In the intelligence game, there’s a saying: “Tell me what you know, tell me what you think, and make damn clear which is which.”
On the heels of two embarrassingly bad calls, the U.S. intelligence community is trying to figure out a better way to assess one of the great intangibles of war: which side has the greater will to fight.
In both cases, the U.S. intelligence agencies put far too much weight on the military capabilities of each side while giving short shrift to the much-harder-to-assess factor of motivation of the front-line troops. On paper, Ukraine was clearly outgunned and outnumbered by the 150,000-strong Russian invasion force that was massed against it. Just as the Afghan government forces were, on paper, superior in troops, training, and weaponry.
The U.S. has a long history of misjudging the enemy while placing too much faith in troops trained and equipped by the U.S. military. It was true in Vietnam, and more recently, it was true in Iraq, where, in 2014, the Islamic State conquered a large swath of the country, meeting little resistance from the much larger U.S.-trained Iraqi army. In the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and in the central city of Ramadi, Iraqi troops spooked by ISIS just dropped their weapons and ran.
But the missed call had consequences. Because President Joe Biden and Congress were told Ukraine faced almost-certain defeat, there was an initial hesitancy to send Ukraine advanced U.S. weaponry for fear it would just fall into the hands of the Russians, just as $80 billion worth of equipment ended up with the Taliban after Kabul fell.
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