We Knew the Strait Would Close. We Were Still Surprised.

The Hormuz blockade, the Hamas attack, Pearl Harbor: why states with vast intelligence resources keep being caught off guard — and what it actually takes to stop it happening

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran. Within days, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps had closed the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow waterway through which roughly 20 percent of the world's seaborne oil and a fifth of its liquefied natural gas passes every day. Shipping firms suspended operations. A global fuel crisis followed. Drones and sea mines appeared in waters that had been open the day before. A scenario that military strategists had documented, war-gamed, and written about for two decades had, in the span of a week, become reality.

Here is the thing: nobody should have been surprised. And yet, in the ways that matter — political, logistical, economic — the world was.

The Paradox That Will Not Go Away

Strategic surprise is one of the most stubborn problems in modern statecraft. Governments with satellite networks, cyber surveillance operations, signals intelligence agencies, and thousands of analysts continue to be caught off guard by major attacks, crises, and collapses. Pearl Harbor. The Yom Kippur War. September 11. The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. The fall of Kabul in eighteen hours. And now, in its own way, the Hormuz closure of 2026.

The French strategist Nicolas Minvielle, writing this week in The Conversation, poses the central question directly: how can organisations with immense analytical resources continue to be wrong about the imminence of conflict?

It is worth sitting with that question, because the instinctive answer — that they simply lacked the information — is almost always wrong. The signals were there. They nearly always are. The problem is what happens to those signals after they arrive.

The Hormuz Case: A Non-Surprise Dressed as a Shock

Iran's doctrine for controlling the Strait of Hormuz has been documented extensively in military and academic literature for more than twenty years. The toolkit is well-understood: sea mines, fast attack boats, coastal anti-ship missiles, drone swarms, and the threat of boarding commercial vessels. Iranian military exercises have rehearsed elements of this scenario repeatedly. The IRGC has said publicly, on multiple occasions, that the strait could be closed. The Congressional Research Service was still publishing updated analyses of the risk as recently as March 2026.

In other words, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz was, in Minvielle's framing, not a strategic surprise in the pure sense. The scenario was documented, the intention was declared, and the capability was visible. What happened was something more insidious: a documented, plausible scenario was treated as improbable because of a cascade of interpretive failures at the analytical, organisational, and political levels simultaneously.

Shipping companies had not made contingency plans robust enough to implement on short notice. Energy markets had not priced in the risk at anything close to appropriate levels. Political decision-making had not pre-positioned responses that could be activated quickly. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps issued formal warnings, boarded and attacked merchant ships, and laid sea mines in the strait — and the world's reaction still had the texture of shock. This is what Minvielle means when he writes that the surprise may be "less in the event itself than in its reception."

The gap between what is known and what is acted upon is where strategic surprise actually lives.

Three Explanations for Why Smart People Get It Wrong

Academic literature on intelligence failure has converged on three explanations, each of which illuminates something real.

The first is cognitive. Analysts are human beings, and human beings are subject to anchoring bias, overconfidence, and what the 9/11 Commission memorably called a "failure of imagination." The dominant mental model — the one that feels most consistent with accumulated experience — crowds out signals that point toward something different. Before October 7, 2023, many Israeli intelligence analysts worked from a framework in which Hamas, governing Gaza and generating revenue from doing so, had no rational interest in a large-scale military incursion into Israel. The signals pointing toward exactly such an attack were read through that framework and interpreted as noise rather than signal.

The second explanation is organisational. Information exists but circulates poorly. Agencies compete rather than collaborate. Procedures designed for one type of threat mishandle another. The fall of Kabul in August 2021 illustrated this vividly: several American assessments had anticipated rapid deterioration, but the speed of the Afghan state's collapse exceeded official expectations because the organisations doing the analysis struggled to integrate immaterial factors — the fragility of the regime's political legitimacy, the catastrophic effect on Afghan military morale of the announced U.S. withdrawal, the absence of genuine will to fight among forces whose entire operational logic had been built around American support.

The third explanation is the hardest to solve. Even when signals are abundant and organisations function well, understanding an adversary's actual intentions at a given moment requires a quality of intelligence that is genuinely rare. Capabilities can be observed. Intentions are opaque. A concentration of Iranian forces near the strait could be coercion, posture, or preparation for actual closure. Without reliable access to internal Iranian decision-making, the ambiguity cannot be fully resolved.

The Information Paradox

There is a further complication that makes the problem worse, not better, as technology advances. The multiplication of data sources — electronic signals, satellite imagery, cyber intercepts, human intelligence, open-source monitoring — does not automatically reduce uncertainty. An adversary who knows they are being watched, as Iran certainly does, actively manages what the observer sees. Egypt rehearsed large military exercises along the Suez Canal for months before the 1973 Yom Kippur War, specifically to condition Israeli analysts into interpreting troop movements as routine. The volume of information that flows through modern intelligence systems creates as many opportunities for adversarial deception as it does for genuine insight.

