National security has an understandable appetite for certainty. It needs certainty to build plans, deploy forces, allocate budgets, and distinguish between a probable threat and an extreme scenario. Yet the very need for certainty can become one of a state’s most dangerous vulnerabilities. When an intelligence assessment stops being a hypothesis that is repeatedly tested and begins to function as an institutional truth, a “conception” is born. From that point onward, the system is no longer merely interpreting reality. It begins filtering it.
The most dangerous sentence in national security is not necessarily, “We do not have enough information.” It is often far simpler: “It cannot happen here.” The sentence is not always spoken aloud. Sometimes it is embedded in operational plans, procedures, force deployment and in the weight decision makers assign to different pieces of information. The danger starts when yesterday’s reasonable judgement becomes today’s policy, and evidence that does not fit the policy is pushed to the margins.
India and Israel differ greatly in size, geography, and security architecture. Yet the histories of both countries offer painful reminders of the same truth: an adversary is under no obligation to behave according to the logic we have constructed for him in our briefing rooms.
Neither India nor Israel has the privilege of sinking into a comfortable conception.
Both countries operate in strategic environments in which a mistaken assessment of an adversary’s intent can become a national crisis within hours. Therefore, even when a working assumption appears sound, even when it has been validated for years, and even when most of the system believes it, someone must be empowered to challenge it. Not once a year, and not only after a commission of inquiry, but continuously. The scenarios that sound imaginative, exaggerated, or almost absurd deserve a place in the room precisely because strategic history is filled with events that were considered too unlikely to merit serious preparation. The relevant question is not whether such a scenario appears probable today. It is what happens if it arrives tomorrow morning.
When a Sound Assessment Becomes a Trap
In Israel, the 1973 Yom Kippur War made the Hebrew word “conceptzia,” the conception, part of the permanent vocabulary of national security. The prevailing assessment held that Egypt would not initiate war until it possessed certain capabilities that could offset Israeli air superiority and that Syria would not act independently. The logic was not irrational. The problem was that it hardened into a rigid framework. As indications accumulated that did not fit the framework, the system struggled to give them adequate weight. The surprise did not result from a total absence of information. It resulted, in significant part, from an insufficient willingness to challenge the underlying assumptions in time.
India has its own historical experience with the same danger. The 1962 India-China War demonstrated how political and strategic assumptions about an adversary’s intentions and the likely limits of escalation can collide with reality on the ground. Decades later, Kargil in 1999 again showed that an opponent can choose a course of action outside accepted expectations. Infiltration and occupation of positions at extreme altitude, in an area where operational assumptions were influenced by previous patterns, created a grave surprise and forced India to respond under exceptionally difficult conditions.
Then Came Mumbai
On 26 November 2008, ten terrorists entered Mumbai by sea. They attacked hotels, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the Jewish Chabad House, and other locations, holding one of the world’s great cities under assault for nearly three days. One hundred and sixty-six people were killed. The strategic impact of 26/11 did not come from the number of attackers, which was tiny when measured against the security resources of a country the size of India. It came from their ability to exploit a vulnerability, choose an approach that was inadequately protected, and combine relatively simple means with an enormous psychological and strategic effect.
Mumbai should therefore be studied as more than a failure of coastal security or a chapter in the history of terrorism. It is also a lesson in the danger of conception. A country can invest heavily in armed forces, intelligence, policing, and technology and still suffer a devastating blow if it is guarding mainly the door through which it expects the adversary to enter.
7 October and the Illusion of a Manageable Threat
The same lesson returned with terrible force in Israel on 7 October 2023. For years, a broad conception developed that Hamas was deterred, that it had an interest in economic improvement and the preservation of its rule in Gaza, and that it did not seek a major confrontation that would trigger a severe Israeli response. Here too, the logic did not emerge from nowhere. It drew on previous behaviour, intelligence assessments and political considerations. The danger arose when this judgement became the framework from which force deployment, readiness and the interpretation of unusual indicators were derived.
