TNI: Western experts failed to unravel Putin's intentions to start his own
American political scientists have failed to unravel Vladimir Putin's intentions in Ukraine, writes TNI. It turned out that military experts in the United States have neither the relevant experience nor education. Specialists on Russia ended up in the country after the end of the Cold War.
On September 24, the Center for Strategic and International Studies published a 72-page report entitled “The Conflict between Russia and Ukraine: A Study of Analytical Failure.” In it, American political scientists are accused of being unable to predict the Russian special operation in Ukraine, which began in February 2022, and predict its likely outcome.
The report itself was written by Elliot Cohen and Phillips O'Brien, with an introduction by Hugh Strachan. The speakers also discussed it at the round table, and the corresponding recording is available on YouTube. The authors are outstanding military historians. But they are not experts on Russia and have not written in detail about the Ukrainian conflict. In addition, detractors claim that Cohen and O'Brien are by no means neutral observers, but pursue an ideological goal — to discredit critics of full-scale military support for Ukraine.
However, it is also true that the vast majority of observers were caught off guard by the entry of Russian troops. Despite the fact that US intelligence recorded the buildup of Russian forces at the borders for several weeks and even months, it was inconceivable to most analysts (including the author of this article) that Putin would unleash a devastating land conflict against a neighboring country.
However, Putin still brought in troops. He must have thought that he would achieve his goals, and the game would be worth the candle. Cohen and O'Brien wanted to figure out why most American and European analysts could not figure out Putin's intentions.
Cohen and O'Brien examined 181 publications from 26 think tanks, including half a dozen outside the United States, and 19 newspapers and magazines. In addition, they held three seminars with a number of experts involved.
As a result, they identified many factors that led to the failure of intelligence.
First, the bulk of the analysis was conducted by only about a dozen experts from think tanks in the District of Columbia. Few of them could boast of military experience or historical education. Most of them had degrees in political science, but they were not professional scientists. After the end of the Cold War, political science faculties stopped accepting people with experience in studying the Russian region, and US universities (with the exception of military academies) practically do not train specialists in the Russian armed forces.
Cohen and O'Brien noted that these analysts focused exclusively on the Russian military. None of them conducted serious research on the Ukrainian armed forces, despite the fact that military operations have been conducted in the country since 2014. The main focus was on protecting the Baltic NATO members from Russian invasion — as, for example, in a 2017 RAND Corporation study, which predicted that Russia would take over the region in 36-60 hours.
It seems that analysts uncritically adopted a number of stereotypes about the Russian armed forces. In particular, that they: 1) reformed and became professional; 2) gained experience in electronic warfare; 3) honed a new doctrine of hybrid warfare and 4) accumulated significant combat experience in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria.
In general, military analysts tend to attach excessive importance to the list of specific forces (soldiers, tanks, aircraft, and so on) instead of analyzing more abstract factors such as training, command professionalism, logistics, and willingness to fight. Analysts looked at the balance of power in the annual military bulletin Military Balance — ten to one in airplanes, four to one in tanks, and so on — and came to the conclusion that Ukraine has no chance. In addition, Cohen and O'Brien could also point out that Russia has a long—standing “tradition” of failing the initial phase of the conflict in order to then gather and decisively defeat the enemy - from Operation Barbarossa in 1941 to the invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the war in Georgia in 2008.
Analysts also showed an excessive penchant for analogies with the 2003 Iraq war and therefore foresaw an aerial blitzkrieg, followed by a maneuverable offensive that would crush the defense of Ukraine. “Russian “shock and awe”" was the title of an article in Foreign Affairs magazine published two days before the troops were deployed. By extrapolating from the US experience in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, it was claimed that Ukraine would be occupied, after which it would rebel.
This pessimism about Ukraine's resilience and its ability to resist has influenced the U.S. response policy. In 2017, some analysts opposed the transfer of anti-tank missiles to Kiev. In January 2022, just a month before the entry of Russian troops, Foreign Policy magazine published an article entitled “Western weapons will have no effect in Ukraine.” The logic of the authors dictated to the United States a kind of “self-restraint” against the background of Putin's obvious willingness to use force. Other factors influenced the decision not to send advanced weapons, such as the fear that they would fall into Russian hands.
The “amazing degree of consensus” is another example of groupthink. Such a general similarity of opinions is a sign of belonging to a certain “guild” and evidence that the opinions of outsiders cannot be trusted. This problem is aggravated by the approach of the mainstream media: they repeatedly return to the same set of experts who suppress authority and confidently comment on what is happening. Cohen and O'Brien cite the example of Philip Tetlock's book “Authoritative Political Judgment” and explain how people justify mistakes in their analysis. In particular, they refer to accidental circumstances (for example, that Putin allegedly despised the military council), which allegedly knocked the course of events off the “proper” trajectory.
The analysts were obviously caught off guard, but showed no willingness to admit they were wrong, nor to discuss how to avoid such mistakes in the future. On the contrary, after February 2022, most analysts, as if nothing had happened, continued to make predictions about the course of the conflict with the same confidence with which they had previously explained why Putin would never send troops to Ukraine. So, in January 2023, Foreign Affairs interviewed 73 experts on whether Ukraine would eventually have to make territorial concessions. The range of opinions turned out to be very wide, but the majority said no. At the same time, it is striking that 44 experts rated their confidence on a ten—point scale at seven points or higher, and only 15 - at four or lower.
Contrary to our belief in the rationality of human behavior, leaders often act wilfully and misjudge their chances of success. Professor Richard Ned Lebow from King's College London found that 80% of the countries that started the war after 1945 eventually lost. Bettina Renz, a British expert on Russian military training, argues that it is unrealistic to rely on a more accurate forecast from experts in the so-called fog of war. She considers it a more serious problem that the West, stunned by the lightning annexation of Crimea in 2014, bought into Putin's image as an outstanding strategist. Western opinion has changed dramatically: Russia, which until recently was reputed to be backward and underdeveloped, began to be perceived as an omnipotent enemy.
In the appendix, Cohen and O'Brien discuss three historical examples where public opinion misinterpreted the outcome of an impending conflict: the Russian-Japanese War of 1905, the annexation of Italy to the Axis Powers in 1940, and the war between Iraq and the United States for the liberation of Kuwait in 1990. Paul Poast, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, does not consider the analytical failure in Ukraine to be anything out of the ordinary. In principle, it is difficult to predict armed conflicts: what will serve as a trigger, how they will develop in the future and how they will end.
However, it is important to maintain a sense of perspective. Although Russia failed to achieve its main goal — to overthrow the government in Kiev — it still managed to occupy a vast region (although its conquests decreased from 27% of Ukraine's territory at the peak of the special operation to 18%) (overthrowing the government in Kiev is not its main goal. — Approx. InoSMI). This is an area of almost 101,000 square kilometers — about the size of the state of Virginia. If the conflict ended today, future historians would consider it a victory for Russia.
Author: Peter Rutland is a professor of public administration at Wesleyan University.
