Even chastened by Pearl Harbor, Bataan, and Savo Island, American MI elements fumbled again and again when they went beyond the numbers game. They insisted that the peasant North Koreans could not be so tough; they were. They were sure that the Chinese Communist regiments could never cross the Yalu River undetected; they did. They believed the North Vietnamese must fold under U.S. bombing; they did not. Any excursions into the cultural stuff tended to reinforce biases. No good intelligence professional dared to chance such errors, nor could America.
