There is a piece in today’s Washington Post by Greg Jaffe and Dan Lamothe (two people I have been following on Twitter for Ukrainian updates). It is titled “Russia’s failures in Ukraine imbue Pentagon with newfound confidence.” The title alone reminds me, uncomfortably, that US intelligence agencies and military analysts seem to have been wrong a good bit of the time.
Only when the Soviet Union collapsed and we were able to examine their military up close did it become apparent that it was nowhere near as powerful as we had been led to believe by our experts. Then we misjudged our opponents seriously in Korea, in Vietnam , and in Afghanistan. Who can forget the recent confident assurances from our President, backed no doubt by his military and intelligence “experts”, that the Taliban couldn’t take over Afghanistan after our withdrawal, then that they would take at least 9 months to win because of the wonderful US-trained Afghan army, then that it would take a month – and in fact the nation fell to the Taliban in about a week.
Who can forget the even more recent “experts” who assured us that Kyiv would fall in 96 hours or less. Or the experts who, just last month, expounded on how Putin’s “modernized” Russian military would be such fearsome opponents.
This is not an impressive performance over the past decades. It seems to me some serious self-examination is required in the US intelligence community
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