Eliot A. Cohen and Phillips Payson O’Brien
One might think that an intelligence failure can be benign: The good guys do far better than expected, the bad guys far worse. In fact, erring on the side of pessimism can be as big a problem as being too bullish. The period just before and after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, is a good example of this. At the West’s most influential research organizations, prominent analysts—many of them political scientists who follow Russian military affairs—confidently predicted that Russia would defeat its smaller neighbor within weeks. American military leaders believed this consensus, to the point that the Joint Chiefs of Staff chair reportedly told members of Congress that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours of a Russian attack. Although those analysts’ gloomy assessments turned out to be wrong, they’ve nevertheless made the United States and its allies overly cautious in assisting Ukraine in its self-defense.
Both of us are military historians who have a keen interest in contemporary strategic issues—and who, at the outset of the war, harbored grave doubts about the prevailing analysis of Russian and Ukrainian capabilities. One of us, Eliot, has served in senior positions in the U.S. government; the other, Phillips, has advised the British Ministry of Defense on Ukraine and other matters. In a report published this week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, we sought to understand how prominent military analysts had been so badly wrong. Why did they assume that Russia could successfully conduct an exceedingly complex lightning offensive and win a major war in considerably less time than the Wehrmacht needed to overrun France, a smaller country, in 1940? Why did they persistently take the most negative possible view of Ukraine’s abilities and prospects?
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