In his new book,
Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception, former U.S. Army Intelligence Analyst Dr. David Firester—Founder and CEO of TRAC Intelligence, LLC—dissects the recurring patterns that left America vulnerable on 9/11, Israel stunned on Yom Kippur in 1973, and—more recently—allowed Hamas to breach the Gaza border on October 7, 2023. In this written exchange, Firester warns that democracies, especially Israel, cannot survive if moral reflexes eclipse strategic judgment, and he offers a blueprint for the intellectual humility and moral adaptation required to confront enemies who weaponize empathy itself. Please note, in his responses, Dr. Firester uses quotation marks around the word Palestinian to highlight how politics and history have shaped that label.
What first led you to see intelligence and military failures as symptoms of a deeper strategic blindness and not just isolated mistakes?
The idea first began to take shape after 9/11. I was in New York that day, and the experience left a lasting imprint. It wasn’t only the shock of the attack—it was the realization that so many signals had been visible beforehand, yet went unheeded. It made me question how intelligent, capable institutions could possess so much information and still fail to adapt in time. Later, during my deployment to Iraq, those questions only deepened.
Whether the setting was Pearl Harbor, the Yom Kippur War, or the intelligence breakdowns before 9/11, the fingerprints were strikingly similar. Failure to Adapt is an attempt to explain why even societies that are technically advanced and morally motivated can misread the world so consistently and how those same habits can be unlearned.
You argue that intelligence failures rarely result from a lack of information. If the problem is not the data or analysis, what drives these breakdowns in judgment?
That became clear to me during my graduate research, when I examined how organizations fail less from ignorance than from misperception. Because bureaucracies suppress dissent, intelligence officers are under pressure to produce quick, certain answers that resolve ambiguity and reinforce pre-existing beliefs. Intelligence systems reward consensus and predictability, becoming resistant to change and failing to adapt to newer threats.
The challenge, then, is not just to collect data more efficiently but to build institutions that can question themselves as effectively as they analyze others.
What changes—structural or cultural—could make the intelligence community more adaptive? And does the military’s command hierarchy help or hinder that process?
True adaptation begins with intellectual humility. Intelligence organizations need to reward dissent rather than making analysts afraid to challenge assumptions.
The military’s hierarchy, while vital for discipline, can both enable and inhibit that independence. Hierarchies excel at execution but often struggle with reflection. In Iraq, I saw leaders empower local commanders to interpret intelligence in real time and act on their interpretations. However, when information had to travel upward for approval, this agility disappeared—sometimes for the pettiest of reasons, such as restrictions on the language that analysts could use to describe the enemy.
Adaptation depends on questioning our own assumptions, even as technology accelerates the speed of information.
In the age of cyberwarfare and artificial intelligence, is the U.S. finally learning to adapt faster—or are we still repeating old strategic patterns?
Technology has certainly accelerated our ability to gather and process information, but speed is not the same as understanding. The deeper challenge remains human and organizational: how do we interpret the processed information once produced? Algorithms can expose patterns, but they can’t tell us which ones matter—or what they mean in human terms.
Artificial intelligence learns from historical data, but that means it inherits the same biases and blind spots that shaped those histories. If our institutions don’t evolve conceptually, AI simply becomes a faster mirror of our own assumptions.
That said, there are encouraging signs. Combining cyber capabilities within traditional military commands, testing plans from the adversary's perspective, and sharing data across agencies all reflect an awareness that adaptability must be built in, not added on.
However, true adaptation will come from leaders and analysts willing to challenge the machine’s conclusions and ask why an algorithm sees what it does. Technology may expand perception, but only critical thought can turn perception into strategy.
You write that non-state actors have a natural edge in adaptability. Is that due in part because they create the threat and force others to react—or is something else at work?
That’s certainly part of it—initiative is power. I saw this dynamic firsthand in Iraq, where insurgent networks could alter tactics overnight. When non-state actors create the threat, they control the tempo of events and dictate how others respond. But their advantage runs deeper. They operate outside the legal and institutional constraints that bind states. They are not signatories to the conventions that gave rise to the laws of war, and jihadist movements in particular violate those laws regularly.
