The US Keeps Losing Wars Because Nobody Listens to the Spooks

In mid-May, CNN reported that the U.S. intelligence community was about to begin a sweeping review of the way it does business. What prompted the senior officials to action? The answer is simple enough: alarmingly inaccurate predictions as to the durability of the U.S. supported government of Afghanistan, which led to a decidedly ignominious withdrawal of our forces there, as well as overly pessimistic projections of Ukraine’s ability to stave off a major assault by the Russian army.

In view of the gravity of those mistakes, this seems a necessary and laudable undertaking. But… don’t expect the review and inevitable list of recommendations to improve the complicated process of gathering, analyzing, and consuming intelligence products by much. So say two of the leading scholars of intelligence in the English speaking world, Richard Betts and the late Robert Jervis, both of Columbia University’s political science department. After decades of studying the question, these men have concluded that invariably the recommendations of commissions designed to improve the caliber of the intelligence process after American wars tend to produce a new set of problems. As Betts put it in a widely quoted essay on this topic:

Strategic intelligence, which Betts nicely defines with admirable economy as “the acquisition, analysis, and appreciation for relevant data,” is an extremely tricky business. It’s a unique amalgam of science and art, for it invariably involves political and psychological factors that are unique to a given conflict, and subject to abrupt change. And it must not be forgotten that senior intelligence officials have to sell their product well if it is to carry real weight with consumers, and that’s an entirely separate skill than producing good analysis.

Of course, serious students of recent American military history already have a basic understanding of what went wrong in assessments of the final phase of the Afghan tragedy, and in the first phase of the Russia-Ukraine War. Broadly speaking, the American intelligence community—the 18 agencies involved in its collection , along with the chief consumers, the White House and the National Security Council—have become overly dependent on quantitative analysis derived primarily from technical and electronic sources (signal intelligence), at the expense of both human intelligence (agents and sources on site in the arena of conflict) and expertise about the political dynamics and cultural histories of foreign societies.

What Clausewitz called moral, or spiritual, factors in his masterwork, On War—the will to fight among the soldiers of an army, the level of popular support for the government, the creativity and intuition of the political leaders of the adversaries—these are things that Clausewitz says “cannot be classified or counted. These have to be seen and felt.”

On paper, the American-trained Afghan Army of more than 300,000 troops, armed with far more sophisticated weapons than the Taliban, including drones and jet fighters, should have been able to hold off the final offensive Taliban onslaught well into 2022. That didn’t happen, because except for some 30,000 Afghan Special Forces, the rest of the “Army” had no interest in defending a government they and their families perceived to be corrupt, ineffectual, and in the pocket of the West. The majority of the Afghan Army units did not put up any resistance to the Taliban. They negotiated their own surrender or offered no resistance whatsoever.

As for the CIA projections that the Russians would break the back of Ukrainian resistance in a matter of days, it’s clear that analysts relied too much on their quantitatively-based assessment of Russian units and weapons systems, while their grasp of Clausewitz’s “moral factors” on both sides was shaky, at best.

One of the most significant failures in U.S. intelligence since Vietnam was the community’s inability to get a grip on the swirling political and military developments surrounding the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In February of that year, a bizarre collection of liberal reformers, leftists, and Muslim fundamentalist clerics overthrew the Shah of Iran, at the time the United States’ most powerful ally in the Middle East and a bulwark against Soviet…