The US Ministry of Defense decided to conduct a check due to forecasts about the rapid defeat of Ukraine, which were given by the American security forces at the beginning of the Russian invasion, writes Daily Beast with reference to sources in the department and former special services officers.
According to sources, the error was “almost total.” Despite the fact that the United States knew exactly about the impending invasion, many CIA employees, Pentagon and White House believed that Russia would quickly conquer Ukraine. They did not expect a serious rebuff and did not expect that “they would be drawn into a major international conflict that could last for years.”
At the beginning of the war, the Russian Armed Forces totaled about 900,000 active troops compared to 196,600 in Ukraine, but the weakness of the Russian army surprised analysts. According to the retired brigadier general of the US Army Kevin Ryan, in recent years, Russia has invested significant funds in modern high -precision weapons, including cruise missiles, but it did not have enough qualified troops to conduct effective attacks. As Ryan added, he expected that Russia would win at the expense of numbers, but this assessment was erroneous, his words are quoted by Moscow Times.
According to the former senior Pentagon official Jeffrey Price, the intelligence community began a serious analysis of incorrect forecasts. He noted that Russia “had huge combat power, but used it very, very bad,” and one of the key problems was the inability to achieve superiority in the air – thus the troops remained open to attacks, and many units were destroyed.
According to Lieutenant Colonel Hunter Ripley, an incorrect assessment of the Russian forces is associated with the bureaucracy in the defense establishment of the United States. “People usually fall into apathy, working with the same intelligence again and again. It becomes a routine,” he explained. The former intelligence officer Lawrence Pfeiffer agrees with him. He noted that “the average bureaucrat will receive remuneration for conservatism in their assessments, and not for the opposite,” so analysts consider it a “safer option” to push away from introductory data that may not reflect the true state of things. So, according to Pfeiffer, the forecast for Ukraine looked “as a combination of improper assessment of Russian military potential, as well as the will and determination” Kyiv.