Thomas Gaulkin
The dust may have cleared from the June 22 US bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, but the impact of the attack remains clouded by uncertainty: What was damaged? Were uranium stockpiles and centrifuges destroyed or moved? Was any radiation released? Will Iran’s nuclear program survive? What happens next?
Last week, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told reporters that “we have degraded their program by one to two years. At least intel assessments inside the [Defense Department] assess that.” The same day, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian ordered a suspension of the country’s cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
It may be a long while before intelligence agencies, let alone the public, have any clarity about the state of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and whether the US decision to attack was worth the risk.
Meanwhile, a large new study of US and NATO military and intelligence officers’ intuitions about risk and uncertainty makes one thing clear: Overconfidence among national security officials is nearly universal.
In a forthcoming paper to be published in the Texas National Security Review, Jeffrey Friedman details the results of a survey showing that 2,000 relatively high-ranking national security officials were consistently too sure of their assessments. “Overconfidence was so extreme that it essentially canceled out the knowledge that these individuals possessed,” he writes.
Friedman is an associate professor of political science at Dartmouth, where he researches the politics and psychology of foreign policy decision-making. The results of his latest study are, as he tells me in the following interview, alarming. But he also says there’s an easy fix.
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