Being blindsided by the unexpected in real life.
- Engineers responsible for designing space-probes to land on Venus assumed its atmosphere had similar pressures at ground level to what Earth has at sea-level. Because ground-level pressures on Venus are roughly equal to pressures a half-mile underwater in Earth's oceans, scientists were certainly NOT expecting the landers to stop sending signals at crush-depth before even reaching the ground on Venus. After that, they brought in engineers who specialize in designing deep-sea submersibles to devise a way to gather data on the ground of Venus and to transmit that data to Earth. The Russians were eventually able to get landers to last up to two hours on the surface.note
- The submarine USS San Francisco once ran full speed into an Underwater MOUNTAIN
. Apparently, the captain and crew should have seen that coming if they were doing their jobs right (the captain ended up relieved of duty and six other crewmen were reprimanded and reduced in rank). So that would make this a case of unknown knowns. - During World War I, the Austro-Hungarian battleship SMS (Seiner Majestät Schiff) Szent István (or, "His Majesty's Ship Saint Stephen") was torpedoed and sunk by two Italian motor torpedo boats that just happened to pass in the area. This goes under the Unknown Knowns category, as the Austro-Hungarians knew that the Italians used motor torpedo boats and considered them a threat due to their tendency to attack their fleet in the harbours. They just didn't expect the boats to be able to torpedo a battleship in the middle of the sea in spite of a destroyer and torpedo boat screen (and in fact thought it had been submarines until the Italians started bragging).
- The Italians tended to be involved in this during the war. When they declared neutrality in 1914 they caught everyone by surprise, as Italy was in a military alliance with Austria-Hungary and Germany at the time. Only, it covered defensive wars, and technically Austria-Hungary attacked first. Falls into False Assumptions, as everyone had thought Italy and Austria-Hungary had managed to put aside their border dispute (Italy hadn't).
- In 1916 the Italians were completely caught by surprise by the Austro-Hungarians attacking - doing some math they had figured the enemy didn't have the manpower to fight Russia on one front and mount an offensive on the other - and the Austro-Hungarians nearly broke through. Then the Austro-Hungarians were caught on the receiving end of this: the Russians attacked en-masse, forcing them to move all the attacking troops on the other side of the country. Both fall into Unknowns Known: the Italians had noticed the massing of troops but dismissed it, and the Austrians should have seen the Russians attacking that fast.
- Italian artillery was another False Assumption: given the state of Italian industry, everyone expected the Italians to be unable to produce a lot of guns, only for them to field the second largest artillery park of any power in the war, to the Austro-Hungarians' growing horror.
- The Battle of Caporetto contained a few of these. First, the Austro-Hungarians and Germans broke through due to a) the Unknown Known of the new German tactics and b) the False Assumption that gas didn't work on high mountains. Then the Austro-Hungarians ran into the Unknown Unknown of the multiple reserve defensive lines that Cadorna and some of his subordinates had passed the previous year, predisposing just in case: while a Modern Major General wasted an artillery trap that could have annihilated a prong of the assault and the Italians (whose army had almost completely dissolved under the pressure of the enemy attack and low morale, with many soldiers deciding to just go home) didn't get to the Tagliamento river in time to stop the enemy, by the Piave river the Italian soldiers had decided that the invader was to be defeated, reformed the army, and held the line, and in the north the Austro-Hungarians discovered that a good chunk of the immense Italian artillery park had been placed on a mountain where they couldn't cut the supply lines.
- 1918 has the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, a massive False Assumption. By that point, everyone had figured that the Allies would win the war, and the plan was for Austria to negotiate peace while Germany would fight through the winter to get better peace conditions. Then the Italians surprised everyone (including their own allies) by launching a sudden and massive offensive that they weren't supposed to have the morale or motivation for. Thanks to this and the Italian artillery being brought up to eleven, when the Italians were finished the Austro-Hungarian army had been functionally annihilated, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had barely managed to surrender unconditionally before collapsing, and Germany had to beg for peace before the Italians could march through Austria to attack them from the south.
