5 ms·

If it was true, Russia wouldn't have started war with Ukraine. More less the plan was to capture Kyiv in 3 days, and complete the job in a few weeks

dpflan 3y ago
Capabilities vary by nation/bloc.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Much of the EU misjudged Russia too, even having presumably much of the US intelligence on the matter available to them. I think the takeaway is that the raw intelligence is much much better, but humans are fallible and made stupid by their priors nonetheless.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  I don't understand which nation is supposed to have competent intelligence? Just look at the predictions made for Ukraine, Afghanistan, etc. and how they turned out. In general it seems to me that we've largely replaced the prior eras of on-the-ground intelligence and entrenched spies working their way up institutions, with digital and satellite surveillance. If anything modern tech and widespread surveillance in many nations may make it much more difficult to have those high level entrenched spies. The times of things like a spy dressing up in disguise to make his way to the telegram station and sending an encoded message are long since gone. Our modern means "feel" so much more private, yet in reality are paradoxically surveilled and broadcast to a million times more people. It could go a long way towards explaining many things.
ethanbond 3y ago
The October 7th attack being another truly obscene intelligence failure. Also the west’s inability to understand (or at least act on) COVID from the early effects in China. I have to imagine intelligence is much much better, but it certainly hasn’t fully closed the cone of error.
- dpflan 3y ago
  Failure, intention, malice, strategy -- not sure, but bellicose people will look for ways to be bellicose. And yes, humans are still involved, so human failure is always a possibility.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  This. One of the biggest surprises from Covid was how little the Intelligence community knew what was happening within China. China wasn't even hiding anything, they cancelled the Chinese New Year and was telling everyone. And the West just ignored it. My kids that play Plague and League of Legends were keeping up with the news from China, just for games, and just looked at me and said 'this is going to be bad'. At the same time early on when US Gov was saying it was nothing. Why didn't the Intelligence Community?
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-coronavirus-crisis-early-november-sources/story?id=70031273 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-c... The IC knew. The White House chose not to act on it. Probably related to the whole “more testing means worse numbers and that’s bad for me politically” pathology.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Yeah. Guess I'm still living in a fantasy world, still believe, that at some point the IC guys walk into the room, and tell the President, "sir you have to take this seriously", and wheels are set in motion.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    You have to always look at the world probabilistically, and not focus entirely on results. Take a current event for example. Right now Texas has declared that they are under invasion [1], giving them a superseding constitutional right to self defense above and beyond Federal orders, and that's put them on the track for a direct conflict with Federal forces, should Biden choose to push the matter. One person might say this is ultimately going to lead to a civil war. Another person might say in a month, this will all have completely blown over. Both outcomes are possible, and so what matters is the probability. There was obviously a probability that COVID turned into what it did, there was also a probability that it simply ended up being one of the zillion other localized little nasty plagues that emerges in nations and ends up remaining localized. I'm certain you'd be surprised to learn of all the zillion potentially