It occurs at all levels of war, from the tactical to the political. The Chinese strategist, Sun Tzu, wrote in On War that forces should “go forth where they do not expect it, where they are not prepared.” And Sir Lawrence Freedman, one of the greatest living strategists, has written that, “a surprise attack, conceived with cunning, prepared with duplicity and executed with ruthlessness, provides international history with its most melodramatic moments.”īut as Sir Lawrence notes, surprise is not just a battlefield event.
The aim is to shock an adversary and overwhelm them when they are their weakest or when they least expect it. The desire to surprise an adversary is central to the Eastern and Western traditions of war. Surprise is a key continuity in human competition and warfare. This is an aspect of military science which needs to be studied above all others in the Armed Forces: the capacity to adapt oneself to the utterly unpredictable, the entirely unknown.
In his Chesney Memorial Lecture in October 1973, called Military Science in an Age of Peace, Sir Michael Howard described the impact of surprise, and the necessity of military institutions to prepare their people to absorb, and adapt around, it.
