Welcome to today's deep dive. I'm your host.
And today we are tackling something that is honestly
a bit heavy, but incredibly fascinating. Hi,
everyone. I'm the resident researcher here. And
yeah, heavy is definitely the right word for
the sources we are unpacking today. You know,
when I hear the word imagination. my brain immediately
goes to like a really specific place oh like
what well i'm thinking of kids in a sandbox or
maybe an artist staring at a blank canvas or
a writer trying to dream up some wild sci -fi
world it feels um whimsical right it feels safe
exactly but today we are looking at this huge
stack of sources we've got Government reports,
intelligence postmortems, major disaster investigations.
And they turn that entire definition completely
upside down. They really do. We are talking of
a concept of a failure of imagination. And in
this context, we are talking about writer's block.
We are talking about a concept used in national
security and emergency management where a lack
of imagination is, it's actually lethal. It is
a fascinating and somewhat terrifying inversion
of the concept. In the documents we're covering
today, failure of imagination isn't about artistic
merit. It's a term of art. Right. It refers to
a circumstance that is undesirable and unanticipated,
yet, and this is the crucial part, seems entirely
predictable in hindsight. That's the part that
just kept jumping out at me while I was reading
this material. Predictable in hindsight. I mean,
it implies the clues were there right in front
of everyone's face. But nobody could put them
together precisely. The mission of this deep
dive is to explore how some of the biggest disasters
in history weren't necessarily caused by a lack
of data. From the terrorist attacks of 9 -11
to, you know, tragedies in space exploration.
Exactly. They weren't caused by broken satellites
or lazy spies. They were caused by an inability
to conceive that the unthinkable was actually
possible. It is just wild to me that imagination
is a metric for national security. It sounds
counterintuitive, doesn't it? Totally. You expect
metrics to be about interception capabilities
or troop numbers or firewall strength. But imagination,
that feels so abstract. And yet, it's the common
thread. As we go through these sources with you
today, you'll see it links the sinking of the
Titanic to the 9 -11 attacks and even to modern
geopolitical conflicts. It's really about the
limits of the human mind to accept worst case
scenarios. It is. So let's unpack this. We have
to start with the big one. The 9 -11 Commission
Report. This phrase, failure of imagination,
is practically the headline of their findings
regarding the intelligence failures leading up
to the attacks. It's explicitly quoted in the
report. When the commission looked at the intelligence
community, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, they found
plenty of bureaucratic hurdles. And that siloing
of information, right, where agencies weren't
talking to each other. Right. The siloing was
a huge issue. But they stated clearly, and I
quote, the most important failure was one of
imagination. And here's where it gets really
interesting to me, because there was a very specific
defense mounted by the Bush administration in
early 2004. Then nobody imagined defense. Yeah.
You see quotes from officials basically saying,
look, be reasonable here. Nobody could have predicted
this. The specific claim was nobody could have
imagined that hijackers would intentionally crash.
The prevailing logic at the time, the script
everyone was following, was that hijackers use
planes as bargaining chips. The negotiation script.
Exactly. The assumption was that they want to
land. They want to make demands, get money, get
prisoners released. But most importantly, the
assumption was that hijackers want to survive.
The quote in the source material is literally,
hijackers usually want to live. Which is a very
logical assumption to make. And honestly, if
you look at the history of hijacking in the 70s
and 80s. Yeah. That was the pattern. You fly
to Cuba, you demand a ransom, you sit on the
tarmac. But our sources point out that this defense,
this idea that a suicide crash was unimaginable,
actually falls apart completely when you look
at the history leading up to 2001. It crumbles
so quickly under scrutiny. I was actually shocked
by how many specific examples there were. I kind
of assumed 9 -11 was the absolute first time
a commercial airliner was used as a weapon. A
lot of people assume that. But the timeline tells
a very different story. Yeah, let's list these
out for you listening because the data points
were there if you're an analyst paying attention
to the outliers. Yeah. Take December 7, 1987.
PSA Flight 1771. This is the one involving the
disgruntled employee, right? Correct. David Burke.