On the morning of 7 October, Hamas did not merely demonstrate that the Israeli assessment was slightly inaccurate. It built an operation designed to exploit it. Fences, sensors, cameras, observation systems and advanced intelligence could not prevent catastrophe when the architecture behind them rested on a faulty assumption about the adversary’s intent. The technology was not worthless. But technology, however sophisticated, cannot compensate for a system that has become too confident that the threat is understood and manageable.
Success Can Make a Conception More Dangerous
This is the uncomfortable point. A conception is not usually a foolish idea. On the contrary, it often begins as a logical, professional and evidence based assessment. It becomes dangerous when it works for a long time. Every day on which the adversary does not do what we fear appears to confirm the assessment. Every quiet month becomes another piece of evidence. Every year without a strategic surprise creates greater confidence. Gradually, past experience stops being a source of learning and becomes a mental prison.
That is also why major strategic failures sometimes occur in highly experienced institutions. Experience is an asset, but it tempts us to believe that we already know the adversary: how he reacts, what he is afraid to do, what is too costly for him and what appears irrational from his perspective. The adversary, however, studies us just as we study him. If he is capable, he is not searching only for our technological weaknesses. He is searching for the assumption we have stopped questioning.
The Problem Is Institutional, Not Only Intelligence Related
The deeper issue is therefore cultural and institutional. Can a young officer present a scenario that contradicts the assessment of senior commanders? Does an analyst with a minority view receive a genuine hearing, or merely a formal paragraph in a report? Do military exercises truly test the system, or are they designed in ways that allow the system to succeed? Are professionals rewarded for challenging consensus before a crisis, or quietly discouraged because they are seen as complicating the decision making process?
Countries such as India and Israel require a permanent red team culture. Not a one off exercise, and not a commission convened after disaster, but a mechanism whose job is repeatedly to prove that the system’s central assumption may be wrong. If everyone believes the border is secure, someone should be tasked with demonstrating how it can be breached. If everyone believes a particular adversary is deterred, someone should construct the case in which he is not. If everyone assumes the threat will come by land, someone must think from the sea, the air, underground, through cyberspace, or through a combination of all four.
The most imaginative scenario in the room should not be dismissed because it sounds unrealistic. It should be tested because one day it may be the scenario chosen by an adversary precisely because we dismissed it.
India’s Question Is Not Only Where the Next Front Will Be
For India, the crucial question today is not only who the next adversary might be or where the next front may emerge. The more important question is which scenarios are currently being rejected because they appear too improbable. A limited attack on a strategic port. A swarm of inexpensive drones entering a major urban area. Sabotage of an undersea cable. A combined cyberattack, terrorist strike and disruption of the power grid. A hostile action that begins far from a traditional border and seeks not to capture territory but to paralyse public confidence, commerce, and critical infrastructure.
None of these scenarios is necessarily a prediction. That is precisely the point. The purpose of national security is not to guess the future correctly every time. It is to prevent one scenario from becoming the only scenario the system is psychologically prepared to see.
There is a natural tendency after every disaster to study the last attack and prepare better for its repetition. After Mumbai, maritime security is strengthened. After a drone attack, counter-drone capabilities receive greater investment. After a border breach, the fence is reinforced. All of this is necessary. But the adversary is not required to repeat his previous success. He can study our response and search for the place where we are still looking backwards.
Neither Country Has the Privilege of Complacency
The deeper lesson of Mumbai, Kargil, the Yom Kippur War and 7 October is not simply that every country sometimes fails. It is that the most dangerous failure begins when a system ceases to distinguish between an assessment and a fact. When a conception becomes policy, it does more than explain reality. It starts deciding which reality we are willing to see.
No state can function without working assumptions. But India and Israel do not have the privilege of turning those assumptions into beliefs. Both must build permanent mechanisms of doubt, challenge and reassessment into their security cultures. Professional doubt is not weakness. It is a layer of defence. A healthy national security system does not need only people who can provide answers. It also needs people who are authorised to ask the uncomfortable question at the right moment, and to place on the table a scenario that sounds completely imaginary today as though it could become reality tomorrow morning.
The purpose of intelligence is not to predict the future perfectly. It is to prevent yesterday’s assumptions from becoming tomorrow’s catastrophe.