The Russia-Ukraine War: A Study in Analytic Failure

Excerpt:  “The Russian invasion of Ukraine was not the first time that both participants in a war and their observers on the sidelines have made the wrong calls. It will probably not be the last, although the purpose of this report is to mitigate that danger in one particular case: a possible clash between the United States and the People’s Republic of China in the Pacific. No one example will exactly match any other. However, the quality and quantity of information—much of it not the product of leaks from official agencies but from open sources like Bellingcat—make the overestimation of Russia’s capacities and the underestimation of Ukraine’s particularly egregious.”