Thread Reader Eliot A Cohen

Thread Reader

Eliot A Cohen

13h • 8 tweets • 3 min read

This excellent thread by @MarkHertling got me thinking about a question: why has the analysis of this war by retired generals such as him, @general_ben and @edwardstrngr, and first rate military historians such as @PhillipsPOBrien been superior to that of the Russian military.1/8

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.analytic community? This requires serious research, & am helping launch some, because its an important question. But here are some initial hypotheses: experience, particularly of high level command in a shooting war sensitizes one to all the intangibles mentioned 2/8 

.in @MarkHertling’s thread. And to the nitty gritty detail that those in the back room of war making, such as @TrentTelenko also provide. They look for different things, and detect different things than the analysts. 3/8 

The military historians know that Churchill was right when he said “Always know, no matter sure you are that you can win, that there would not be a war if the other fellow did not think he also had a chance.” They proved more sensitive to a lot of the same things the generals 4/7 

know - morale, various dimension of leadership, i.e. the intangibles. And importantly: neither group shared the disdain for the Ukrainians that the analytic community seems to have had. The analysts - particularly those from the quant world and lacking either the 5/8 

experience or the historical depth were bewitched by numbers without knowing how to look behind them, by technology, without knowing whether it was reliable, available, prepared for, maintainable etc.; and above all doctrine. As many of us intellectuals do, they 6/8 

also way overvalued ideas, in this case doctrine. Maybe too they found it hard to think that the giant, fierce, cunning powerful beast they were studying was actually myopic, arthritic, confused, clumsy, and stupid - though even more vicious to the weak than they had thought. 7/8 

The point is not to settle scores here. It is, rather, to say that good judgment is invaluable, and poor judgment is dangerous, and that one of the greatest and scarcest virtues out there is self scrutinizing, self critical intellectual humility. 8/8 

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