Roberta Wohlstetter

[2] She served as a consultant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, and to the General Research Corporation in Santa Barbara, California.

[4]Her book Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision attempts to explain the causes of the U.S. intelligence failures that led to Imperial Japan's 1941 surprise attack.

The book argues, in part, that intelligence failures are to be expected because of the difficulty identifying "signals" from the background "noise" of raw facts, regardless of the quantity of the latter.

On a tactical level, the attack came as a surprise because warning mechanisms - radar stations and patrol planes - were not deployed, although senior officers came to believe they were.

Military history writer Eugene Rasor wrote in 1998 that the book is "the best and most comprehensive study of the intelligence failure that led to the surprise attack".

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who was in office at the time of the September 11 attacks, was greatly influenced by the book and required his assistants to read it even before these events.

That volume outlines how the hypotheses that Wohlstetter identifies as the mechanism by which intelligence "signals" are sorted from background "noise" are neither uniform, entirely rational or random, but are instead functions of the culture and identity of the analytic unit.

And that is certainly one explanation for the clarity and persuasiveness of his own voluminous words on strategy, politics, and world affairs.In 1939, Wohlstetter married the mathematician and nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstatter.