US officials thought that Russia's attack on Ukraine would be a victory.
The conflict is nearing its fourth month and US officials are rethinking their assumptions.
It is difficult to analyze another military's capabilities.
The world has seen that the Russian military isn't what it was thought to be after more than 100 days.
The US military and intelligence agencies are believed to be near-peer adversaries. Smaller Ukrainian units blunted the force that appeared. Moscow retreated after taking heavy casualties and achieving few objects.
Something was off in US assessments of Russia's military, and the Pentagon and intelligence community have admitted that they missed signs of ahollow force.
The US intelligence community underestimated the resolve of the Ukrainians and underestimated the capabilities of the Russians.
After the Pentagon's poor assessment of the Afghan military, US leaders thought they could hold off the Taliban for months after the US withdraws.
Lawmakers questioned the director of national intelligence and the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency about their assumptions about the future of the country.
The size of the Russian forces on the Ukrainian border was going to be very difficult for them.
The Russians lacked an effective non-commissioned officer corps, leadership training, and effective doctrine, and that's what we didn't see from the inside. Those are the intangibles that we have to be able to understand.
In the totality of the entire operation, there were a lot more successes than failures.
The US intelligence agencies misinterpreted the effectiveness of the Russian and Ukrainian militaries, but they provided accurate information about Russia's intentions in the months leading up to the attack.
The US's credibility was damaged by the accurate assessments the White House has released.
Intelligence analysts face a lot of challenges when assessing an adversary.
"When dealing with a foreign actor, analysts can fall prey to a number of mental traps, from confirmation bias, availability bias, or even favoring existing analytic lines over new information," said a former Russia analyst at the CIA.
"Analysts constantly have to try to check themselves and each other through a variety of formal and informal analytic methods to make sure they are not making an error of judgement."
Several intelligence collection methods are used by the US intelligence agencies.
Human intelligence, the most traditional method, is the most valuable, as it can provide insight into an adversary's plans and intentions. intercepts of electronic communications are used to gather signals intelligence.
Open-sourced intelligence cobbles together public information from sources like press reports or social media. Satellite imagery can be used to document an adversary's movements.
Analysts rely on all of the above methods in order to inform policymakers, but they have to accept that they won't know everything.
When dealing with adversaries that are skilled at deception and counterintelligence, the collection gaps are often larger and murkier.
A lack of information leads to collection gaps. Maybe you didn't have access to a technical source. "Maybe you don't have a human perspective on high-level deliberations?" asked van Landingham, founder of risk-analysis and research firm Active Measures.
If there is a critical unknown that prevents an analyst from having high confidence in a judgement, many policymakers will demand more information than you could hope to get.
A Hellenic Army veteran, a defense journalist specializing in special operations, and a graduate of a prestigious university are just some of the things that Stavros Atlamazoglou is.
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