- Finally, the very last days of the war: by the time the armistice on the Italian front took effect and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had started to collapse, the Austro-Hungarian Army had reformed as a coherent fighting force. This falls under False Assumptions, as everybody had assumed that no army could do this... In spite of the Italian Army doing almost the very same thing exactly a year before. The Italian high command was very happy that the armistice had taken effect, as the Austro-Hungarian Army proved they had outlasted the empire they served and only laid down their arms (not surrendered) a regiment or division at time.
- Italians kept doing this long after World War II. Italian Navy's special ops were responsible for wrecking two British battleships, the HMS Valiant and HMS Queen Elizabeth, in 1941 in the middle of Alexandria Harbor and for seriously weakening the strength of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean for more than a year. So common were such incidents that when the Soviet warship Novorossyisk (formerly Italian battleship Giulio Cesare, taken over by the Russians after World War II) blew up at Sevastopol in 1956, Russia suspected that the Italians might have pulled it off as a sort of revenge, although no firm evidence of this ever emerged.
- Overlapping with Unknown Knowns and False Assumption, the sinking of the Titanic has this trope written all over it. Titanic was built in full compliance with the contemporary maritime safety regulations, with her design able to withstand a number of different scenarios involving running around, hitting something, or getting hit by something. She didn't have enough lifeboats for everyone aboard, but at the time, it was expected that the ship would remain afloat long enough for help to arrive and the boats would then ferry people to a rescue ship. Three years earlier, this seemed to work perfeclty with the RMS Republic. A scenario in which the entire complement had to get off the ship at the same time was simply not imagined.
- 9/11
- Technically untrue with regards to the intelligence services. It wasn't so much that 9/11 was unexpected, at least by counter-terrorism professionals - between them, the CIA and FBI had enough intel to sweep the attackers up, but for "the Wall", a bureaucratic device that limited cooperation between the two agencies — Mohammed Atta even put the actual name of his hotel on his landing card! It is just that the attack happened before people expected it to, so more a case of Known Unknown. Of course, the US public was totally blindsided.
- The World Trade Center was estimated to withstand a plane crash. However, the engineers doing the estimations envisioned low-speed accidental crashes, due to low visibility; no one imagined that someone would intentionally crash a fully-fueled jetliner into the Towers.
- The collapse of the Towers left architects and engineers completely dumbstruck. At the time, no skyscraper had ever collapsed due to a fire. Regarding the aforementioned plane crash scenario, it was expected that there would be a terrible fire but the structure would still stand. In 1945, a B-25 had hit the Empire State Building, which survived the impact.
- Related: US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's attempt to explain the "Unknown Unknowns" concept at a wartime press conference was widely mocked by the ill-informed and malicious. Of course, as this was regarding the apparently absent WMD's in Iraq, the criticism may have been warranted (he was dodging a direct request for solid evidence). Those phrases became so strongly associated with Rumsfeld that he even named his published memoirs "Known and Unknown".note
- This goes all the way back to the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The CIA expected that the Soviets would withdraw all their forces to Kabul and keep it secure while letting their local proxies hold the country. Instead, they withdrew from the country entirely. The U.S.'s lack of a plan for a post-Soviet Afghanistan has been faulted for the chaos there that was eventually resolved with the rise of the Taliban and its willingness to shelter Al-Qaeda.
- Mount Vesuvius was the first experience Roman civilization had with a full-fledged volcanic eruption. They had to invent a word to describe what happened.
- One major reason why the first few English settlements on the North American coastline either clung by a thread, were reduced to a few ragged survivors, or vanished without a trace was because their occupants completely misread the region's climate. Although the vegetation and weather in springtime or autumn may have superficially resembled Britain's, with summer's heat waves suggesting a balmier overall climate than conditions back home, the seasonal changes of the new continent are much more extreme than western Europe's. Thus, nothing in the English colonists' experience with two-month winters that barely dipped below freezing could have prepared them for the reality of yard-deep snowfall in January, crop-killing cold snaps in September, or char-broiling heat (to say nothing of the occasional hurricane) in July.
