An Alternate History

Folks talk a lot about the Israeli intelligence failures that enabled 10/7, and with good reason. Israel’s intelligence and police agencies allowed a well-trained, well-resourced, and committed group of attackers to undertake long-range planning and then to execute those plans in such impeccable fashion that the attackers succeeded well beyond what they had expected. This was a Pearl Harbor/Barbarossa/Tet Offensive level of success; even 9/11 isn’t a particularly useful parallel because the “in-the-know” group for the September 11 attacks was pretty small. Anyway, there’s a big lit on this developing and I actually do think that we’ll know more over time as the Israeli state cleans house and as more information emerges from captured Hamas documentation.

Something that’s less well understood, to my mind, is the extent of the US intelligence failure. To be sure, the United States was not responsible for the containment of Hamas in the same way as Israel, but what happens in Gaza certainly has a (second order) impact on the United States and is thus of interest to the US Intelligence Community (IC). Most will recall that in January and February of 2022 the US dedicated significant intelligence assets to monitoring developments on the Russia-Ukraine border, and that the Biden administration made the decision to make much of that intelligence public. In the weeks before the war, the US IC was essentially howling that the Russians had decided to attack, and that both Ukraine and Europe needed to prepare. This was not regarded as welcome news in either Europe or Ukraine; recall that Kyiv kept trying to tamp down expectations of war, both out of concern over provoking Russia and in order to maintain economic and political stability.

To the extent that much has been written about this, it seems that the US IC had reasonable confidence in the Israeli intelligence community and thus didn’t worry overmuch about the Israelis missing something this big. That’s not quite as big of a miss as the Israelis failing to see that an attack was imminent… but it’s still a pretty significant intelligence failure and one that the US IC should take seriously. It was easy for us to understand why the Ukrainians would not see what was right in front of their faces in February of 2022, and it is perhaps easy for us to understand why the Israelis did not see the threat on their doorstop in October 2023. In the first case we operationalized that understanding at the time, making intelligence public and sending a message to the Russians, the Ukrainians, and the world that Kyiv would not. In the second case we simply didn’t take seriously the possibility that the Israelis might have been blinded by their priors, and didn’t allocate the kinds of resources that could have detected the attack pre-emptively. This matters, because the difference between our October 7 and an October 7 where the IDF is well-prepared to defend against the Hamas attack is consequentially different in terms of damage inflicted, and quite likely different in terms of the magnitude of the Israeli response. Maybe that difference isn’t enough to sink or save the Biden presidency, but it’s nevertheless something that the US IC could, and perhaps should, have been paying attention to.