They are taught by restraint, not war. Why US analysts were mistaken in the forecasts of war in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq

American warriors have been mistaken in recent decades, recognized by military historian Eliot Cohen in a column for The Atlantic. Unfortunately, this also happened in the case of Ukraine, which our allies could not understand before the war. Forecasting war is always a risky business. Even the most understandable expert or politician soon learns to insert the warnings into his predictions: "You will never guess.

" But even if you take into account, it simply impresses how bad the Western governments, commentators and leaders have been able to evaluate not only what the course can take wars, but also how they have developed. In 1990, many respectable analysts and journalists involved bloodshed, which was followed by the mire in the deserts of Kuwait and Iraq, when the Iraqi troops hardened in the battles faced numerous and probably softer American colleagues.

However, the Persian Gulf war turned into a rapid conflict in which friendly fire and accidents caused the US Army the same harm as a hostile fire. The Iraqi surpassed in service, maneuvering, in management and, as we later learned, in fact the number of force opposed to them. American and European planning experts have similarly overestimated their opponents in the Balkans in the 1990s.

Historically misinforming calls to the number of German divisions, tired of Tito's partisans during World War II, convinced specialists in defense planning and commentators that although the United States easily won the victory over Iraq, invading Bosnia will be much tougher. It turned out wrong. Since then, the wrong estimates in both directions are ongoing.

For four years after the war in Iraq, the United States fussed in 2003, convincing themselves that they were simply fighting with a reduced number of "elements of the former regime" and the "opponents of the bitter end" that are running an irregular war and which can be lost through a shaky new Iraqi army. To change both the assessment and the strategy, it took a more realistic look and the best war commander, General David Petreus.

If, by 2007, the US government in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, pursued excessive optimism, then Congress pierced a stable and equally unjustified pessimism about the possibility of a fracture of the situation. In fact, the novice senator from Illinois and the senior senator from Delawer, both of whom later became presidents, were convinced that the war in Iraq was hopeless, just when Petreus and his five new brigades changed the situation.

Let us return to excessive optimism again: US administrations have misunderstood the pace and scale of Taliban's war against our Afghan allies in the early 2000s; In 2021, they were stunned by the collapse of the Afghan regime after we announced the final withdrawal of troops. They were equally surprised by the revival of the Islamic state after a similar, albeit smaller, withdrawal of troops from Iraq ten years earlier.

Outstanding Russian military analysts confidently predicted Russian Blitzkrig a Ukraine in February 2022. A similar picture is observed now that anonymous military sources and probable experts say that the Ukrainian counter -offensive has failed because the fighter jets were not maneuvered in the style of George S. Patton and the Third Army during a breakthrough from the bridgeheads in Normandy in 1944.

How and why did it happen? In the end, the inability to predict the real course of war is a phenomenon of both the right and left political spectrum, and it is as widespread among the current officers and intelligence officers, as well as among journalists and commentators. To some extent, the explanations differ depending on the case. False judgments in Iraq and Afghanistan partially reflect the difficulty of overcoming the voluntary amnesia of the military to fight the rebels after Vietnam.

The idea "We will never do it again" forced the US Army, in particular, to stop thinking about the fight against the rebels. When in 2004 I conducted research on this topic for the Council on Defense Policy, I found that there were still existing guidelines on the fight against insurgents were Vietnamese origin and assumed the presence pajamas.

False judgments about Ukraine arose from various sources: narrow orientation to the number of weapons and units of military equipment, confusion , incompetent and cowardly. It was unfair with the Vietnamese, Afghans and Iraqi, each of whom was somehow doomed to failure, but it was extremely wrong with respect to Ukraine.

And in the conditions of an analytical subculture, based on a certain honor of the Russian bear, it was difficult for some to accept that the bear was rheumatic, myopic, had crippled claws and peeled. Not all people study war. Over the last three to four decades, universities have been filled in "security research" courses, which in practice means things such as weapons control, restraint theory and negotiation. It was there that today's journalists, scientists and officials.

Universities where prominent military historians once worked - Mac Coffman at the University of Wisconsin, Günter Rothenberg in Purdya, Gordon Craig in Stanford, Theodore ROPP in Duke - saw that they were replaced by respectable scientists who were less interested (or were not involved Before the war in general) what happens when nations are harvested by armies, fleets and air armads to speak with the last argument of kings.

For civilians, the end of the call meant the disappearance of a rigid understanding of what forcing the military to work and, importantly, their numerous nonsense and inefficiency.

Since military experience in the political, scientific and journalistic world has exhausted, professional officers acted exclusively in conditions in which, no matter how grueling and deadly, eternal wars seemed to be eternal, the United States always had prevailing advantages, including the preference in the air and in space, as well as in space, as well reliable logistics bases and communication lines.

These conflicts were difficult and often bitter experience, but they were not wars that kill hundreds or even thousands of people a day, and were not wars against countries that could challenge our domination in the air or at sea. This has not been this since 1945. Our higher military education system only partially compensates for the lack of direct experience. As Minister of Defense, James Mattis called "to return the war to military colleges.

" But military colleges, by important and respected exceptions, are primarily intended to attract middle-aged officers in the military-political world of international policy, defense decisions and analysis. These are not incubators of elite military planners and military scientists who need. Many circles remain convinced that the real war will somehow no longer come to us.

That is why, although military leaders know that ammunition reserves are too small, they do not knock on the tables of their civilian authorities, begging them. That is why political leaders, for their part, cannot explain to the American people that we need to spend more - much more - on defense, if we hope to prevent in other parts of the world the horrors that have beaten Ukraine.

That is why humanitarian restrictions on some valuable weapons - in particular, for mines and cassette ammunition - can penetrate the law or politics, because for some reason we think that these horror will never become necessary. According to two antidotes. The first is much more military history, old -fashioned guns and guns, no matter how outdated and embarrassed they seem to the modern academic mind.

Military history should be read widely and deeply, once said the largest English-language military historian of the 20th century Michael Howard. We need to know a lot about many wars and many about some to make a sense that the war will go well and what is bad, that you can predict and what is not. And we have to keep an honest account. Mistakes, even large, in military judgment are inevitable.