the enemy ( mirror imaging ).

The intelligence services interpret the data through:

of the representations, or even a system of representation when it is about an ideological fight)
of the historical analogies: such as the will not to reproduce " Munich" , tested in 1956 with Suez, 1962 with Cuba, or in 1995 with Srebrenica
personal experiences: as those of Anthony Eden who projected on the nationalization of Suez Canal in 1956 his memory of the annexation of Sudètes in 1938.

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