intelligence failure
Missed threat warning
Intelligence failure is the inability of intelligence agencies to anticipate or prevent significant threats—terrorist attacks, military invasions, political upheavals.
The term usually appears in postmortems: The 9/11 attacks represented a massive intelligence failure.
Failures may stem from inadequate collection, poor analysis, bureaucratic rivalry, or simply the difficulty of predicting human behavior.
The phrase often carries an implicit accusation that someone should have known.
- blunderFoolish, costly mistake
- oversightSupervision or inadvertent omission
- blindspotZone beyond perception
- lapseBrief failure or expiration
- breachBreaking of agreement
fiasco · miscalculation · warning · classified · espionage · covert · surveillance · debacle · 9/11 · Pearl Harbor · Bay of Pigs · weapons of mass destruction · slam dunk · mole · leak · analysts · need to know · CIA
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