cataclysmic issues facing us all on a literally daily basis. That's how you get these hind-sight reports about how everything was always known but not acted on. Well yes, it was seen as a possibility and a potentially cataclysmic one - but ultimately the call was made that it probably would not come to pass. And the thing is, that may have been the case that 99.99% of the time, that would have been the right call. And we got to live through the .01%. It could also have been a completely idiotic call. Seeing leaked probabilistic modeling could help, but even then - models can be wrong, as they quite often were (frequently to an absurd degree) during COVID times. So, even there it's not so simple. [1] - https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-issues-statement-on-texas-constitutional-right-to-self-defense https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-issues-state...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
somenameforme 3y ago
Russia never claimed or suggested they would capture Kyiv in 3 days. That came from US intelligence and the military, and was ultimately stated by Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [1] So it came from the same sources that planned the Ukraine counter attack, that repeatedly claimed Russia was imminently running out of missiles, that Russia's economy would collapse imminently, that Afghanistan would hold out against the Taliban, and so on. It was only after these claims obviously failed to materialize that we started claiming Russia claimed it. Newsweek has an excellent article [2] covering what claims Russia did make. They are, at best, taken out of context, like when a media personality was going on a rant about an all-out conflict with the West, and how Russia must prepare. [1] - https://www.foxnews.com/us/gen-milley-says-kyiv-could-fall-within-72-hours-if-russia-decides-to-invade-ukraine-sources https://www.foxnews.com/us/gen-milley-says-kyiv-could-fall-w... [2] - https://www.newsweek.com/even-russian-propaganda-was-hesitant-claim-kyiv-would-fall-three-days-1832754 https://www.newsweek.com/even-russian-propaganda-was-hesitan...
- pvg 3y ago
  We've had two years of reporting and analysis now and it's clear the Russian plan was for a fast and brief military/intelligence operation that decapitates and paralyzes the Ukrainian government and installs as a friendly regime. One particularly telling aspect (which was not as obvious in the chaos of the early days of invasion) is the substantial preparation and rapid deployment of civil administration resources into occupied territories - down to delivering Russian school textbooks. It's not particularly material what Russians claimed before they invaded, they planned to begin ruling Ukraine very quickly.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    To me it seems most clear that Russia expected a negotiated settlement to happen shortly after hostilities began, largely to the point that their army was more for show than for actual use. And they would have been right had we not decided to escalate things to the international scale bloody and brutal conflict that it became. The claims they actually expected to win an actual hot war in a few weeks are not very logical in my opinion. Ukraine is a nation with extensively highly fortified locations and they had large numbers of highly motivated, and well armed, fighters in nationalist battalions that would be 100% guaranteed to fight. And in a war where somebody is fighting back, you simply don't win in a few weeks - ever. Look to Gaza - that's basically a no holds barred war where they're just completely flattening everything with the latest Western arms, all to try to take out a group of 20-25k of people running around in t-shirts with RPGs. And that's likely to go on for years. The USSR (as well as the USA) lost a war to Afghanistan, Russia lost a war to Chechnya, and more - all because of this phenomena. War without surrender against somebody who's fighting back is brutal, regardless of their inferiority on paper.

