Your thoughts?
My thoughts:
1. No conspiracy at all. The central issue, with regards to connecting the dots afterwards, was that there was no one charged with connecting them BEFORE THE FACT. Intelligence collection was a parochial business (each service collected it's own, and very often, did not share it with it's sister services or the federal agencies like the FBI). This was not truly rememdied until the creation of the OSS and later, CIA.
2. The military structure of the day was quite used to muddle, bureacratic inertia and nonsense, empire building, and fostered an enviornment where original thinkers and those who might otherwise buck the system, were buried. Anyone who had both brains and initiative was pretty much automaticaly suspect in the military of 1920-1941. Those officers who attained high rank during this period did so by kow-towing to their superiors and keeping orthodox thoughts.
3. As to the attack itself, Gen. Short was responsible for the defense of the islands, including the harbor. Admiral Kimmel is guilty of being the guy on watch when the bombs fell, but he did at least order an emergency sortie to the ships in harbor (despite the fact that 21 of them were either sunk or damaged).
4. Racism and a lack of appreciation for the enemy and his capabilities played a huge part in the debacle. Neither Short nor Kimmel took their "War Warnings" beyond a certain point, because it was universally believed that all Japanese were 5' 2", wore Coke-bottle glasses and had buck teeth, and were little better than semi-intelligent apes, certianly incapable of sailing across the Pacific undetected and attacking the American fleet at it's moorings. Short and Kimmel were derelict in thir duty in ordering a full alert upon receipt of EVERY "War Warning"; the fact that several had been issued previously and not resulted in anything makes no difference. You still practice fire drills even when there isn't a fire, correct?
5. The codebreaking was all very nice, but it was still regarded as something less than reliable by career military men (there were exceptions, such as Nimnitz and MacArthur), and the limited success that Britain was enjoying with Ultra (not widely know at the time for obvious reasons) did very little to change minds. Common practice at the time was to have at least one other credible source back up (concretely) whatever the code breakers had dug up. The process of collecting intelligence was way ahead of th eability to co-ordinate and make use of it effectively. After Pearl Harbor, and Britain's cracking of the Luftwaffe and Kreigsmarine Enigma codes, minds were changed.
6. Never mind the "Sneak attack" business. In the entire history of warfare you would be hard pressed to find more than perhaps 10 major wars that were preceeded by a formal declaration of war by either side. It is axiomatic in warfare that one must always try to take the enemy at unawares, and the only reason the Japanese attempted to abide by the formal legalities attendant to declaring war was because they expected a short war, ending in overwhelming Japanese victory, and the fact that the Japanese had "played by the rules" was supposed to be remembered by the American peace negotiators who would then be more amenable to a victorious Japan. Instead, what Yammamoto had feared came to pass: far from being resigned to having been beaten "fair and square", the late declaration gave the appearance of duplicity and only served to ensure that Japan would be burned to the ground.
There's more than enough blame to go around (as per Donald M. Goldstein), and we saw the same mistakes made with regards to intelligence gathering and acting upon it on September 11, 2001, as we did on December 7, 1941.
You can idiot-proof any system, and Mother nature just basically makes better idiots to screw the whole thing up.