- Emperor Justinian of the Byzantine Empire, almost did manage to reconquer the Roman Empire. But The Plague arrived.
- When Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans tried to make Aaron Burr pull a Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal by giving him an Impossible Task, they did not predict he would Take a Third Option and invent the modern election campaign. They were not happy about this.
- The end of the Tokugawa Shogunate happened because of a number of factors that it simply did not anticipate nor effectively deal with. Chief among them was the fact that its system of socioeconomic control essentially collapsed because it failed to account for an increasingly commercialized economy. To ensure the loyalty of the daimyo, it required them to maintain estates in the capital of Edo, in which they were supposed to reside for long extended periods of time along with their families, who were to remain any time the daimyo was away. In addition to acting as a means of keeping tabs on potentially rebellious daimyo — who held the most distant domains — it also siphoned off considerable resources, making it more difficult for them to revolt. However, this also promoted urbanization, which led to the proportionate growth of services and manufacturing, which greatly benefited merchants, who were the least-regarded members of society. As a result, inflation marginalized the incomes of both the daimyo as well as the Tokugawa, who relied heavily on revenues from agricultural taxation. The samurai were particularly badly hit by this, as they were forced to subsist solely on a stipend of rice provided by their lord, which remained unchanged even as their financial obligations grew, which led to impoverishment of those who were supposed to represent the upper-most echelon of society. To resolve the problem of ever-declining purchasing power, both the Tokugawa and daimyo raised taxes, which of course came at the expense of an equally-embattled peasantry. Thus, by the early nineteenth century, the Tokugawa had to contend with growing internal restlessness, most notably among the samurai who were supposed to protect and maintain the existing order.
- All the Scandinavian countries were into this in 1814. In Norway, nobody expected the Treaty of Kiel, being handed over to Sweden without questioning. In Sweden and The British Empire, nobody dreamt of the Norwegians actually going as far as declaring independence, actively resisting a union with Sweden. The Norwegian Constituent Assembly made a drastic impact on every setup made in January 1814, changing the rules completely come November that year.
- If you watch the video of the Army-McCarthy hearings, it is obvious that Joseph McCarthy is completely blindsided by Joseph N. Welch's "have you no sense of decency" speech. He can barely speak for a few moments.
- Which is all the more amazing because he should have seen it coming. According to Roy Cohn, before the hearings began, there was an informal agreement between both sides not to bring up certain things, one of which was Fisher's political past. If you watch Point of Order again, you can see Cohn facepalming as McCarthy does so, knowing that his boss has just shot himself in the foot politically. He was utterly unsurprised at how Welch milked the moment.
- When the second 1978 Papal conclave began, no one could have foreseen that a Polish Cardinal would be elected. Given that it had been about 450 years since the last non-Italian had been elected Pope no one outside the College of Cardinals seriously expected non-Italians to have much of a chance. Thus it was completely unexpected for most of the world when it was announced that Karol Cardinal Wojtyła had just been elected Pope.
- The whole Ukraine crisis between Russia and the rest of the world was completely unexpected for everyone since it reverted the situation to the Cold War-era levels and it's now causing LOTS of unexpected changes around the world.
- It started when Russian intelligence utterly failed to predict the rise of sustained popular protests against the withdrawal from EU accession talks, protests that ultimately proved to be enough to drive Kremlin ally Viktor Yanukovych from power. So, in classic Russian fashion, they believed that other powers were involved in manipulating events within Ukraine.
- Averted if, as later intelligence stated, the US officials actually did see it coming and planned for it. What they eventually missed out upon, was the Russian reaction to it. Cue the annexation of Crimea, which seemed to come out of the blue.
- Russia did it again in September 2015 when, against all odds, they sent a massive military force to Syria to help Bashar al-Assad. Absolutely nobody saw this coming either, especially the Obama administration which was caught completely flat-footed by this move as it completely derailed all the post-Assad plans the U.S. had with other anti-Assad factions in the region (such as Turkey).
