What would we do without our multi-billion dollar intelligence agencies? But more importantly, why do our leaders seemingly believe the purpose of our expensive intelligence is to predict what will happen rather than being a tool to shape outcomes?
The Israelis missed the Hamas slaughter and kidnapping raid preparations, but let's not dismiss America's intelligence problems. I missed it the first time (or forgot it), but it wasn't just the CIA that got Russia's invasion of Ukraine incredibly wrong given that the DIA is mentioned in the article, too:
The Central Intelligence Agency was so pessimistic about Ukraine’s chances that officials told President Joe Biden and other policymakers that the best they could expect was that the remnants of Ukraine’s defeated forces would mount an insurgency, a guerrilla war against the Russian occupiers. By the time of the February invasion, the CIA was already planning how to provide covert support for a Ukrainian insurgency following a Russian military victory, the officials said.
U.S. intelligence reports at the time predicted that Kyiv would fall quickly, perhaps in a week or two at the most. ...The director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Army Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, said at the same March hearing that “my view was that, based on a variety of factors, that the Ukrainians were not as ready as I thought they should be, therefore I questioned their will to fight, [and] that was a bad assessment on my part.”
“I think assessing … morale, and a will to fight is a very difficult analytical task,” he added. “We had different inputs from different organizations. And at least from my perspective as director, I did not do as well as I could have.”
Add in Afghanistan where our expensive intelligence agencies predicted the Taliban would take two years to win:
While not all U.S. intelligence analysts underestimated the Ukrainian will to fight, the community’s missteps in Ukraine came just months after American intelligence gravely underestimated how fast the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan would collapse in 2021, leading to a rapid takeover by the Taliban.
Yeah, garbage in, garbage out.
And there were unintended consequences of these mistakes:
I'll say again that I think Biden is accidentally supporting Ukraine. I think Biden was told Ukraine would lose fast. I think the early war shipments of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons were designed for a post-invasion Ukrainian insurgency. The arms would be a relatively cheap way for Biden to show resolve after needlessly losing Afghanistan.
But Ukraine and Russia didn't cooperate with that political strategy. Russia effed up and Ukraine fought. Oops. Biden got trapped into backing Ukraine. And I worry he's looking for an exit ramp.
I think the Biden administration just wants Ukraine to die and go away. And Republicans might rescue Biden by putting their fingerprints on the murder weapon rather than welcoming Democrats belatedly to the cause of resisting Russian aggression.
But I digress.
Here's my pre-collapse judgment on Afghanistan and immediate pre-war assessment of Russia.
Even though the focus here is on the surface intelligence failures, I think the basic problem is that our uniformed and civilian military leaders see themselves as college professors trying to predict outcomes that we are powerless to affect rather than using predictions as a tool to achieve good outcomes.
Have a super sparkly day.
UPDATE: I understand we won't see the successes kept secret. But with such high profile miscalculations on wars, the successes may be rather small if you are weighing value. And how many failures are secret?
UPDATE: I should also note that I also recognized that Russia could have done better if it had launched a firepower-heavy invasion rather than the victory parade it organized and carried out. By the time Russia decided to wage war, the parade had already allowed Ukraine to smash up the invasion force and mobilize for war. So don't assume Russia can't do better in their next invasion.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
NOTE: I'm still adding updates on the Last Hamas War in this post.
