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This document is referenced in the article regarding analysis by the Pentagon on its own capabilities: "National Defense Industrial Strategy" [https://www.businessdefense.gov/docs/ndis/2023-NDIS.pdf]
It's a completely different world when you can be talking to people on the other side of world in realtime, all the time, with a device in your pocket.
Communications between country leaders were fast and reliable, so I don't think 'I didn't get your apology letter so we went to war' was a factor in 1939, nor will it be in 2027.
To judge by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict... , the persuasive virtues of video are just as useful for the warmongers as for the peacemongers.
Maybe they were fast enough by 1939 standards, but it seems that in 1960s communication between Moscow and Washington was considered to be "not fast enough". Quoting Wikipedia article on Moscow–Washington hotline[1]:
> During the [1962 Cuban Missile Crisis], official diplomatic messages typically took six hours to deliver; unofficial channels, such as via television network correspondents, had to be used too as they were quicker. The experience of the crisis convinced both sides of the need for better communications.
> During the crisis, the United States took nearly twelve hours to receive and decode Nikita Khrushchev's 3,000-word-initial settlement message – a dangerously long time. By the time Washington had drafted a reply, a tougher message from Moscow had been received...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow%E2%80%93Washington_hotl...
More communication does not automatically mean more love, peace and happiness. Communication are the wires, words are the content and bring the meaning.
Consider that both sides of US politics receive the same intelligence briefs on Russia V Ukraine, on alleged interference in US elections, on alleged US civil insurrection attempting interference in election results, etc.
Does todays "unquestionably better intelligence" result in different sides being aligned wrt interpreting this better intelligence?
More less the plan was to capture Kyiv in 3 days, and complete the job in a few weeks
I think the takeaway is that the raw intelligence is much much better, but humans are fallible and made stupid by their priors nonetheless.
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.
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.
And yes, humans are still involved, so human failure is always a possibility.
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?
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.
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.
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-state...
It does not seem like a poor response, in my opinion.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande...
Part of the argument against the Feb 2nd travel restrictions was actually that it was too late to be effective. COVID was already confirmed in the US in mid January. It had almost certainly already been circulating for weeks and obviously was definitely circulating internationally, which is why the epidemiologists weren’t advocating for a travel ban from China. I wouldn’t be surprised if it helped soften the blow a little bit, but there’s no way it was going to substantially change the course of events and there’s no way it’s a replacement for mass testing within the country.
Yes, “the public at large” was mostly wrong. The IC wasn’t. The White House was privy to much more information than the public and likely even more than CDC was. That’s the whole point?
Trump came out and said in June 2020 that he specifically told the federal agencies to slow down testing. Travel ban or no travel ban, that was simply the wrong decision and it was wrong for the wrong reasons (making his numbers look bad). There’s being wrong because reality is hard to parse in the moment, or because you have incomplete information, or because mistakes just happen (e.g. the botched test manufacturing) and there’s being wrong because selfish political ends dominate public health considerations. Those types of “wrong” are not equivalent.
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"Analysts concluded [unknown disease] could be a cataclysmic event," one of the sources said of the NCMI’s report. "It was then briefed multiple times to" the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House. Wednesday night, the Pentagon issued a statement denying the "product/assessment" existed.
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There is no mention of high risk anywhere. It's just another risk among countless others. In this particular case the wording of your article is also suggestive that the initial reports were not even concerned about it coming stateside, but rather its impact on the US forces in the region. It only made it to the President's daily briefing, and seemingly only once at that, sometime in January. Also remember even well into January it wasn't clear if human transmission was possible, and it was initially have thought to have come from an animal that US forces could potentially have been exposed to - like malaria, for example.
Of course the issue is that the administration did not use the NSC's playbook, or apparently any other playbook, per their own admission. That's another unforgivable error.
Though I'd add that even with hindsight, it's not easy to come up with suggestions - because many different countries throughout the world tried all sorts of different approaches, and there was never any real silver bullet. And of course those efforts also, themselves, have consequences which we will be dealing with for years to come. So one has to balance the cost of a solution, rather than just looking for a solution under the logic that it MUST be better than doing nothing (which I am not implying would be ideal either).
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande...
