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22 August 2024

Michael Handel, October 7, and The Theory of Surprise

James J. Wirtz

The place to begin is with a chance encounter with Tom Mahnken in the lobby of San Francisco’s Hotel Nikko in August 2001. Tom mentioned that he was working on a festschrift for Michael Handel, his colleague at the U.S. Naval War College, who had recently passed away tragically from an especially aggressive form of cancer. Handel had been kind to me as a graduate student, offering advice, opportunities, and introductions – I immediately asked if I could contribute a chapter on his “Theory of Surprise.” Tom said he never heard of the theory, but I reassured him that it was embedded in Handel’s many works on intelligence failure and strategic surprise. Contemporary events gave the project a sense of urgency. “The Theory of Surprise” focused on the September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda attacks. It was published along with other essays in Paradoxes of Intelligence, which honored Handel’s contribution to the field of intelligence studies.[i]

Today’s reader might be unaware of Handel’s link to the intelligence field; he is probably best remembered for his comparative study of strategy, especially the works of “classical strategic thought.” He began with a volume on Clausewitz,[ii] followed by a comparison of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz,[iii] and then by increasingly comprehensive editions of his monograph Masters of War, which surveyed the ideas of Mau Zedong, Antoine-Henri Jomini, Niccolo Machiavelli, Alfred T. Mahan, Julian Corbett and even Casper Weinberger, among others.[iv] Nevertheless, as a founding editor of the journal Intelligence and National Security, Handel was an early leader in the field of intelligence studies, scholarship that was energized by the searing experience of the surprise suffered by Israel at the outset of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He wrote extensively about the subjects of intelligence analysis, intelligence failure, and strategic surprise, including unique treatments of military intelligence, and technological surprise.[v]

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