What further complicates matters is that deception itself functions as a strategy. Concepts such as taqiyya (religious concealment) and hudna (temporary truce) are used not as theological footnotes but as operational tools—enabling non-state actors to deceive, delay, and regroup. These actors exploit the openness and moral restraint of democracies precisely because they know that restraint limits how we can respond.
That moral self-restraint is what separates civilization from barbarism—but it also exposes a new vulnerability: the tendency to let moral judgment override strategic judgment. That dilemma led me to explore what I call moral adaptation—the theme at the heart of my book.
You introduce the concept of moral adaptation and also warn of a moral reflex that distorts analysis. How do morality and moral judgment shape intelligence and policy—for better or worse?
Morality is indispensable in democratic strategy—but only when it is self-aware. Moral adaptation means aligning ethical principles with the realities of conflict without abandoning either. It recognizes that moral clarity and strategic clarity are not opposites.
On the other hand, there is the moral reflex: the impulse to interpret events through narratives about innocence and guilt rather than cause and consequence. Democracies, especially those founded on humanitarian ideals, are prone to this because they seek moral reassurance as much as strategic success.
In intelligence, that reflex can produce selective empathy—seeing some actors only as victims and others only as villains—blinding analysts to motives, intentions, and opportunities for deterrence. In policy, it manifests as performative morality: decisions made to appear just, rather than to achieve just outcomes.
Moral adaptation, however, is different. It demands the discipline to see adversaries as they are, not as we wish them to be, while preserving moral integrity without surrendering realism. The task of democratic intelligence is to remain humane without becoming naïve—a balance as difficult as it is essential.
Moral adaptation demands the discipline to see adversaries as they are, not as we wish them to be, and to preserve moral integrity without surrendering realism.
In your book, you note that democracies often crave moral narratives—the innocent underdog, the oppressive hegemon. This is evident not only among leaders and analysts, but in society itself. How can this be addressed?
Moral narratives are comforting because they simplify complexity. They turn geopolitics into morality plays, giving people the illusion of certainty in an uncertain world. Democracies are especially prone to this because their citizens participate emotionally as well as politically. The desire to see one side as purely righteous and the other as inherently guilty satisfies a deep human need for moral coherence—but when applied to strategy, it distorts perception.
Correcting this requires education that prizes evidence over emotion, media literacy that resists emotional framing, and what I call epistemic humility—the courage to question one’s own moral instincts. Democracies don’t need less morality; they need morality informed by truth rather than narrative convenience.
After World War II, the Allies succeeded in de-radicalizing Germany and Japan. What made that transformation possible—and could a similar process ever take hold in Palestinian Arab society?
The moral reconstruction of Germany and Japan after 1945 succeeded because defeat was total, leadership was delegitimized, and ideology was discredited from within. The Allies didn’t simply impose new institutions; they reshaped the moral vocabulary through which those societies understood themselves. Education was rebuilt around accountability, civic responsibility, and empirical truth. Reconstruction was both economic and psychological/ethical.
Democracies don’t need less morality; they need morality informed by truth rather than narrative convenience.
The Middle East, by contrast, has rarely experienced either in unison. Many "Palestinian" institutions still derive their legitimacy from resistance rather than governance; the political culture rewards grievance as part of "Palestinian" identity. Where post-war Germans said “never again” and meant it, much of the region still says “not yet.”
De-radicalization begins when a society confronts the moral bankruptcy of its ideology. In Germany and Japan, that reckoning was undeniable because the devastation was existential and the evidence overwhelming. In "Palestinian" society, no comparable moral reckoning has yet occurred. Instead, anti-Jewish and anti-Western narratives remain woven into educational curricula, political rhetoric, and even religious discourse.
Transformation isn’t impossible, but it would require leaders and educators willing to replace myth with memory, victimhood with responsibility, and resentment with moral agency. External actors can help create the conditions, but only internal reform can make them endure.
The lesson of 1945 is that reconstruction is not merely about rebuilding cities—it’s about rebuilding conscience.