- After roughly 6 months of bombing, Russian forces announced a withdrawal from Syria. Once again, nobody in the West saw this coming. But it was even bigger than that: even Assad and a lot of Russian defense officials were unaware of the announcement until quite literally hours before it happened.
- Two subversions happened in Italy in 1970 with the Golpe Borghese. The Golpe's main armed component came from the Corpo Forestale dello Stato (the park rangers. To be fair, they have light infantry firepower) because nobody would expect it... Except that the government not only knew of the attempted coup, they knew exactly who was trying it, and the army was fully mobilized and waiting for them. Also, the government expected the conspirators wouldn't see the government suppressing the coup and using it as an excuse to declare martial laws, but their leader Junio Borghese found out and aborted the coup just in time.
- According to the theories of the fringe historian Viktor Suvorov, the entire World War II was basically Stalin's plan to weaken Europe and strike out once everyone was busy fighting each other; Stalin was focused completely on offense and was forewarned that Hitler might attack him, but completely dismissed the possibility ("Unknown Known") because he figured that surely even Hitler wasn't stupid or insane enough to attack the USSR.
- The French strategy for World War II relied on forcing any German invasion of France through Belgium which motivated the construction of the Maginot Line to deter a direct invasion through the border. This seemed like a perfectly logical plan given that this would not only force Belgium into the war on the French side, but also help keep the battlefield as far away from French territory as possible. It was also seen as the only logical route for a German advance, since to the south were the Ardennes, a region consisting of hilly terrain and extensive forests, lacking in road and rail networks: overall, it was ill-suited for a rapid offensive and highly problematic for logistics. So when the Germans began their invasion of Belgium and broke through faster than expected, the Anglo-French military command accordingly sent the bulk of their forces to meet them on the central plain. What they did not anticipate was that the German military was willing to gamble the outcome of the entire war on launching a major offensive through the Ardennes days after their feint attack on Belgium. Outdated doctrine and organization — which prevented the French army from reacting quickly to the sudden breakthrough — did the rest.
- Singapore fell to the Japanese in 1942 primarily because most of its fortifications and defensive weapons were aimed out to sea — where a massive naval invasion was expected. The Japanese were certainly not expected to come through the dense jungle... which they totally did.
- The Battle of Midway: The Japanese did not see losing the battle coming. Not only were they not expecting an aggressive US Navy, they were not expecting them to show up so soon. Not only did US codebreakers crack their ‘unbreakable’ code and know when the attack was coming there were three US carriers present when the Japanese expected only two. Japanese leaders were blindsided when in minutes US dive bombers knocked out three of their carriers in less then 10 minutes.
- The Guadalcanal Campaign: The Japanese were completely caught off guard when seemingly out of nowhere US Marines attacked and seized the airfield they were building on the island of Guadalcanal. This lead to a massive campaign on both side to either hold the airfield or try to take it back.
- The US does not get off scott free on this as, more than once, during night actions they were blindsided by attacks from Japanese task forces trying to force the seas to land more troops to take back the island or to bombard Henderson Field so their army can retake the base. Of course this wasn’t one sided as US task groups also managed to do the same as well. The area is now called Iron Bottom Sound for a very good reason.
- The United States military tends to occasionally come up with very strange, and sometimes fantastical military exercises. Some of these involve simulations of attacks by aliens, ghosts, or even potentially invading their closest allies. It's both an acknowledgment of and an attempt to subvert category 3. Either they have an actual plan should any of the scenarios actually occur and make it at least Category 2, or else to find the right officers and NCOs who can at least keep up with WTF Level 9000 events and think outside the box enough to maintain an effective force and not completely lose it when things go mental. They're apparently quite fun to participate in compared to more typical exercises. It's very likely that other militaries practice similar plans, at least to prevent a complete disaster when they didn't see that coming.
- The Zombie exercises pull double duty (or rather quadruple). A Zombie exercise has normal military attacks, a spreadable disease, being cut off from others, and an internal revolt. So anyone who can handle a "Zombie invasion" is essentially prepared for an utter breakdown of infrastructure during an invasion.
