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“Surprise, when it happens to a government, is likely to be a complicated, diffuse, bureaucratic thing. It includes neglect of responsibility, but also responsibility so poorly defined or so ambiguously delegated that action gets lost. It includes gaps in intelligence, but also intelligence that, like a string of pearls too precious to wear, is too sensitive to give to those who need it. It includes the alarm that fails to work, but also the alarm that has gone off so often it has been disconnected …. finally, as at Pearl Harbor surprise may include some measure of genuine novelty introduced by the enemy, and possibly some sheer bad luck.”

Schelling’s foreword and Wohlstetter’s book are less about the failure of imagination, than something very different — systemic bureaucratic confusion, ordinary human distractions, and an overwhelming glut of information with no clear idea of what anyone should be looking for.[

Believing is seeing. We see what we are prepared to see. The problem was not an absence of evidence. There was a glut of evidence. The problem was how to interpret it, how to see it.

Dorothy "Dot" Cole was the oldest living US Marine veteran when she died on January 7. She was 107 years old.

Cole decided she would take a stance to support her country after Japanese forces launched a surprise attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii on December 7, 1941.

"There were women volunteering with the Red Cross and knitting while sitting in church, so I thought I had to do something,