You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense and foreign affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the founder of Warren the Rocks. I'm sitting here with Bruce Hoffman of the Council

and Foreign Relations, but if you've ever come across the subject of terrorism at all in your career, you've read his work.

Thanks for joining us, Bruce.

Sure, of course.

And I want to say to our listeners, we had a bit of an equipment failure so I'm recording on my phone so the

audio quality is not going to be as good on this one and I apologize so Bruce

pretty shocking assault by Hamas on Israel on Israeli territory let's start with how could something like this have possibly

succeeded. I know that there's probably going to be all sorts of inquiries and

investigations later on and now it's not really at the time but you have to wonder

how such a technologically and militarily

sophisticated country like Israel that is designed to prevent things like this from happening,

how an assault could make it over the border from Gaza.

I have to say that I'm immediately reminded of one of the most memorable lines from the 9-11

Commission report about the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

And that was its criticism of the United States intelligence community.

It said it was a failure of imagination.

And I think that's exactly right.

For Hamas, it was the perfect storm and the ideal opportunity.

Firstly, I think Israel had become, as the United States and many other Western nations are completely reliant on technological

and highly sophisticated electronics platforms for gathering intelligence,

in addition just the difficulty of getting human intelligence. But that also I think led to perhaps

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