- The Zombie exercises pull double duty (or rather quadruple). A Zombie exercise
- Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican Primary was expected to be a repeat of the quickly-surging-then-tanking Hermain Cain from 2012, but instead the Donald turned into something of an Outside-Context Problem for the entire Republican establishment, who were so used to traditional politics they had absolutely no idea how to campaign against someone like Trump. Not only did he have a better idea of how to manipulate the media for more coverage than anyone else in the field, he freely admitted to changing his mind on positions (defusing many attempts to characterize him as a "flip-flopper" with his perceived honesty), and owned his elitism instead of hiding it, framing himself as "unbought" because of his wealth. Nor could donors be counted on to rein him in since he was rich enough to fund his campaign himself (and other donors were afraid of the pushback they might get from him and his supporters for opposing him so blatantly). And without a political past, opponents had trouble finding attacks that would stick. Furthermore, the Republican Party had spent the better part of three decades conditioning their base to reject the establishment. So when an anti-establishment candidate appeared, his election by those voters in defiance of the Republican establishment should have surprised no one.
Then again, Trump wasn't the only anti-establishment Republican candidate in 2016, but two of them had their own run-ins with this Trope:- The Herman Cain analogue ended up being Dr. Ben Carson.note He surged very highly at the start,note but then the November 2015 Paris terror attack put national security & foreign policy at the top of the agenda, a field he was extremely weak in,note and Carson's campaign almost completely collapsed, going from around 25-30% to the single digits prior to the actual primaries.
- Senator Ted Cruz got waylaid by this trope as well, though he lasted longer than all but moderate Governor John Kasich. In the early going, the well-funded Cruz, who enjoyed strong support from movement conservatives for his principled stands despite those very same stands having alienated his fellow Republicans in Congress, figured Trump would quit as soon as he'd gotten his vanity fix, leaving a large bloc of voters there for the taking. Unfortunately for Cruz, Trump didn't and began racking up primary victories. Cruz won his share, staying in the race even as almost every other candidate dropped out, but had neglected to have a backup plan and started pinning his hopes of winning the nomination on procedural maneuvering at the convention, putting him in an uneasy alliance with the party establishment he'd originally positioned himself as running against, including Kasich! This fell apart when both Cruz and Kasich wanted to campaign in Indiana. This increased support for Trump, who went on to win Indiana, and Cruz dropped out with a month left to go in the primaries, with Kasich following the next day.
- Hillary Clinton - twice! She was a shoo-in for the nomination in 2008. Sure, there might be another, similarly qualified candidate challenging her - maybe Al Gore would throw his hat into the race once more. But an African American freshman senator with a funny name? What's he gonna do? Win Iowa? Until very close to the end, she seemed to have been unable to see coming what ultimately happened - two terms of Obama. Fast forward to the 2016 race and Clinton was once more a shoo-in for the nomination, allegedly working the field before officially announcing to avoid any challengers. But then some elderly ex-mayor of Burlington, Vermont, a Jew from Brooklyn named Bernie Sanders who calls himself a Democratic socialist, comes from nowhere and beats her in New Hampshire.
- And then there was the Michigan primary. Polls had Hillary up by as much as 20 points, but ultimately Sanders won. FiveThirtyEight (a polling aggregation site run by Nate Silver that is usually pretty good in its predictions) spent most of the time after the polls closed trying to make sense of what had just happened.
- However, Sanders was unable to build on this because of his difficulty winning over (1) black voters and (2) superdelegatesnote , and although he continued to win primaries Hillary mathematically clinched the nomination before the primaries ended.
- The entire global political establishment was hit with this when Trump won the 2016 election in spite of all of the news media and opinion polls stating otherwise. What makes this such a massive example of this trope was that according to campaign insiders, Clinton was so sure of victory that she spent most of her time campaigning in battleground states (and even spent time campaigning in states that were guaranteed to go Republican: Arizona and Texas) that she failed to realize Trump's economic messaging was resonating extremely well among white working-class liberals, and thus was completely blindsided when Trump took traditionally blue states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsinnote that she had taken for granted.
