More Wild Speculation
Apr. 26th, 2022 09:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitout(Outline at top of post, this time to organize my thoughts:
NOT TRAINS. That’ll be 3, if I get there.
Our intelligence is really good, but we didn’t realize that Russia’s military had the problems it had.
Our intelligence is focused on Threats, not Opportunities.
And that’s not the Good Thing it seems like it is.
)
This post is not about trains, for anyone who made it to the bottom of the last one. If I get to trains, it’ll be later. Sorry.
US intelligences services are really good. They are well-funded. They have great technology. They have enormous institutional knowledge about how to do what they do and they have unbelievable connectivity. True, they were probably undermined by Orange Guy, but honestly, he didn’t have the focus to really do anything meaningful to them and it’s not clear he even really cared to damage them particularly; he was more interested in sharing inappropriately with That Evil Guy’s Minions. We could clearly see both Ukraine invasions in the lead up to them. But we absolutely mis-assessed the probability of the success of the second invasion. How did we get that so wrong?
A lot of Twitter in the first hours/days/weeks of the invasion was busy sharing photos and interpretations of pictures coming out of Ukraine of Russian equipment that was not … functioning as expected. The most obvious of course was the convoy that was not progressing, but there were great analyses of things like tires. In the lead up to the invasion, the tire focus involved weather and frozen ground vs. muddy ground. But post invasion, a lot of people were talking about tire failures that indicated a failure to do very basic maintenance.
Other analyses revolved around having a conscript army, and the lack of cranes / forklifts on the trucks, and other logistics associated with the Russian army. The initial things I saw on twitter — and which caused me to dive into my current fascination with all things Warehouse and Circular Economy and Innovation in non-customer facing parts of our economy, but which enable e-commerce — bore out as true and the initial analysts credited in later, more traditional journalistic coverage.
Basically, the Russian economy is significantly more backward than we realized, and that is reflected in the military. Also, the Russian military is suffering from the results of a decade of corruption diverting resources and failing to do maintenance and resupply. The Russian military is, in a word, incompetent. Still big, and with lots of go bang stuff, and some capacity to deliver the go bang stuff. But incompetent. And our intelligence services _entirely failed to notice_. That is _amazing_. Why did _that_ happen?
First observation: a lot of intelligence is basically learning what the other side’s leadership knows. That’s not _all_ of intelligence, but it is a a lot of it. A good deal of the rest of it is connecting with the opposition to the leadership and what they know. What’s left after you get past that is any open-source information. So, if Russian leadership did not know they were incompetent, and if Russian opposition was focused on Anti-Corruption actions without necessarily understanding or caring about incompetence in the military that resulted from corruption, then our intelligence was unlikely to find out, as there isn’t really any open source in Russia.
Second observation: anyone in Russia who _did_ want the military to be competent / well-run was punished for efforts in that direction. To the extent that our intelligence _saw_ that, we’d probably chuckle and forget about it. The opposition in Russia similar. They have no motivation to publicize this. If they did publicize this, it would have been fixed.
But still. It isn’t _that hard_ to build a picture of how well an organization is run / where its strengths and weaknesses are. How did we fail to notice these weaknesses? Well, Russia has nukes, and when both sides have nukes, there’s this Mutually Assured Destruction era assumption that you almost don’t _need_ conventional anything if you have nukes. It’s not true now. It was not really true then (Sorry Not Sorry Ike you crazy bastard), either. But it’s a lot of how people think about things.