He was a former airline employee who had been
fired. He didn't hijack the plane to go to a
destination or demand ransom. He just wanted
revenge. Exactly. He bypassed security using
his old credentials, boarded the flight, shot
his former boss who was on board, shot the pilots,
and pushed the control column forward. He drove
it straight into the ground. Everyone on board
died. He didn't want to live. That is a clear
suicide crash using a commercial airliner. And
that was 14 years before 9 -11. Then you have
Egypt Air Flight 990. Which was much closer to
the event, October 31st, 1999. Right. The relief
first officer, Gamil Albatudi, intentionally
crashed the aircraft into the Atlantic Ocean.
Again, a suicide scenario. And there was another
case, AFR 8969, an Air France flight. The intelligence
there suggested the terrorists who hijacked it
planned to crash it over Paris, possibly right
into the Eiffel Tower. So we have these data
points. We have literal crashes where the person
at the controls had zero intention of landing
safely. Exactly. The dots were there. The failure
was in connecting them to form a picture of a
coordinated attack on American soil. It wasn't
that the event was impossible. It was that the
observers couldn't imagine the shape those dots
formed. They treated these events as anomalies,
tragic one -off events, rather than a trend or
a new tactic. That's the trap. And it wasn't
just old historical data either. There were flashing
red lights right before the attacks. We have
to talk about the president's daily brief from
August 6, 2001. This is a critical document.
It was declassified by President Bush following
intense criticisms from the 9 -11 Commission.
Do you remember the title of that brief? I do.
It was titled, Bin Laden Determined to Strike
in U .S. That seems pretty unambiguous. It really
is. And the content indicated that hijackings
were a possible mode of attack. Plus, there were
reports coming out of field offices about foreign
nationals taking pilot training inside the U
.S. And the detail that gives me chills, honestly,
every single time I read it, is that they were
notably uninterested in learning how to take
off and completely uninterested in learning how
to land. A glaring anomaly. If you're learning
to fly a Boeing -class aircraft, landing is generally
the most critical skill you want to master. It's
the hardest part. Not caring about landing should
have been a massive alarm bell. It's like going
to driving school and saying, don't teach me
how to park or use the brake, just show me how
to floor it on the highway. That's a great analogy.
But because the mindset was still hijackers want
to live, the system dismissed that signal. It
was seen as weird, maybe suspicious, but it didn't
trigger a red alert because it didn't fit the
mental model they were comfortable with. So after
the declassified report comes out in the summer
of 2003, Senator Bob Graham, who was deeply involved
in the intelligence oversight, comes out and
says, look, this wasn't some mysterious event.
Right. He stated the attack might have been easily
predicted and even prevented. And that brings
us back to the core concept of the deep dive.
It wasn't a failure of intelligence in terms
of gathering raw facts. It was a failure to believe
the facts were pointing to a catastrophe. Which
brings up the broader issue of institutional
blindness. Our sources mentioned the Gore Commission
from 1997. Created by President Clinton, right?
Correct. This was in response to the crash of
TWA Flight 800. The mandate was to look at aviation
security shortcomings. So you have this high
-level commission, tons of resources, looking
specifically at how to make planes safer. And
what did they focus on? Bombs. They were entirely
focused on the danger of placing explosives on
aircraft. Which makes sense if you're looking
at the past, Lockerbie, things like that. Yeah.
They were fighting the last war. Precisely. The
report did not mention suicide hijackings. It
didn't mention the use of aircraft as weapons,
even though, as we just discussed, the Gore Commission
was meeting 10 years after the PSA suicide crash.
The precedent existed, but the institution was
designed to look for bombs. So it only saw bombs.
It's like they were wearing blinders that only
allowed them to see ticking luggage. They looked
at the right problem, aviation security, but
the wrong specific threat. That is the absolute
hallmark of a failure of imagination. You mitigate
the risks you know and understand while leaving
yourself wide open to the risk you refuse to
consider. Now, this concept isn't limited to
terrorism. The sources take us into some totally
different arenas, which helps show how universal
this problem is. Let's talk about space. Specifically,
Apollo 1. This was the tragedy in 1967, where
three astronauts, Grissom, White, and Chaffee,
were killed in a fire during a launch pad test.
