How the Pentagon assesses Ukraine’s progress
AFTER THREE months of achingly slow progress, Ukraine’s counter-offensive is gaining some momentum. Near the southern village of Robotyne, Ukrainian troops have pierced the first of Russia’s three defensive lines. They are now attacking the second. “Had we had this conversation two weeks ago, I would have been slightly more pessimistic,” says Trent Maul, the director of analysis for America’s Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA). “Their breakthrough on that second defensive belt…is actually pretty considerable.” Can Ukraine breach it, and the third line beyond, before shells become scarce and winter beckons?
Mr Maul, whose DIA office on the Potomac river periodically shakes as Marine One, the presidential helicopter, shuttles to and fro from its heliport next door, is charged with answering such questions. The job of his agency, which is less well known than the CIA, is to take the military measure of America’s foes. That often requires quantitative judgments: the range of an Iranian missile or the size of China’s fleet. An annual DIA report, “Soviet Military Power”, was read avidly during the cold war. But intangibles are just as important. Mr Maul singles out the will to fight—and candidly acknowledges that his agency got it wrong in Iraq in 2014 and Afghanistan in 2021, where American-built armies crumbled almost overnight.
“We thought the Afghans would fight until the end of the calendar year and try to have a heroic defence of Kabul,” says Mr Maul. Instead, “they basically folded pretty quickly.” That experience, along with the evaporation of the Iraqi army in the face of the Islamic State group, led DIA to “over-correct” when judging how Ukraine would fare when Russia invaded last year. “We had a similar thought that they were just overwhelmed on paper.” It has proved a teachable moment. Mr Maul brandishes a 40-page “tradecraft note”, published this January, which…
2023-09-06 14:04:56
Article from www.economist.com
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