- Part of the reason why the 1929 Great Depression and the 2007 Great Recession were so devastating was that they happened due to things that were seen as inevitable in hindsight, yet almost nobody - certainly nobody in any position of power - saw coming. In the 1930s the world economy was wrecked among other things due to the fact that many companies had refinanced long-term investments with short-term loans. What could possibly go wrong with that? The crisis was exacerbated when a major bank collapsed in Austria and no government saw a need to bail them out ("too big to fail" was not a common term back then), which led to a run on the banks and the collapse of any domestic European credit market, after American banks already started calling back their credits to European debtors. In 2007 the thing nobody saw coming was that housing prices could ever go down in a country with a growing population. Ultimately the whole house of cards that was built on the assumption of perpetually growing prices in the housing market came tumbling down, taking the US economy and shortly thereafter the European economy with it.
- During the last days of the Weimar Republic, many politicians tried to invoke this trope, justifying actions that broke either the letter or the spirit of the constitution with the statement that those were "Emergencies not foreseen by the constitution". One of those was the son of President Paul von Hindenburg, who worked his elderly father in order to get what he wanted, which led to many on the left joking about the "President's son not foreseen by the constitution". Ultimately, it was an unknown known - Adolf Hitler who had actually been very direct about his intentions that brought the Weimar Republic down.
- Rocksteady is on record as to saying that Batman: Arkham Knight getting an M-rating was unintentional, as they hadn't intended for it to be such. Comments suggested that the final hallucination where the Joker can gun down an unarmed Penguin, Riddler and/or his hostage, and Two-Face, and the stuff involved Professor Pyg (including him mutilating someone when Batman finds him) is what earned it that. It's also been speculated that the Scarecrow's redesign (which included a mutilated face), the game opening with the Joker's cremation and not cutting away once the flames start to consume his body, and flashbacks to the Joker crippling Barbara Gordon and torturing Jason Todd also played a role.
- Likewise, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice originally got an R rating, which surprised director Zack Snyder as he had intended to make it PG-13. However, he did recut the film to get a PG-13 rating and the Ultimate Edition was released on Blu-ray with an R rating. There's more extensive fighting in the cut, two characters utter "fuck", and a scene released on the web shortly after the theatrical release showed the army finding Lex Luthor talking to a demonic Steppenwolf in what appeared to be a pool filled with blood.
- Pokémon GO: No one, not even Nintendo themselves, expected the game to be so insanely popular, to the grade entire organizations and world leaders requested that Nintendo do something about players trying to catch Pokémon in improper, dangerous, sacred, or forbidden places. And on a technical level, attracting way more people than expected made the servers very unstable in the early days.
- McDonald's had what seemed to be a good synergy promotion during the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles: every purchase gave a scratch-off card with an Olympic event, if the United States won a medal in it there was an edible reward (Big Mac for gold, fries for silver, a soda for bronze). And then the Soviet Union led a boycott of the Socialist countries that erased much of the competition in certain sports, leading the US team to take Home Field Advantage to incredible levels (174 medals total - half of them golden! - a huge improvement over the 94 of 1976note ) and McDonald's to hand out free food in huge quantities, with some restaurants reportedly running out of Big Macs.
- The firing of James Comey from his position as head of the FBI turned into this for the Trump administration, as rather than the Democrats cheering on Trump for getting rid of a guy they hated, instead they pointed out just how suspicious the entire action was, and ultimately caused a lot of backlash. Comey, for his part, didn't see his firing coming and learned about it when he saw a report on TV about it, which he initially thought was a prank.
- The 2017 snap general election in the UK caused several moments where no one saw it coming.
- First was a snap election in the first place. Theresa May had stated repeatedly she was not going to call an early general election so the fact she actually did caught a lot of people off guard. Reportedly, many members of the Cabinet did not learn about it until the meeting just before the announcement.
