Operation Cottage: A Cautionary Tale of Assumption and Perceptual Bias.

摘要

In the summer of 1943, American and Canadian forces launched an amphibious assault on the north Pacific island of Kiska. Codenamed Cottage , the operation was intended to seize the last enemy stronghold on North American soil from Japanese occupiers. The assault began in the predawn hours of August 15 with a heavy coastal barrage by an armada of nearly 100 Allied war-ships. Intense fire support was followed by a chaotic but successful ship-to-shore movement of over 34,000 U.S. Army and Canadian combat infantrymen. For 2 long days, the invasion force slugged its way inland through thick fog and against the constant din of machinegun and artillery fire. By the time the island was declared secure, over 300 Allied soldiers lay dead or seriously wounded. Japanese casualties? There were none. The Japanese had abandoned the island almost 3 weeks prior. How could this have happened? How could a command staff of considerable talent and intellect disregard a plethora of intelligence and execute a major amphibious assault on a deserted island? The answer might lie in a basic construct of the human thought process known as perceptual bias. Perceptual biases are experienced-based assumptions and expectations that individuals intuitively apply to the world around them. 1 In his book The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis , Richard Heuer argues that all individuals assimilate and evaluate information through a personal mental model (or mindset) influenced by perceptual bias. Perceptual bias is not inherently bad. The assumptions we form through this bias allow us to process what would otherwise be an incomprehensible amount of information, but they can also set a lethal trap for unsuspecting mission planners, decisionmakers, and intelligence analysts.