More relevantly, my sense is that our entire intelligence community is built around finding threats. I think we have stopped looking for Opportunities. I’ll put a little personal color on this to show what I mean by this. I did not grow up rich. And I grew up in a cult. There was a lot more anxiety about paying the bills in the family I grew up in than was justified objectively, also. I have a pretty ingrained tendency to overdo everything I do at all. Almost _all_ of my “good enough” talk is an explicit effort to compensate, and is itself overdone — my husband describes my control freak nature as being so control freaky my primary goal is to make sure people don’t notice just how much of a control freak I am. I think he may have underestimated how bad this is, actually. I think a lot of my control freakiness is aimed at making sure _I_ don’t see how much of a control freak I am. I hit a point in my mid 20s where I realized that I was optimizing with the goal of Preventing Disaster / Compensating for Murphy’s Law. I had gotten _so_ good at that (post-divorce), that I started summarizing my perspective / behavior as, “If someone dropped a million dollars on me, I wouldn’t be able to benefit from it”. And I thought, you know, that’s probably wrong. So I adjusted my approach. I “tuned” not for Avoid Any Bad / Prepare for All Possible Disaster; I “tuned” more loosely, to allow good things into my life. And that worked really well for me. I could see that worked, and I loosened up even more. And that worked really well, so I started doing some pretty crazy stuff, and honestly, most of _that_ has worked out really well. The world looks _really_ different when you quit with the Apocalypse Everywhere All the Time and go with The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades.
Don’t be crazy out there; you still have to select achievable goals, make a reality based plan, do solid task breakdown and monitoring, adjust flexibly to changing environments, and implement. I mean. Control freak gotta control freak.
If we had an intelligence apparatus that was focused on Opportunities — hey, Russia isn’t funding their military, if we just …
Yeah. You can see how that has been bad for us in the past!
OTOH, let’s play that out for a bit. Our delightful democracy, where the Person at the Top of the Military turns over (Potentially) every 4 years (for sure after 10) is structured so that politico-military-intelligence policy is directed somewhat arbitrarily by someone who is NOT part of the entrenched technocratic intelligence gathering community. Maybe we _don’t_ want whoever that is to have a list of We Could Totally Take These Guys It Would Be Easy. But maybe we _do_ want to be able to realistically portray what would be involved if we tried to do certain things. Maybe we _do_ want to notice that someone has rotted, has weakened, is a zombie dinosaur that is gonna go boomsplat when it falls over and make sure you are not underneath any of the toxic bits that splash down.
How would we do that? I mean, what’s involved in making sure people do maintenance? That seems more like a checklist of low-value contacts asking very Not Classified Type Questions, and could even be passive data collection of you have a good understanding of indicators of failure to maintain vs. Doing the Maintenance.
Also, we could practice by checking up on ourselves and our allies?
NOT TRAINS. That’ll be 3, if I get there.
Our intelligence is really good, but we didn’t realize that Russia’s military had the problems it had.
Our intelligence is focused on Threats, not Opportunities.
And that’s not the Good Thing it seems like it is.
)
This post is not about trains, for anyone who made it to the bottom of the last one. If I get to trains, it’ll be later. Sorry.
US intelligences services are really good. They are well-funded. They have great technology. They have enormous institutional knowledge about how to do what they do and they have unbelievable connectivity. True, they were probably undermined by Orange Guy, but honestly, he didn’t have the focus to really do anything meaningful to them and it’s not clear he even really cared to damage them particularly; he was more interested in sharing inappropriately with That Evil Guy’s Minions. We could clearly see both Ukraine invasions in the lead up to them. But we absolutely mis-assessed the probability of the success of the second invasion. How did we get that so wrong?
A lot of Twitter in the first hours/days/weeks of the invasion was busy sharing photos and interpretations of pictures coming out of Ukraine of Russian equipment that was not … functioning as expected. The most obvious of course was the convoy that was not progressing, but there were great analyses of things like tires. In the lead up to the invasion, the tire focus involved weather and frozen ground vs. muddy ground. But post invasion, a lot of people were talking about tire failures that indicated a failure to do very basic maintenance.
Other analyses revolved around having a conscript army, and the lack of cranes / forklifts on the trucks, and other logistics associated with the Russian army. The initial things I saw on twitter — and which caused me to dive into my current fascination with all things Warehouse and Circular Economy and Innovation in non-customer facing parts of our economy, but which enable e-commerce — bore out as true and the initial analysts credited in later, more traditional journalistic coverage.
Basically, the Russian economy is significantly more backward than we realized, and that is reflected in the military. Also, the Russian military is suffering from the results of a decade of corruption diverting resources and failing to do maintenance and resupply. The Russian military is, in a word, incompetent. Still big, and with lots of go bang stuff, and some capacity to deliver the go bang stuff. But incompetent. And our intelligence services _entirely failed to notice_. That is _amazing_. Why did _that_ happen?
