Roberta Wohlstetter, whose prize-winning 1962 study of intelligence failures leading to Japan's 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor has reverberated in national security discussions for decades and influenced the final report of the 9/11 commission, died of complications of pneumonia Saturday in a New York City hospital. She was 94.
A longtime resident of Los Angeles, Wohlstetter was a researcher for Rand Corp. when she wrote "Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision," a classic in its field that explained why the United States and its leaders were caught unawares by the catastrophe that drew the nation into World War II.
Forty years after its publication, the book was cited by the 9/11 commission to draw parallels to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes, which raised similar questions about military preparedness, intelligence and politics.
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld often recommended the book -- before and after the 9/11 attacks -- for "laying out the difficulty of sorting through conflicting intelligence reports and coming to judgments about what one ought to do" about them.
Wohlstetter described a predicament in which the government was unable to distinguish important "signals," including decoded Japanese cables and ship movements, from "noise," the blizzard of conflicting or erroneous information that confronted policymakers, military leaders and intelligence officials in the weeks and months preceding the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
"There was as much noise as there were significant sounds," she wrote in an analysis so forceful that in national security circles the dilemma is called simply "the Roberta Wohlstetter problem."
"It was a superb book," said Thomas Schelling, the Nobel Prize-winning political economist and foreign affairs expert who wrote an elegant foreword to "Pearl Harbor."
Schelling, who described the book as "a unique physiology of a great national failure to anticipate," recalled this week that it was published at a time when responsibility for the Pearl Harbor attack was still hotly debated. Some analysts, for example, accused President Roosevelt of knowing of the impending strike and allowing it to occur so that he could push the United States into the war. That theory, among other conspiratorial scenarios, was never proven.
"Roberta put Pearl Harbor into a very reasonable context that not only deflated a lot of the controversy about whose fault it was," Schelling said, "but was a wonderful reminder that there was no reason the same thing couldn't happen again."
