No one was making surprise attacks against Honolulu in 1940, either. The point of the military is to be credibly prepared for even low likelihood events (which, due to game theory, is what makes them low likelihood in the first place).
Finally, no current potential enemy state has the kind of aircraft carrier fleet needed to perform that the of attack. The U.K. and China both have two active carriers, but the Chinese are still training up. The Japanese launched about 300 planes from six carriers.
Nowadays, any surprise attack on the United States would be a counterforce launch of hundreds of ICBMs and SLBMs with at most twenty minutes of warning to launch a response, and hours to launch a second strike, assuming command and control networks remained active.
The only scenario after the invention of modern surveillance/detection mechanisms I can think of would have been 9/11 and in that case the problem wasn't reaction time but red tape, identification of compromised airplanes and willingness to shoot down civilian planes full of American citizens who might already be trying to recapture the plane.