ABSTRACT
Most major wars since 1939 have begun with surprise attacks. Hindsight reveals that the element of surprise in most of these attacks was unwarranted; substantial evidence of an impending strike was available to the victims before the fact. The high incidence of surprise is itself surprising. The voluminous literature on strategic surprise, however, suffers from three fixations. One is a focus on the problem of warning, and how to improve intelligence collection, rather than on the more difficult problem of how to improve political response to ample warning indicators. Another is a common view of surprise as an absolute or dichotomous problem rather than as a matter of degree. Third is the prevalent derivation of theories from single cases rather than from comparative studies. This article puts these fixations in perspective.1