Let me 'append' my previous claim then. I don't know anything I would have done differently than I'd expect to have significantly have changed the outcome. Obviously juking the numbers, or trying to at least, is stupid (that goes for lowering and increasing). On the other hand, I don't expect that played a meaningful role in what played out, well excepting some sort of butterfly effect argument - but with such, one can argue literally anything.
There were tons of extremely important, extremely consequential decisions that had to be made without information we [maybe] could’ve had. I suppose one could argue that Trump probably wasn’t successful/consequential in slowing down testing (I presume we’ll never know), but I don’t think you can argue that the velocity of testing was inconsequential.
And essentially all interventions came with major costs. For a hypothetical, imagine that we know for a fact that school closures saved 5,000 lives. But you also know that you damaged the mental and social development of millions of students. Development from which it seems many of this generation may simply never recover from. It's not like there's a good choice, because both options completely suck. Of all the things we tried, it doesn't seem there was any sort of "free lunch" where you got a really significant benefit with no cost. Everything came with costs, and those costs were often extremely high.
I agree with all these points. What we'd debate is the assigned probabilities.
Which is a bit subjective and a sliding scale.
Think at that point there were definitely signs that it was not going to be nothing, and blow over.
The US was much more 'head in sand' response, not as you imply, they made some reasonable calculation of probabilities.
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-w...
[2] - https://www.newsweek.com/even-russian-propaganda-was-hesitan...
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.
And since you mention Afghanistan, the illustrative parallel is really this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tajbeg_Palace_assault
which did in fact result in the immediate decapitation and replacement of the Afghan government within hours of the beginning of military operations.
I'm not entirely sure the point about Afghanistan goes against what I'm saying. Yes, the USSR destroyed the government, and highly motivated fighters continued to fight, and ultimately defeat, them. The exact same thing happened to us. That's, more or less, the point I am making. Russia knew extremely well there were relatively large numbers of heavily armed, trained, and motivated nationalist types in Ukraine. The only way they were winning quickly is if they could negotiate a settlement with the civilian government.
Afghanistan is an example of the successful execution of the initial military engagement of such an operation, the rest was unsuccessful but Ukraine is not Afghanistan - it's right next door, it has deep historic, cultural, linguistic, ethnic, you-name-it ties to Russia. It does have also have a long history of armed nationalist resistance. The Soviet Union successfully suppressed it at least twice and it's reasonable suspect that Russia would have been able to do so as well, especially given their methods. Each Soviet effort was followed by campaigns of direct and indirect forced Russification and much worse. It's worth asking yourself why, say, Crimea is full of Russian speakers. It's not because it's some historical cradle of Russianness.
So "we" don't have anything except claims from an active participant in a war who has been caught lying repeatedly during this war, who has a long history of lying prior, and who has every motivation to continue lying in this one. What's actually happened for the past couple of years will only become clear over the years to come.
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As for Crimea, it has a pretty wild history, but it's never been majority/plurality Ukrainian or even close to it. You can see a demographic history here. [1] At the start of the USSR it was designated a subregion of Russia, but was primarily populated by Tatars. Over the years leading up to WW2 many more Russians migrated to it, and relatively small number of Ukrainians. After WW2 the Tatars were accused of collaborating with the Nazis and deported from the region leaving it almost entirely Russian, which remained the case til the current era.
It was only in 1954 that Nikita Khrushchev granted it to Ukraine, ostensibly as a gift to Ukraine celebrating the 300th anniversary of Ukraine's integration into Russia. In reality it was part of a political power struggle of the time, and in the Russian world this is often referred to as Khrushchev's Folly, probably mimicking Seward's Folly. In spite it being a sub-region nominally under Ukraine, it remained populated primarily with ethnic Russians. And this never changed. The highest percent of Ukrainians was 26% in 1970, at which time there were also 67.3% ethnic Russians.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Crimea#Ethnici...
They were not expecting an actual hot war (hence the "Special Military Operation"). I think that the plan was to quickly capture and/or replace the government, have the country go into chaos, have good "patriotic" people already in place to act as with the new government, and then realign the country towards Russia.
Capturing Kyiv or at least forcing the government abroad was a big part of that.
But even assuming I was wrong, the main point remains: I think it is clear that they were not expecting a years-long hot war with a neighbor, and that is a massive failure intelligence-wise