By Peter Rutland, The National Interest, 10/18/24

On September 24, the Center for Strategic and International Studies released a seventy-two-page report, The Russia-Ukraine War: A Study in Analytic Failure. It indicts the U.S. policy community for failing to predict the likely outcome of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. [https://www.csis.org/analysis/russia-ukraine-war-study-analytic-failure]

The report was written by Elliot Cohen and Phillips O’Brien, with an introduction by Hew Strachan (the authors also discussed the report in a panel that is available on YouTube.) The authors are distinguished military historians. However, they are not Russia specialists and have not written extensively about the Ukraine war. Critics argue that Cohen and O’Brien are not neutral observers but have an ideological axe to grind—that is, a desire to discredit critics of full-scale support for Ukraine’s war effort.

 The vast majority of observers were caught by surprise by Putin’s invasion. Even though U.S. intelligence documented the build-up of Russia’s forces in the weeks and months before the invasion, it was just too hard for most analysts (the present author included) to imagine that Putin would unleash a devastating land war on his neighbor.

Nevertheless, Putin did start the war. He must have thought that he could achieve his goals at a cost worth paying. Cohen and O’Brien want to know why most American and European analysts failed to understand Putin’s intentions.

Cohen and O’Brien examined 181 publications from twenty-six think tanks, including half a dozen outside the United States and nineteen newspapers and magazines. They also held three workshops with some of the experts involved.

They found multiple factors contributed to the intelligence failure.

Most of the analysis came from just ten to twenty experts working in think tanks inside the DC beltway. Few of them had military experience, nor were they trained as historians. Most of them had degrees in political science but were not professional academics. Since the end of the Cold War, political science departments have stopped hiring people with expertise in Russian area studies, and there are virtually no specialists in the Russian military in U.S. universities (outside of the military academies). 

Cohen and O’Brien noted that these analysts focused on the Russian military. None of them had done any serious research into the Ukrainian military, despite the fact that a war had been raging there since 2014. Most attention focused on defending the NATO member Baltic countries from a Russian invasion, as in a 2017 RAND study that predicted Russia would overrun the region in thirty-six to sixty hours.

The analytical community seems to have internalized many of the assumptions prevailing in the Russian military that they were studying: that it had 1) reformed itself into a professional force, 2) become skilled in electronic warfare, 3) perfected a new doctrine of hybrid war, and 4) accumulated significant combat experience in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria.

In general, military analysts tend to focus on counting concrete objects (soldiers, tanks, aircraft, etc.) rather than analyzing more abstract factors, such as training, leadership, logistics, and willingness to fight. Analysts looked at the force ratios in the Military Balance: ten to one in aircraft, four to one in tanks—and concluded that Ukraine did not stand a chance. Cohen and O’Brien could also have noted that Russia has a long tradition of bungling the opening phase of a war, only to pull together and win in the end—from Operation Barbarossa in 1941 through the invasion of Hungary in 1956 to the Georgia War in 2008.

The analysts were also prone to draw the analogy with the 2003 Iraq War: an aerial blitzkrieg followed by maneuver warfare that would overwhelm Ukraine’s defenses. “Russia’s Shock and Awe” was the title of a Foreign Affairs article published two days before the invasion. Extrapolating from the U.S. experience in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, it was believed that Ukraine would be occupied by Russia and then mount an insurgency.

This pessimism about Ukraine’s capacity to resist influenced the U.S. policy response. In 2017, some analysts were arguing against arming Ukraine with anti-tank missiles. In January 2022, just one month before the invasion, Foreign Policy published a piece titled “The West’s Weapons Won’t Make Any Difference to Ukraine.” This strain of thought meant that, to some extent, the United States “self-deterred” in the face of Putin’s apparent readiness to use force. Other factors influenced the decision not to send advanced weapons, such as the fear they would fall into Russian hands.

The “remarkable degree of consensus” is another example of groupthink. Conformity shows that you are an accepted member of the guild, and the opinions of outsiders are not to be trusted. The mainstream media’s role exacerbates this problem: they returned to the same pool of experts who demonstrate their authority by expressing certainty about what is happening. Cohen and O’Brien cite Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment in helping to understand how people explain away errors in their analysis, such as citing random developments (e.g., Putin ignoring military advice) that prevented what “should” have happened from taking place.

Despite being caught off guard, the analytical community has shown little willingness to admit they were wrong or discuss how to avoid being wrong again. On the contrary, after February 2022, most analysts plowed ahead, making predictions about the course of the war with the same assurance that they had explained why Putin was not going to invade Ukraine. For example, in January 2023, Foreign Affairs polled 73 experts on whether Ukraine will eventually have to make territorial concessions to Russia—a fairly wide range of views, with a majority disagreeing. However, what was striking was that forty-four experts reported a confidence level of seven out of ten or higher, while only fifteen reported a level of four or below.

For all our belief in the rationality of human behavior, leaders often act willfully and miscalculate their chances of success. Professor Richard Ned Lebow of King’s College London found that the country that started the war lost 80 percent of the wars since 1945. Bettina Renz, an expert on Russian military teaching in the UK, argues that it is unrealistic to expect experts to come up with a more accurate forecast of what would happen in the fog of war. The bigger problem, she argues, was that the West, dazzled by the annexation of Crimea in 2014, bought into the image of Putin as a master strategist. Western opinion careened from dismissing Russia as a basket case to seeing it as an all-powerful foe.

In an appendix, Cohen and O’Brien discuss three historical examples where conventional wisdom misread the likely outcome of a pending war: the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Italy joining the Axis powers in 1940, and the Iraqi army facing U.S. troops in 1990. University of Chicago political scientist Paul Poast argues that the analytical failure over Ukraine is not an outlier: wars are inherently hard to predict, both in their onset, what happens once they begin, and how they end.

It is important, however, to keep a sense of perspective. Even though Russia failed in its main objective to topple the government in Kyiv, it did succeed in occupying a vast swathe of Ukrainian territory—27 percent of the country’s land at the peak, now down to 18 percent. That is an area of 42,000 square miles, about the same size as Virginia. If the war ended today, future historians would regard it as a victory for Russia.