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> The US put a huge amount of effort into assessing USSR military capabilities, and mostly got it wrong. An impression I was left with after reading Daniel Ell
by erentz 7y ago
> The US put a huge amount of effort into assessing USSR military capabilities, and mostly got it wrong.
An impression I was left with after reading Daniel Ellsberg’s last book was this wasn’t entirely an intelligence failure so much as it was a deliberate ignoring of intelligence and making up of a fiction so the air force could build lots of bombers and missiles.
I think we’ve all experienced this in our workplaces, the higher ups really only want to hear what they want to hear, and intelligence that doesn’t fit that very often is ignored.
- caycep 7y agoA couple of Eisenhower biographies goes along w/ this. He was well aware of all the machinations amongst different players, including defense industry players collaborating w/ politicians to sound warning drums, to Allen Dulles and his coterie manipulating policy for who knows what. Apparently the best source of intel were RB-47 and U2 overflights. Ike knew, going into negotiations w/ Khruschev, just how weak the USSR's hand was.
- Symmetry 7y agoThere's also the problem that we didn't want the USSR to know that we knew that they didn't have very many ICBMS[1]. So Eisenhower and Kennedy felt they had to pretend in public that there was a missile gap, and spent most of their days pretending hard that there was a missile gap. And if you spend most of the day pretending something is true there's no way that doesn't warp your gut level understanding of the world. So was our knowledge of the USSR's actual capabilities useful if we didn't let it affect our policy making? [1] They had more than enough shorter range missiles to take out ~everyone in western Europe though.