Why did experts overestimate Russia's military?

In my recent video about why experts got their predictions wrong about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I briefly mentioned a CSIS report by Eliot Cohen and Phillips O’Brien about the tendency of some military analysts to overestimate the capabilities of the Russian military. So from my video this is the second category of being wrong, where you accurately saw that there was an invasion coming, but you thought that Russia would be successful.

It’s a very interesting report, but I also think the authors are a bit too harsh on some of the experts they criticize. So, I thought I would take some time to discuss the report and add a few points to keep in mind if you read it. 

Cohen and O’Brien scrutinize the estimates about Russia’s military potential before the outbreak of the full-scale invasion. Their basic claim is that a group of military analysts specializing in the Russian military did predict that Russia would invade Ukraine but massively overestimated the capabilities of the Russian military. This led to a narrative in the West where it was assumed that a Russian victory was inevitable, that Ukraine would fall within a matter of days or weeks, and that Russia would be able to win a kind of blitzkrieg with their superior army and battle proven air force. 

Kofman, Lee, Watling, Bronk…

It's easy to understand which experts Cohen and O’Brien are talking about. They are not named in the text of the report itself, but the findings are backed up by comprehensive references, so the endnotes are essentially a long list of people whose judgment is put into question. These are people like Michael Kofman, Rob Lee, David Kilcullen, Dara Massicot, Jack Watling, and Justin Bronk — people who prior to the invasion were known to be the foremost experts on the Russian military, and they still play that role today as some of the most prominent Western experts on the war. 

The tendency to overestimate Russia has had real policy consequences. Western countries have hesitated to provide military aid to Ukraine because it was assumed that a Russian victory was only a matter of time. Once it became clear that Russia was not going to win quickly, it was still assumed that Ukraine would eventually be pushed into fighting a guerrilla-style insurgency, and that the only weapons the West could meaningfully provide were things like MANPADS and light anti-tank weapons. And it is still present in today’s discussions about Russian red lines, where many people assume that Putin has a reserve of weapons that he can use for escalation.
(I have also made a video about the damaging effects of the unconscious assumption in both the West and Russia that a Russian victory is inevitable.)

Cohen and O’Brien claim that the analytical error in overestimating Russia has led to a delay in the provision of military assistance to Ukraine, which prevails even to this day. They discuss several explanations for this analytical failure of overestimating Russia. One is that these experts were too narrowly focused on contemporary military analysis and forgot to include perspectives from other disciplines.

For example, a perspective from military history might have revealed that a war in Ukraine would not end up as an Afghanistan-style insurgency, or that attacking just before the mud season was a very bad idea in Ukraine so a quick victory would be impossible. A perspective on studies of Russian society might have contributed to a better understanding of the effects of corruption, which would likely also influence the performance of the Russian military. So, they advocate that we need multidisciplinary studies if we want to understand the real capabilities of a military such as Russia’s. 

Another point of criticism is that these experts, to a high degree, were blinded by the Russian propaganda about how great they were. They bought into stories about how the Russian military had performed in operations in Syria, while, in reality, these operations were too easy to provide an accurate picture of the true capabilities of the Russian air force.

Is the critique fair?

I think Eliot Cohen and Phillips O’Brien raise a relevant critique. We need to be careful when studying the military capabilities of Russia and other potential adversaries. It becomes a problem if military analysts focus narrowly on contemporary force structures and operations, and that can lead to wrong estimates.

I’ve always found it puzzling when analysts such as Kofman and Lee have made extensive analyses of Russian exercises based on official press releases from the Russian military. It’s been strange to watch how much effort they put into analyzing the photographs that the Russians themselves decided to put on their website during exercises like Zapad, and then using that to make conclusions about what the Russians were training for and what kinds of operations they were capable of performing. 

But I also think that Cohen and O’Brien take the criticism a bit too far. Especially at the beginning of the war, I found Kofman’s analysis extremely valuable for understanding the conflict. It’s fair to mention that Kofman was one of the first to acknowledge that the Russians were not living up to his pre-war expectations. On the one hand, Kofman’s analysis may have contributed to building the narrative about Russia’s enormous military strength and inevitable victory. But on the other hand, he was also quick to point out that this was not playing out in real life after the invasion had started.

Russia’s invasion was weird

I also think there is a shortcoming in Cohen and O’Brien’s analysis in the sense that Russia’s initial invasion plan was just plain weird. It was built on absolutely wrong assumptions about how easy it would be and how Ukraine was a fragile state that wouldn’t fight, and how the Russian-speaking part of the population would do most of the work for the Russian military.

The invasion plans were basically built on the assumption that they wouldn’t have to fight a war, but would win in a kind of hybrid battle that would resemble the 2014 annexation of Crimea. It is at least partly unfair to judge the capabilities of the Russian military based on their performance in a military operation that was based on incorrect assumptions, insufficient planning, and political misjudgments. And therefore, it is also at least partly unfair to judge the analysts who were trying to predict the capabilities of the Russian military based on that performance. 

But overall, I think the report is interesting, and I recommend reading it. It is important that we have this discussion about our predictions leading into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, both about why so many experts failed to predict that there would be an invasion in the first place, and also why military analysts overestimated the capabilities of the Russian military. And the conclusion is correct that we need multidisciplinary research to move beyond the limitations of isolated analysis of military equipment and operations when trying to assess what the Russian military is capable of doing.