Business Insider:
More than 100 days after Russia renewed its attack on Ukraine, and the world has seen that the Russian military isn't what it was believed to be.
The Russian force the US military and intelligence agencies believed to be a near-peer adversary hasn't shown up. The force that did appear had its main thrust blunted by smaller Ukrainian units. After taking heavy casualties and achieving few objects, Moscow pulled back its troops and lowered its ambitions.
Something was off in US assessments of Russia's military, and the Pentagon and intelligence community have admitted that they missed indications that Moscow was in fact fielding a "hollow force."
The US intelligence community is conducting an internal review of its processes after underestimating Ukrainian resolve and overestimating Russian military capabilities.
The faulty assessment in Ukraine comes after the Pentagon's extremely poor assessment of the Afghan military, which US leaders thought would be able to hold off the Taliban for months after the US withdrawal.
During a Senate Armed Services committee hearing in May, lawmakers questioned Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, and Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, about their agencies' assumptions in Ukraine, focusing on assessments that Kyiv would fall in three to four days and that the war would last only two weeks.
"We assessed their capacity to face the size of the Russian forces that were amassed on their border was going to be very difficult for them," Berrier said of the Ukrainians.
"What we did not see from the inside was sort of this hollow force" that lacked an effective non-commissioned officer corps, leadership training, and effective doctrines, Berrier said of the Russians. "Those are the intangibles that we have got to be able to get our arms around as an intelligence community to really understand."
Pressed by lawmakers, Berrier said that the DIA would take a hard look at what it had missed by stressed that in "the totality of the entire operation there were a lot more successes than failures."
While US intelligence agencies misinterpreted the effectiveness of the Russian and Ukrainian militaries, they provided accurate information about Russia's intentions in the months prior to Russia's attack, which began on February 24.
Those accurate assessments — many of which the White House has released to allies and the public — helped rally international support for Ukraine and burnish the US's credibility.
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They over-estimated Russian equipment as well as Russian leadership and troops. None were really up to the task they were given, thus the retreat to trying to salvage something in Eastern Ukraine by hammering the Ukraine defenders with massive artillery attacks and pushing Russian troops into failed attacks. The Russian conventional forces just were not up to the job and they have yet to find military leaders to salvage their operations.
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