And for anyone who doesn't know the history,
this wasn't even a launch. It was a plugs -out
test on the ground. Right. The rocket was sitting
on the launch pad. The engines weren't lit. And
because it was just a test on the ground, the
mental model of danger wasn't the same as if
they were blasting off. During the investigation
hearings, astronaut Frank Borman spoke up. He
explicitly invoked failure of imagination. It's
interesting you mentioned Borman. For any listeners
who are fans of HBO, this was actually dramatized
in the miniseries From the Earth to the Moon.
Oh, really? Yeah. You see that moment where they
realize they never imagined a fire could move
that fast in a pure oxygen environment while
still on the ground. They knew oxygen was flammable.
They knew there were sparks in the cockpit wiring.
But they couldn't imagine a scenario where a
test on the launch pad would result in the rapid
asphyxiation and burning of the crew before anyone
could get the hatch open. They didn't design
for it because they didn't imagine it. They assumed
the ground was safe. Space is dangerous, but
the ground is safe. Exactly. And going back even
further, and this is the classic example of hubris,
we have the RMS Titanic. The unsinkable ship.
The sources mentioned that design flaws in the
Titanic are often categorized under the same
heading. It was an inability to imagine the specific
conditions that would lead to its sinking. But
they had watertight compartments. They clearly
thought about sinking. They thought about certain
types of sinking. They imagined a head -on collision
or a breach of maybe two compartments. They built
the ship to survive the accidents they could
predict. They didn't imagine the perfect storm.
A glancing blow along the side of the hull that
opened up five or six compartments at once. And
because they couldn't imagine that much water
coming in, the watertight bulkheads didn't go
all the way to the ceiling. They assumed the
water would never get that high. It was a failure
to imagine the scale of the failure. It seems
like there's a pattern of confidence, masking
vulnerability, we've built this great ship, or
we have the best Air Force. Which leads us right
to Pearl Harbor. Donald Rumsfeld, the former
Secretary of Defense, discussed this in the documentary
The Unknown Known. He suggests that the U .S.
failure to anticipate the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor was, at its heart, a failure of
imagination. They couldn't imagine that the Japanese
fleet could move that far, that quietly, and
strike that hard without being detected. Or they
couldn't imagine that a nation would be bold
enough to attempt it, knowing the potential U
.S. response. In intelligence circles, it's called
mirror imaging. Meter imaging. That's an interesting
term. It's when intelligence analysts project
their own values and logic onto the adversary.
We wouldn't take a risk that big, so they won't
take a risk that big. Ah, so you just assume
everyone plays by your rulebook. Exactly. And
when you assume the enemy follows your logic,
you are setting yourself up for a massive surprise.
And just to show that this isn't just history
buffering, unfortunately, this term is still
very much in use today. The sources bring up
a very recent conflict. The 2023 surprise attack
by Hamas on Israel. Yes. And just to be clear
to you listening, we are reporting on this. Strictly
through the analytical lens of our sources regarding
intelligence and preparedness. We are not taking
any political sides here. Absolutely. The phrase
failure of imagination has been applied by analysts
to describe Israel's lack of preparedness for
that specific event. Right. Despite having incredibly
sophisticated surveillance and intelligence satellites,
cyber warfare, the Iron Dome, the specific scale
and method of that attack caught them off guard.
The analysis suggests that the defense establishment
was looking for high tech threats, rockets, cyber
attacks, sophisticated tunnels. They struggled
to imagine a low tech physical breach on that
scale. Bulldozers and hang gliders. Precisely.
If you were looking for advanced weaponry, you
might not be watching for bulldozers tearing
down a fence. That specific method wasn't in
the threat library in a way that triggered a
defense. It mirrors the other examples perfectly.
