Sociology

The significance of the attacks on Pearl Harbor and how they pertain to US intelligence can be seen in two fundamental ways mainly, break-down in communication and subsequent changes    made to the US intelligence apparatus.

The breakdown in communication occurred do to typical bureaucratic bungling. It is known, that the United States had already broken Japans commercial shipping codes and had a good head start on their navel codes however, due to negotiations still taking place at the time, these facts were not widely known to other branches of the intelligence community. Because, of the withheld information from one office to the other, and to use the vernacular of the day a SNAFU, it was generally not known that a large Japanese navel fleet was heading towards Pearl Harbor.

Due to the total break down of inner office communications, greater synergy was sought and found in the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, formally the O.S.S. Granted, this was not done until the end of the war, but the seeds of this change had been sewn due to this main breakdown of communication, between the intelligence communitys various offices.

An analogous current day example would be the creation of the Department of Home Land security after the events of September 11th. Because of the communication break downs obvious leading up to the attacks it had been decided by the Bush administration to create an umbrella organization to help promote inner departmental communication. It still remains to be seen, if the creation of this Orwellian institution will actually prevent further attacks, or if it is just an excuse to fund more intrusive domestic spying.