- The reason the election was called was that the Conservatives were confident they could crush Labour under Jeremy Corbyn (who was polling lower than any past Labour leader at the time). The problem was they failed to realise Corbyn was a good campaigner (which is why he got the job in the first place) and the Tories' primary support base is older voters. This, combined with a poor campaign by the Tories in general, allowed Corbyn to energise younger voters and win several seats leading the Tories to lose their majority in the House of Commons.
- The Scottish National Party (SNP) also got blindsided. While they could tell they might lose some seats, they believed their calls for a second referendum on Scottish independence would energise their supporters enough to win most of the Scottish seats they won in 2015 (56 seats, all but three in Scotland). Instead, it caused a backlash against the SNP by the anti-independence voters (and a few independence supporters who thought it was too soon for a second referendum on the issue), combined with increased support for the Tories in Scotland, which they should have seen coming but dismissed thanks to the perceived notion Scots don't vote for Tories, leading to the loss of a third of their seats. On top of that was losing two of their biggest hitters, the former leader Alex Salmond and the leader at Westminster Angus Robertson.
- This happened to Israel on multiple levels in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, though it was very much a case of Known Unknown regarding the breakout of the war itself. The Israeli government got pretty much every possible warning that a war was coming, up to and including both massive enemy buildup on the borders and a warning from the King of Jordan himself just days before the attack. Key people in the Israeli government, including the Prime Minister herself, simply refused to believe that the Arabs were capable of starting a war at that time, and were subsequently caught completely off guard. Contrary to popular belief however, the IDF had actually started mobilizing just prior to the breakout of war - it was just too little too late - and the option of an Israeli pre-emptive strike had already been forbidden by the United States.
- The IDF's armored corps did not see Soviet RPGs and anti-tank guided missiles coming. The technology was known, but the number of launchers available to the Egyptian army was heavily underestimated. The IDF was still expecting tank-on-tank action in the open desert, and instead lost hundreds of tanks to man-portable launchers hiding behind every dune. A similar story played out with the IAF and the Syrian and Egyptian air defenses, which had been beefed up considerably after Israel's 1967 surprise attack from the air, and now ended up shooting down a sizable portion of the IAF.
- Similarly, no one expected the Egyptians to be able to breach the huge rampart on the Israeli-controlled side of the Suez Canal... except every single Israeli soldier who served along the canal and watched them practicing the use of high-pressure water cannons.
- Iraq's strategic plan in the First Gulf War, to deploy the majority of its army dug-in in Kuwait backed up by a powerful mobile reserve, was sound except for one major problem: they entrusted the defense of their right flank to the trackless desert along their border with Saudi Arabia, reasonably assuming that the Coalition would have as much trouble navigating there as they did. Unfortunately for the Iraqi general staff, they didn't know that the Coalition had access to recently-developed Global Positioning System technology, allowing them to easily navigate the desert and cut off the troops in Kuwait.
- While any disease outbreak can count, the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020 escalated with an impact that no other 21st century epidemic (SARS, swine flu, Ebola, Zika) reached. It started in China, and scaling down business in a country of economical and industrial importance due to a sick work force already made things complicated. And then the virus spread across the globe, and even if infection couldn't be airborne, only through close contact and via respiratory droplets, the world had to suddenly accommodate and in a way stop lest COVID-19 became The Plague: travel restrictions were set all-around, things stopped on culture (festivals and gatherings were cancelled, movie releases were postponed or at times relegated to streaming services, TV and film production was halted) and sports (every tournament stopped being played, and events still months away such as the Olympics were pushed forward to 2021), and people were enforced to stay home, screwing over the education system and many businesses.
- The fall of Afghanistan in August 2021 was seen as something as a possibility, but the speed of which the Taliban retook the country took everyone off-guard. What no one expected was that the Afghani army would easily give up and willingly surrender to the Taliban after American and NATO forces spent decades, thousands of manpower and billions of dollars to try and build up the army to protect their liberated home.