It suggests that even with modern technology,
if you cannot conceive of the enemy's plan because
it seems too audacious or too primitive, you
will be blind to it until it happens. It is unsettling.
It makes you realize that preparedness is a state
of mind, not just a checklist of equipment. You
have to actively fight your brain's desire to
normalize the world. To help us, and to help
you listening, fight that normalization, the
source material actually provides a bit of a
vocabulary toolkit. There are related concepts
that help explain why our brains do this. These
are great mental models to have. Yeah, let's
run through these. I think having names for these
mental traps is actually really helpful. The
first one is hindsight bias. This is the phenomenon
where everything looks obvious after it has happened.
When we look back at 9 -11 or the Titanic, we
say, how could they miss that? It's so clear
the guys didn't want to learn to land. But we
are looking at the puzzle with the picture already
on the box. In the moment, it was just noise.
Exactly. An analyst in 2001 is seeing thousands
of reports a day. Picking out the one that matters
is incredibly difficult. Hindsight bias makes
us overconfident that we would have seen it coming.
Then there's the black swan event. I feel like
this term gets thrown around a lot in business
meetings. Oh, the printer broke. It's a black
swan. It is often used incorrectly. A true black
swan. is a rare, unpredictable event that has
severe consequences. Where does the name come
from? It comes from the old European belief that
all swans were white. For centuries, all swans
are white wasn't just an opinion. It was considered
a biological fact. Until they went to Australia.
And saw a black swan. The idea is that if you
have only ever seen white swans, you cannot imagine
a black swan exists until you see one. And once
you see one, your entire understanding of the
world changes. 9 -11 was a black swan. Exactly.
And then there's the scariest one. Unknown. Unknowns.
This is a concept Rumsfeld famously popularized,
though it exists in decision theory. You have
known knowns things we know we know. Like gravity.
Right. Then you have known unknowns things we
know we don't know, like specific gaps in our
data. But unknown unknowns are the things we
don't even know we don't know. That's the failure
of imagination territory. It's the threat you
haven't even written down on the list of things
to check. Precisely. It's the asteroid you didn't
know was coming. And finally, the argument from
ignorance. This is a logical fallacy where you
assume something is false just because it hasn't
been proven true yet. For example, we haven't
seen any evidence of a plot to use planes as
missiles. Therefore, no such plot exists. Which
is a deadly assumption. Just because you haven't
seen it doesn't mean it isn't happening. It is
the comfort of silence. We mistake silence for
safety. So what does this all mean for us? We've
looked at 9 -11, space disasters, sinking ships,
and war. It seems like the takeaway is that being
smart isn't enough. Intelligence and data are
necessary, but they were insufficient. You can
have all the dots, but if you lack the mindset
to believe the unbelievable, you will never connect
them. It feels like we need to actively train
ourselves to be a little bit... I don't want
to say paranoid, but maybe creative. Critical
thinking requires questioning your own bedrock
assumptions. You have to look at a rule like
hijackers want to live or this ship is unsinkable
and ask. Under what specific circumstances is
this statement false? You have to be willing
to sound a little crazy in the meeting. You have
to be the one to raise your hand and say, hey,
what if they don't want to negotiate? Exactly.
The cost of social awkwardness in a meeting is
far lower than the cost of a failure of imagination
in the real world. We need to create cultures
where asking what if isn't punished. That is
a very powerful way to put it. We must recognize
that the world is not limited by our ability
to predict it. Reality has a nasty habit of outpiecing
our imagination. So here is where we leave you
today. We've talked about the past, about things
that are now obvious in hindsight. But if a failure
of imagination is about missing what seems impossible
until it happens, what is the impossible scenario
that we are currently ignoring right now? That's
the real challenge. What is the black swan swimming
just out of sight that we refuse to imagine simply
because it scares us? What happens if the global
Internet backbone just permanently goes dark
tomorrow or a synthetic virus targets our agriculture
instead of people? That is the question that
keeps intelligence analysts and should keep us
awake at night. Thanks for diving deep with us.
Keep questioning those assumptions.