Analysts over-rationalized Russia's invasion plan

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:03:26

   Maybe we could take, given everything you laid out now as a case study, the invasion of 2022 february 24th what were the failures and what were the effective decisions on the russian side and the ukrainian side in the early days in the early months of the war maybe mike you could also talk about what you predicted and uh what turned out to be a correct prediction and what turned out to be not a correct prediction yeah absolutely so first i think um amongst community of military analysts and folks who were looking at the situation in 2021, I was definitely one of the people that thought Russia was preparing a full-scale military invasion in Ukraine.

2. 1:04:08

   And even though we weren't certain, and I wasn't certain, of exactly how they would do it or what it would look like, so there were definitely gaps in information. It's rare where you have perfect knowledge of the adversary's plans. Although the U.S. intelligence community had great knowledge of Russia's plans and were Releasing that information throughout the Russian military buildup was a very difficult time because first, many folks did not want to believe that what they were seeing on the ground, the Russian military buildup and the rhetoric leading up to it.

3. 1:04:39

   was truly built up to a full-scale invasion. In fact, I learned as an analyst that even if all the pieces kind of look right, people naturally want to believe it's anything other than that. This is a very inconvenient truth. And there were a host of countries and allies that the United States had that had a different interpretation of the evidence, like Germany and others in Europe. And to be frank, Ukrainian political leadership also had real misgivings about the likelihood of a full-scale invasion.

4. 1:05:07

   People thought if there was going to be a breakout of conflict again, that it would just be narrowly focused on the Donbass region and that much of the Russian buildup was meant to coerce Ukraine. It was meant to be a part of course of diplomacy or to distract Ukrainian forces. So there were competing interpretations. I want to be clear about this. And people had different contingencies in mind. Some thought it might be just another Russian attempt to seize the Donbass.

5. 1:05:37

   Some of that might be something larger, trying to capture parts of eastern Ukraine. And some did think it was going to be a Russian attempt to take most of the country. So I think I was amongst the folks that predicted the invasion early on in Russian intentions and the scope of the operation, but not the way they were going to do it. Because there, I think we over-rationalized the way Russian military would actually conduct the operation, not seeing how the military strategy and the plan, the concept of operations, would be tied to Russian political assumptions.

6. 1:06:10

   And the Russian political assumptions were that Russian intelligence had set the conditions in Ukraine for a speedy takeover, that Russian troops would be greeted as liberators, that they could conduct essentially a coup to main. That they could very rapidly advance into Ukraine, encircle the capital, either capture or isolate the Ukrainian political leadership, and that even though there would be an initial phase of combat operations, it would be brief, and that they could get Ukrainian forces to a large extent, surrender or isolate them.

7. 1:06:47

   These are the Russian assumptions. I'm being clear about that. And then they could quickly move to a stabilization occupation phase. And all that stemmed from the fact that at the end of the day, Vladimir Putin did not see Ukraine as a real independent country with a separate national identity and really had not learned or updated his views at all from the real beginning of the war, which was 2014, right?

8. 1:07:09

   And we know this because he actually wrote many of them in a July article in 2021. If we go back to that, folks who are interested, it was published. And he laid out a whole series of views of how he saw Ukraine, how he saw the sort of ongoing frozen conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and his assumptions were fairly clear. I don't think we did a good enough job of tying those assumptions to thinking through how Russia might actually do this kind of operation. And secondarily, the toughest thing to predict, the interaction between the two forces. Here, it's not a case of overestimating the Russian military, just underestimating the Ukraine military, although I think there's a fair argument to be said that we overestimated how Russian military would perform in this case.

9. 1:07:54

   We underestimated how the Ukraine military would perform in the initial opening of the war. in part because we knew far less about the ukraine military i'll be very frank about that most expertise is usually against adversary forces we don't have nearly as much expertise amongst ally for allies and partners um there's just the nature of the field and the profession we work in and secondarily i think actually more was known about russian plans to attack than ukrainian plans to defense so the degree of anchoring bias that information has when you do analysis but also much was contingent so ukrainian forces perform not only did they perform much better but ukraine volunteers show up to fight in those early moments but it's a very chaotic early period of the war the initial clash and reconciliation

10. 1:08:39

    of the Russia invasion and the Ukrainian defense. I think one challenge that analysts have and folks who look at analysis is an understanding that military power by itself cannot be abstracted. I often see it abstracted in conversations in a sense that the United States is number one and China's number two and Russia's maybe number three or four or five, wherever you want to put it. But there's no such thing. Military power requires a context to express itself, right? So So if you're thinking of a potential, let's say, battle between the United States and China over Taiwan, you have one scenario in mind, okay?

11. 1:09:13

    If you're thinking of maybe a war between China and India, you have a different scenario in mind. So this abstraction isn't helpful. It actually really matters what the scenario is because the geography matters, the political objectives matter, they will drive the military strategy and the concept of operations. and that will then heavily decide how the forces will be employed, which is the most important thing here. And so sometimes what happens is you may know something about a military or you may even know quite a bit about both militaries, but knowing something about militaries is not the same as knowing how the two of them will interact in a particular fight. And that's subject to a lot of individual choices, political choices, military choices, and also a great deal of serendipity and chance, things that are contingent.

12. 1:10:02

    I'll say this about the opening of the war. As poorly thought through the Russian invasion was, and as unworkable as their assumptions were, you know, in many cases, the Ukrainian defense itself was improvised. And so that first clash was, in my view, contingent on a whole series of choices and early battles that went a certain way. And we'll continue to debate this military history for a long time. You know, I think I and other folks who are interested in military history, we still debate what happened in World War II, what happened in World War I, what happened in Napoleonic Wars. The reason I bring this up is for a degree of humility, this war is hardly over. We still have a long ways to go to piece together what happened exactly and why. And often we don't have a great understanding of the probability of a timeline, because people naturally assume

13. 1:10:55

    that whatever timeline they're living in, whatever happened, was the likeliest series of events to take place. They rarely ever assume that they're living in a fortunate version of that timeline. So I'll stop there in a sort of discussion of what we thought and the initial reconciliation of the Russian plan to invade and Ukrainian plan to defense. I learned a great deal of myself professionally as an analyst, I'll be honest, watching it, particularly