You write that “democracies cannot afford even the perception of moral erosion.” Does this describe Israel’s current dilemma, where civilian casualties are seen as proof of wrongdoing regardless of intent? How can a democracy preserve moral clarity when its enemies exploit that perception?
It does describe Israel’s dilemma—and more broadly, the dilemma of all democracies confronting adversaries unbound by moral restraint. The tragedy of modern asymmetric warfare is that the more a democracy adheres to the laws of war, the more it risks being condemned for them. Adversaries who embed themselves among civilians exploit that very morality as a tactical weapon. The result is an inversion of ethics: restraint becomes weakness, and self-defense is recast as aggression.
Adversaries who embed themselves among civilians exploit that very morality as a tactical weapon. The result is an inversion of ethics: restraint becomes weakness, and self-defense is recast as aggression.
Israel faces this more acutely than any other state because its enemies understand that Western perception can achieve what battlefield force cannot. Hamas and similar movements deliberately manufacture civilian suffering, knowing that global media will conflate consequence with intent. This is the weaponization of empathy. It exploits precisely the moral reflex I warned about—the tendency to judge outcomes emotionally rather than analytically.
Yet Israel’s moral challenge is also its moral strength. Democracies cannot abandon their ethical standards without forfeiting the very legitimacy that distinguishes them from their enemies. The task, then, is not to mute moral concern but to anchor it in context—to explain, relentlessly, the nature of the enemy’s strategy and the moral calculus it imposes. The harder challenge is teaching the world to see that moral clarity is not measured by emotion, but by integrity under fire.
You note that “doctrine shifts only after humiliation.” Did Israel fail to recall the lessons of 1973—or was October 7 a fundamentally different kind of shock?
October 7 bore eerie echoes of 1973, not only in the surprise itself but in the psychology surrounding it. In both cases, early warning signs were present yet filtered through assumptions about enemy capability and intent. Hamas’s preparations may have been noticed, but their potential effect was probably judged as limited—an operation expected to produce shock, not systemic trauma.
But there is another, subtler similarity: the constraint of perceived legitimacy. Before the Yom Kippur War, Israel was influenced by a sense of what the international community—especially Washington—would tolerate in terms of preemptive or decisive action. The same dynamic almost certainly shaped Israeli assumptions before October 7. In an era of instant moral judgment and politicized media, Israel must constantly calculate not only military risk but reputational cost. Under the Biden Administration, Jerusalem likely assumed there were narrow limits to how forcefully it could act without jeopardizing diplomatic support. The forms of surprise evolved, but the assumptions that enabled it did not.
The lesson is not simply to anticipate the next attack, but to reclaim confidence in the legitimacy of decisive self-defense, even when the world hesitates to grant it. A sovereign nation should never require anyone’s permission to protect its citizens, least of all when confronting a genocidal enemy sworn to its destruction.
You first developed your argument 14 years ago. Looking at today’s strategic environment, has anything changed for the better? Do you see any reason for optimism?
Some things have changed for the better, though often in painful ways. Fourteen years ago, I was focused primarily on how institutions fail to learn. Today, I see more signs that they at least recognize the cost of that failure. Both Israel and the United States have been forced to confront the limits of technological deterrence—the realization that no amount of precision or surveillance can replace adaptability, judgment, or moral clarity.
So yes, there is room for optimism—not because the world has grown safer, but because the cost of blindness has become impossible to ignore. Adaptation is slow, but it’s happening.
Any final thoughts?
If there’s one point I would add, it’s that the greatest threat to democracies is not external—it’s the erosion of strategic and moral confidence from within. Adversaries can attack our systems, but only we can dismantle our own conviction. The challenge of the twenty-first century is not just military or technological; it’s cognitive. We are drowning in information but starving for understanding, and that imbalance makes us vulnerable to every actor who manipulates perception faster than we can correct it.
Where post-war Germans said “never again” and meant it, much of the region still says “not yet.”
Israel’s story captures this tension perfectly. Its extraordinary innovation has stemmed largely from necessity—an extremely small country in a very bad neighborhood, surrounded at times by genocidal enemies. Nothing sharpens ingenuity like survival. Yet even nations defined by creativity can misjudge their adversaries.
Wednesday, November 19, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
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