This is the paradox: more data can produce more noise, more ambiguity, and more opportunities for sophisticated actors to shape what analysts believe. The challenge is not to gather more signals. It is to discern which signals announce a genuine break from the pattern — and to do so quickly enough to act.

The Alert-to-Decision Gap

Even when analysts get it right, there is another failure mode waiting: the gap between alert and decision. Recognising a threat has costs. Mobilising forces costs money and political capital. Changing posture generates diplomatic consequences. Assuming a risk of false positives — of crying wolf — has career consequences for the analyst and credibility consequences for the institution. The rarer a given type of attack, the more rational it appears, in any given moment, not to treat a warning as requiring immediate and costly action.

This paradox — that the least probable events are also the most destabilising — is not irrational. It is the predictable output of systems designed to manage routine risk. The problem is that strategic surprises, by definition, are not routine.

The Strait of Hormuz illustrates this precisely. Iran's closure of the strait prompted a global fuel crisis, a U.S.-led aerial campaign on Iranian targets, and a subsequent naval blockade of Iran, with the U.S. simultaneously intercepting Iranian vessels while Iran seized cargo ships in retaliation. The mechanism that produced this outcome was not simply that people failed to see it coming. It is that the cost of treating it as imminent — every year for twenty years when it did not happen — was high enough that no government, company, or market was structured to respond at the speed the actual event demanded.

What Actually Reduces Strategic Surprise

Minvielle's analysis points toward three concrete improvements, all of which are harder than they sound.

The first is precision. An effective warning is not a general assessment of elevated risk. It is tactical: specific enough to support a decision. The Battle of Midway in 1942 — one of the most decisive intelligence-driven victories in military history — worked not because American cryptanalysts had decoded a general picture of Japanese intent, but because they had broken the encryption codes with sufficient precision to tell decision-makers where, when, and what. That level of specificity, married to decision-makers willing to act on it, produced a result. General warnings, however accurate in retrospect, rarely do.

The second improvement is treating alert as a continuum rather than a binary. Rather than oscillating between doing nothing and full mobilisation, organisations benefit from developing graduated responses: limited deployments to test a hypothesis, targeted intelligence intensification in specific areas, preparation exercises designed to assess the reality of a threat without committing to acting on it. These intermediate steps reduce the cost of being wrong in either direction and build organisational muscle memory that matters when the real moment arrives.

The third — and most underrated — is what Minvielle calls "strategic empathy": the capacity to understand an adversary's logic from the inside, not through the lens of one's own normative frameworks. Strategic surprises are often, in part, ethical misunderstandings. What we cannot conceive — because it conflicts with our assumptions about how rational actors behave, what constitutes legitimate action, or what costs an opponent is willing to bear — we struggle to perceive even when the evidence is there. Hamas's willingness to accept the costs of October 7. Iran's willingness to close the world's most important energy chokepoint even in the face of certain American military response. These are not inexplicable decisions; they follow a logic. The failure is not that the logic is invisible. It is that analysing it seriously requires treating the adversary's worldview as coherent rather than aberrant.

The Lesson That Keeps Not Being Learned

Strategic surprise will not be eliminated. Minvielle is right about this, and it is an important thing to say clearly: the goal is not to achieve a state of perfect anticipation. It is to build organisations and political cultures that can respond faster, absorb shocks more effectively, and resist the institutional inertia that turns a known risk into an unnecessary catastrophe.

The Strait of Hormuz is still not fully stable. Iran continues to launch drones, the United States continues to intercept them, and the question of the strait's status is tied directly to negotiations over frozen Iranian assets and the terms of any durable ceasefire. The scenario that was documented for twenty years is still unfolding, in real time, at considerable cost.

The question worth asking now is not whether this was predictable — it was. The question is what structures, habits of mind, and political arrangements would have been required to ensure that "predictable" translated into "prepared." The answer is uncomfortable, because it implies changes that are expensive, politically unrewarding in peacetime, and in tension with the short-term incentive structures of democratic governments and commercial organisations alike.

That is the real paradox of strategic surprise. It is not that we cannot see what is coming. It is that we keep choosing, rationally and incrementally, not to act as though we believe it.

Sources: Nicolas Minvielle, "From Pearl Harbor to the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz: understanding and anticipating surprise wars," The Conversation (June 7, 2026); Wikipedia / CENTCOM reporting on 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis; Britannica, "2026 Iran war"; Congressional Research Service, Iran Conflict and the Strait of Hormuz (March 2026); Erik Dahl, Intelligence and Surprise Attack (Georgetown University Press, 2013).