- In 2018, Activision Blizzard thought it would be a good idea to announce Diablo Immortal, a mobile game as The Climax to that year's BlizzCon convention after building up hype for a new Diablo game for several months beforehand. BlizzCon is attended by Blizzard's most dedicated fans who are all but entirely comprised of PC gamers, who had paid $200 a pop in hopes of seeing a mainline Diablo game, especially since the then-latest game in the franchise, Diablo III, had been released over six years ago at the time; so the announcement went down about as well as you can imagine. One attendee (in)famously asked if Diablo Immortal is "an out-of-season April Fool's joke". Somehow, Blizzard hosts did not expect a negative reception of this scale to a mobile game being announced as the grand finale to a PC-centric convention, as demonstrated by announcer Wyatt Cheng's reaction to the crowd booing the confirmation that, at the time, there were no plans for a PC portnote ; he was so surprised that he impulsively asked the crowd, "Do you guys not have phones?", which also went down about as well as you can imagine.
- The Demand Overload that hit Final Fantasy XIV was expected when its fourth expansion, Endwalker, dropped. However, the sheer level that hit the game caught everyone off-guard. This was due to four major reasons:
- The COVID-19 Pandemic. The pandemic hit during the middle of Shadowbringers' life cycle, leading to more players staying online to play, causing servers to start getting backed up.
- The one-two punch of World of Warcraft's failure with their own newest expansion, Shadowlands and the sudden revelation of Activision Blizzard's misconduct that was revealed during the summer of 2021. The double whammy disillusioned many players and content creators and lead to them checking out FFXIV out of curiosity and many genuinely sticking around.
- The cryptocurrency boom. There was already a shortage of computer equipment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the rise of cryptocurrency lead to the hoarding of various equipment including graphics cards and server equipment. As such, a plan of adding extra servers to alleviate the extra load of players had to be backburnererd. This lead to the unprecedented move of stopping sales of the game and stopping downloads of the free trial.
- Abubakar Shekau, a former leader of the infamous Nigerian jihadi group Boko Haram, pulled this trope on ISIS, of all people. Although Shekau allied his group with ISIS, he left the group after being denied a leadership position. After a few years of infighting, ISIS finally forced Shekau into the negotiating table, hoping to bring a well-recognised jihadi leader back into the fold. Shekau, however, had other plans, and blew himself and the ISIS negotiators up in the middle of the talks. Of course, given ISIS' well-known tendency to pull You Have Outlived Your Usefulness, he may just have been Genre Savvy enough to recognise that he wasn't going to live long either way. Regardless, the ISIS leadership did not see Shekau's "dramatic" final act and was, by all accounts, surprised at the outcome.
- The 2022 US Midterms was one of the worst showings for the Republicans, with the party barely winning the House of Representatives and failing to retake the Senate, when traditionally the minority party would have gained numerous seats. Many GOP nominees had gambled on tried-and-true sticking points like the economy, crime, and border safety. Instead, their talking points were overshadowed by the loss of abortion rights and fears of democratic backsliding with the Dobbs Decision and the Capitol Insurrection still in the public conscience. At the same time, they overlooked high turnout among Democrat-leaning Millennial and Generation Z voters, who were excited by popular Democratic policies and turned off by GOP hostility to abortion and democracy. After over a month of counting, the Republicans lost a seat in the Senate, and narrowly won control of the House of Representatives but only by 9 votes instead of the dozens they expected.
- Hurricanes, as with all weather patterns, can be predicted but even the best computers and the best meteorologists can be caught with their pants down when a hurricane can do something they didn't expect.
- Hurricane Isabel in 2003 caught Virginia off-guard when the hurricane decided to plow through North Carolina and right into Central Virginia. Though it had weakened once it went on land, it didn't weaken enough and its eastern side nailed Eastern Virginia badly, causing widespread power outages, over a billion dollars in damages and killed nearly two dozen people. It also lead to Dominion Power rethinking how to plan for hurricanes so this never happened to them again.
- Hurricane Harvey in 2017 decided to park its butt in Eastern Texas, drowning the Houston area in up to 40 inches of rain. The National Weather Service's precipitation scale didn't go that high until this incident.
