The course examines the reasons why nations and other groups sometimes manage to achieve surprise in their attacks on their victims and what they achieve by surprise.
Countries which stage surprise attacks can gain major military advantages. On the other hand, such attacks can incense their enemies and unite them in their determination to defeat the aggressor. The outcome depends on the military strength and cohesiveness of the nation attacked. If they suffer from military and political weaknesses the attack may simply increase their demoralisation. After the pre-emptive Japanese attack on the Russian fleet moored outside Port Arthur in Manchuria in 1904, the Russians never recovered their balance and lost every major engagement on land and at sea. The war culminated in a widespread revolt in the Russian heartland, a precursor of the revolution which was to occur in 1917. On the other hand, though its forces were initially heavily defeated, the Soviet Union recovered from the sudden Nazi attack in June 1941 and eventually destroyed the Nazi armies, though at massive cost in civilian and military casualties. Similarly, the United States lost a number of its battleships when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, but the attack united the country in the determination to defeat the attackers.
Surprise attacks are rarely launched ‘out of the blue’, they usually occur because the victim had ignored the warning signs. Both the Russians in 1904 and the Americans in 1941 had been engaged in months of increasingly vituperative negotiations with their potential adversaries. Similarly, when the British were surprised by the Argentine attack on the Falkland Islands in April 1982, it was largely because the government in London had ignored the press campaign in Buenos Aires for the seizure of the islands. Even in the case of the Nazi attack on its Soviet ‘ally’ in June 1941 there had been signs that their relationship was deteriorating and, of course, Hitler had never made any secret of his loathing for communism and his determination to find ‘living room’ for the German people in eastern Europe. The course assesses whether any Intelligence organisation can always avoid strategic surprise by a potential enemy and what, if anything, can be done to minimise the difficulties.
Any state meditating a surprise attack has to balance the potential military advantages against the likelihood that the enemy will rally and be more determined in its response. Traditional autocracies find such a response more difficult, while democracies and totalitarian states may display the willpower and national cohesion to rend the aggressors. The course looks at the outcome of the Axis aggression in June and December 1941, the Arab-Israeli War in 1967, the Falklands War in 1982 and al-Qaeda’s strike against the United States in 2001.
