Countability

With the tide possibly turning, here’s a look at why the Russian army was so vastly overrated, even by Western intelligence agencies that should have known better.

I’ll rephrase some other main points:

The McNamara fallacy played a massive role in this. Modern governments only look at what you can easily count and ignore that which is hard or impossible to count as unimportant. On paper the Russian army is impressive, but it’s hard to count poor training, corruption, lack of maintenance, low morale and severe ineptitude. Whereas the Ukrainian army had quietly became a professional, motivated and experienced force since 2014.

Intelligence agents, academics, think tank busy bodies, et al. are pulled from the upper classes. Meanwhile, many of the make or break details of winning are war are solidly working class: pallets, warehouses, tire maintenance or simply keeping a kitchen stocked. And thus the white collar Western Academics simply couldn’t comprehend this was missing in the Russian army and that this would be catastrophic to the Russian war effort.

Both of these are variations on the spotlight fallacy, looking for your keys only under a street lamp because that’s where the light is shining, even if that’s clearly not the place you lost them.

There were experts that got it right before the war started, but they were dismissed as russophobic and alarmist until they weren’t.

The last three years have made me far more skeptical of experts than I used to be.