Roberta Wohlstetter, who died Saturday at 94, was an eminent historian of military intelligence who produced a classic study of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that concluded that organizational ineptitude and not conspiracy lay behind the failure to detect and interdict a Japanese war fleet intent on sinking the American fleet.

Wohlstetter, who spent more than half a century as an employee and consultant to the RAND Corporation, became among the foremost experts on decision-making during crises. Her book, “Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision” was published, appropriately, in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis — another dire event, rife with rumor, that would later engage her analytic attentions.

But the timing of the publication was pure coincidence. Wohlstetter had actually finished the book five years before, but the National Security Agency had barred publication. Her manuscript was published in full after a Kennedy Administration review found nothing objectionable, as it was based entirely on public documents. Wohlstetter herself told the Washington Post in 1990 that the problem was the culture of secrecy at the NSA. “They classify everything,” she said.

At Pearl Harbor, Wohlstetter concluded that the problem was not so much a lack of information as too much of it. While policymakers expected a Japanese attack, the question was where. Possibilities included Alaska, the Philippines, or Malaysia and areas near the Indian Ocean. That American spies could intercept and decode Japanese diplomatic messages didn’t necessarily help, either.

“If our intelligence systems and all our other channels of information failed to produce an accurate image of Japanese intentions and capabilities, it was not for want of the relevant materials,” Wohlstetter wrote. “Never before have we had so complete an intelligence picture of the enemy.” But the noise drowned out the signal. The book won the 1963 Bancroft Prize, awarded by Columbia University for distinguished historical work.

With its relevance to the events of 9/11, the book is said to have been handed out to subordinates by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.

At RAND, Wohlstetter was a frequent collaborator with her husband, Albert Wohlstetter, credited with drawing attention to the concepts of “second strike” nuclear capability and also “fail safe” nuclear strategy that included keeping nuclear-laden B-52 bombers constantly fueled and aloft.

Roberta Wohlstetter was the daughter of Edmund Morgan, a Harvard Law professor who was noted for his work on the rules of evidence and who also helped modernize the Uniform Code of Military Justice. She was an ambitious student and her Vassar College class of 1933 included the author Mary McCarthy, except that “her group wasn’t mom’s group,” according to Wohlstetter’s daughter, Jean Wohlstetter.

She briefly studied law, then entered graduate programs in psychology and comparative literature. According to her daughter, an interest in decision-making was evident in her dissertation, which centered on a study of the psychology of Hamlet. Perhaps typical of her own determination was that she refused to revise one chapter to suit her adviser and never completed her doctorate. In her brief fling with law school, she had gained a husband, but Albert Wohlstetter quit the law, too, and ended up with a doctorate in mathematical logic.

After World War II, the Wohlstetters moved to California, where she got a job at RAND, initially as a part-time book reviewer. After Albert Wohlstetter joined RAND as well, in 1951, the two occasionally collaborated on papers, most significantly on the topics of controlling Cuba and on linkages between American domestic protests and political upheavals abroad. Roberta Wohlstetter was an early analyst of terrorism — a 1974 article of hers was titled “Kidnapping to Win Friends and Influence People” — as well as a trenchant observer of nuclear matters on the Indian subcontinent. One of her later papers holds a clue to matters of data that held her attention throughout her career: “Surprised by the Obvious.”

Roberta Wohlstetter held teaching positions at the University of Chicago, Howard University, and Barnard College. In 1985, the Wohlstetters together were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In his remarks at the award ceremony, President Reagan noted that “Wohlstetter, a generation ahead of her time, asserted her influence in areas dominated by and, in some cases, reserved for men.”

Roberta Wohlstetter

Born Roberta Morgan on August 22, 1912, in Duluth, Mich.; died January 6 at New York-Presbyterian Hospital of complications of pneumonia; survived by her daughter, Joan Wohlstetter, and her brother, the Yale historian and also a Bancroft Prize winner, Edmund Morgan.