dpflan 3y ago

Capabilities vary by nation/bloc.

ethanbond 3y ago
Much of the EU misjudged Russia too, even having presumably much of the US intelligence on the matter available to them. I think the takeaway is that the raw intelligence is much much better, but humans are fallible and made stupid by their priors nonetheless.
somenameforme 3y ago
I don't understand which nation is supposed to have competent intelligence? Just look at the predictions made for Ukraine, Afghanistan, etc. and how they turned out. In general it seems to me that we've largely replaced the prior eras of on-the-ground intelligence and entrenched spies working their way up institutions, with digital and satellite surveillance. If anything modern tech and widespread surveillance in many nations may make it much more difficult to have those high level entrenched spies. The times of things like a spy dressing up in disguise to make his way to the telegram station and sending an encoded message are long since gone. Our modern means "feel" so much more private, yet in reality are paradoxically surveilled and broadcast to a million times more people. It could go a long way towards explaining many things.

ethanbond 3y ago

The October 7th attack being another truly obscene intelligence failure. Also the west’s inability to understand (or at least act on) COVID from the early effects in China. I have to imagine intelligence is much much better, but it certainly hasn’t fully closed the cone of error.

dpflan 3y ago
Failure, intention, malice, strategy -- not sure, but bellicose people will look for ways to be bellicose. And yes, humans are still involved, so human failure is always a possibility.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
This. One of the biggest surprises from Covid was how little the Intelligence community knew what was happening within China. China wasn't even hiding anything, they cancelled the Chinese New Year and was telling everyone. And the West just ignored it. My kids that play Plague and League of Legends were keeping up with the news from China, just for games, and just looked at me and said 'this is going to be bad'. At the same time early on when US Gov was saying it was nothing. Why didn't the Intelligence Community?
- ethanbond 3y ago
  https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-coronavirus-crisis-early-november-sources/story?id=70031273 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-c... The IC knew. The White House chose not to act on it. Probably related to the whole “more testing means worse numbers and that’s bad for me politically” pathology.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Yeah. Guess I'm still living in a fantasy world, still believe, that at some point the IC guys walk into the room, and tell the President, "sir you have to take this seriously", and wheels are set in motion.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  You have to always look at the world probabilistically, and not focus entirely on results. Take a current event for example. Right now Texas has declared that they are under invasion [1], giving them a superseding constitutional right to self defense above and beyond Federal orders, and that's put them on the track for a direct conflict with Federal forces, should Biden choose to push the matter. One person might say this is ultimately going to lead to a civil war. Another person might say in a month, this will all have completely blown over. Both outcomes are possible, and so what matters is the probability. There was obviously a probability that COVID turned into what it did, there was also a probability that it simply ended up being one of the zillion other localized little nasty plagues that emerges in nations and ends up remaining localized. I'm certain you'd be surprised to learn of all the zillion potentially cataclysmic issues facing us all on a literally daily basis. That's how you get these hind-sight reports about how everything was always known but not acted on. Well yes, it was seen as a possibility and a potentially cataclysmic one - but ultimately the call was made that it probably would not come to pass. And the thing is, that may have been the case that 99.99% of the time, that would have been the right call. And we got to live through the .01%. It could also have been a completely idiotic call. Seeing leaked probabilistic modeling could help, but even then - models can be wrong, as they quite often were (frequently to an absurd degree) during COVID times. So, even there it's not so simple. [1] - https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-issues-statement-on-texas-constitutional-right-to-self-defense https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-issues-state...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

somenameforme 3y ago

Russia never claimed or suggested they would capture Kyiv in 3 days. That came from US intelligence and the military, and was ultimately stated by Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [1] So it came from the same sources that planned the Ukraine counter attack, that repeatedly claimed Russia was imminently running out of missiles, that Russia's economy would collapse imminently, that Afghanistan would hold out against the Taliban, and so on. It was only after these claims obviously failed to materialize that we started claiming Russia claimed it. Newsweek has an excellent article [2] covering what claims Russia did make. They are, at best, taken out of context, like when a media personality was going on a rant about an all-out conflict with the West, and how Russia must prepare. [1] - https://www.foxnews.com/us/gen-milley-says-kyiv-could-fall-within-72-hours-if-russia-decides-to-invade-ukraine-sources https://www.foxnews.com/us/gen-milley-says-kyiv-could-fall-w... [2] - https://www.newsweek.com/even-russian-propaganda-was-hesitant-claim-kyiv-would-fall-three-days-1832754 https://www.newsweek.com/even-russian-propaganda-was-hesitan...

pvg 3y ago
We've had two years of reporting and analysis now and it's clear the Russian plan was for a fast and brief military/intelligence operation that decapitates and paralyzes the Ukrainian government and installs as a friendly regime. One particularly telling aspect (which was not as obvious in the chaos of the early days of invasion) is the substantial preparation and rapid deployment of civil administration resources into occupied territories - down to delivering Russian school textbooks. It's not particularly material what Russians claimed before they invaded, they planned to begin ruling Ukraine very quickly.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  To me it seems most clear that Russia expected a negotiated settlement to happen shortly after hostilities began, largely to the point that their army was more for show than for actual use. And they would have been right had we not decided to escalate things to the international scale bloody and brutal conflict that it became. The claims they actually expected to win an actual hot war in a few weeks are not very logical in my opinion. Ukraine is a nation with extensively highly fortified locations and they had large numbers of highly motivated, and well armed, fighters in nationalist battalions that would be 100% guaranteed to fight. And in a war where somebody is fighting back, you simply don't win in a few weeks - ever. Look to Gaza - that's basically a no holds barred war where they're just completely flattening everything with the latest Western arms, all to try to take out a group of 20-25k of people running around in t-shirts with RPGs. And that's likely to go on for years. The USSR (as well as the USA) lost a war to Afghanistan, Russia lost a war to Chechnya, and more - all because of this phenomena. War without surrender against somebody who's fighting back is brutal, regardless of their inferiority on paper.