First observation: a lot of intelligence is basically learning what the other side’s leadership knows. That’s not _all_ of intelligence, but it is a a lot of it. A good deal of the rest of it is connecting with the opposition to the leadership and what they know. What’s left after you get past that is any open-source information. So, if Russian leadership did not know they were incompetent, and if Russian opposition was focused on Anti-Corruption actions without necessarily understanding or caring about incompetence in the military that resulted from corruption, then our intelligence was unlikely to find out, as there isn’t really any open source in Russia.
Second observation: anyone in Russia who _did_ want the military to be competent / well-run was punished for efforts in that direction. To the extent that our intelligence _saw_ that, we’d probably chuckle and forget about it. The opposition in Russia similar. They have no motivation to publicize this. If they did publicize this, it would have been fixed.
But still. It isn’t _that hard_ to build a picture of how well an organization is run / where its strengths and weaknesses are. How did we fail to notice these weaknesses? Well, Russia has nukes, and when both sides have nukes, there’s this Mutually Assured Destruction era assumption that you almost don’t _need_ conventional anything if you have nukes. It’s not true now. It was not really true then (Sorry Not Sorry Ike you crazy bastard), either. But it’s a lot of how people think about things.
More relevantly, my sense is that our entire intelligence community is built around finding threats. I think we have stopped looking for Opportunities. I’ll put a little personal color on this to show what I mean by this. I did not grow up rich. And I grew up in a cult. There was a lot more anxiety about paying the bills in the family I grew up in than was justified objectively, also. I have a pretty ingrained tendency to overdo everything I do at all. Almost _all_ of my “good enough” talk is an explicit effort to compensate, and is itself overdone — my husband describes my control freak nature as being so control freaky my primary goal is to make sure people don’t notice just how much of a control freak I am. I think he may have underestimated how bad this is, actually. I think a lot of my control freakiness is aimed at making sure _I_ don’t see how much of a control freak I am. I hit a point in my mid 20s where I realized that I was optimizing with the goal of Preventing Disaster / Compensating for Murphy’s Law. I had gotten _so_ good at that (post-divorce), that I started summarizing my perspective / behavior as, “If someone dropped a million dollars on me, I wouldn’t be able to benefit from it”. And I thought, you know, that’s probably wrong. So I adjusted my approach. I “tuned” not for Avoid Any Bad / Prepare for All Possible Disaster; I “tuned” more loosely, to allow good things into my life. And that worked really well for me. I could see that worked, and I loosened up even more. And that worked really well, so I started doing some pretty crazy stuff, and honestly, most of _that_ has worked out really well. The world looks _really_ different when you quit with the Apocalypse Everywhere All the Time and go with The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades.
Don’t be crazy out there; you still have to select achievable goals, make a reality based plan, do solid task breakdown and monitoring, adjust flexibly to changing environments, and implement. I mean. Control freak gotta control freak.
If we had an intelligence apparatus that was focused on Opportunities — hey, Russia isn’t funding their military, if we just …
Yeah. You can see how that has been bad for us in the past!
OTOH, let’s play that out for a bit. Our delightful democracy, where the Person at the Top of the Military turns over (Potentially) every 4 years (for sure after 10) is structured so that politico-military-intelligence policy is directed somewhat arbitrarily by someone who is NOT part of the entrenched technocratic intelligence gathering community. Maybe we _don’t_ want whoever that is to have a list of We Could Totally Take These Guys It Would Be Easy. But maybe we _do_ want to be able to realistically portray what would be involved if we tried to do certain things. Maybe we _do_ want to notice that someone has rotted, has weakened, is a zombie dinosaur that is gonna go boomsplat when it falls over and make sure you are not underneath any of the toxic bits that splash down.
How would we do that? I mean, what’s involved in making sure people do maintenance? That seems more like a checklist of low-value contacts asking very Not Classified Type Questions, and could even be passive data collection of you have a good understanding of indicators of failure to maintain vs. Doing the Maintenance.
Also, we could practice by checking up on ourselves and our allies?