The Russia-Ukraine War: A Study in Analytic Failure

Surprise occurs in many forms. Many think of it in terms of a surprise attack, but it occurs in other dimensions. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is a good example: the attack was foreseen, but the immediate outcomes were astonishing. To use an old Soviet phrase, analysts misunderstood in fundamental ways the “correlation of forces.” Their judgments about Russian and Ukrainian military capacity were not merely off—they were wildly at variance with reality. And even more perplexing, leading and widely acknowledged experts misjudged with a degree of certainty that in retrospect is no less remarkable than the analytic failure itself.