Fresh off of the Pentagon overstating the strength of the Afghan military ahead of the Taliban’s rapid takeover last year, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency admitted he underestimated Ukraine’s will to fight in the lead up to Russia’s invasion.
The invasion of Ukraine came after weeks of warnings by the Biden administration that Russian leader Vladimir Putin was likely to invade. But a top defense intelligence official admitted last week that he had underestimated the quality of the Ukrainian military. Even President Joe Biden said in January he believed a Russian victory in Ukraine would essentially be certain.
Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, began a line of questioning during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Thursday by commending the intelligence community for “the outstanding work that it did leading up to the invasion” in warning about Putin’s impending attack.
Cotton noted that Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines had said Putin underestimated the skill of Ukraine’s military and its willingness to fight, and asked if U.S. intelligence had made the same mistake.
Haines replied: “So, we assessed prior to the invasion that he was overestimating — or underestimating, rather — the Ukrainians’ … resistance. So, I think we did well there. We did not do as well in terms of predicting the military challenges that he has encountered with his own military.”
Cotton asked Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier the same question, and he admitted he had botched it.
“My view was that, based on a variety of factors, that the Ukrainians were not as ready as I thought they should be, therefore I questioned their will to fight,” Berrier said. “That was a bad assessment on my part because they have fought bravely and honorably and are doing the right thing.”
Cotton questioned if the U.S. had also botched how long Kyiv would hold out or how long Ukraine would still have an air force or air defense systems. Berrier said the DIA made assumptions about Putin’s assumptions that were wrong, and Cotton asked why.
The DIA director said: “I think assessing will, morale, and the will to fight is a very difficult analytical task, and we had different inputs from different organizations and we, at least from my perspective as director, I did not do as well as I could have.”
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“These mistakes potentially had real world policy implications about the willingness of the president or other NATO leaders to provide weapons that they thought might’ve fallen into the hands of Russians in a matter of hours, or to impose sanctions for something that might have been a fait accompli,” Cotton said. “And we need to ask ourselves if we made mistakes about the first two weeks of the war, are we making mistakes about the next two weeks or the next two months and the policy implications those might have.”
Biden said in a mid-January press conference prior to Putin’s invasion: “It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion, and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do.”
During that same press conference, Biden said Russia would win a war with Ukraine, saying Russia would “be able to prevail over time,” though he said the cost would be heavy.
The president said he told Putin directly: “You know, you’ve occupied, before, other countries. But the price has been extremely high. How long? You can go in and, over time, at great loss and economic loss, go in and occupy Ukraine. But how many years? One? Three? Five? Ten? What is that going to take? What toll does that take?”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told Congress behind closed doors in early February that Kyiv could be conquered by Russia within 72 hours of a full-scale invasion, Fox News reported.
In comparison, both Biden and Milley, as well as the rest of the administration, appeared to vastly overestimate the strength and willpower of the Afghan army ahead of the Taliban’s rapid takeover of the country last August.
Biden said in August: “We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong, incredibly well-equipped, a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies.”
But that figure was misleading, according to a SIGAR report from last July, and did not account for casualties and surrender — or outright fleeing the country.
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As well as Milley inflating the size of the Afghan national forces during Senate testimony in June, he also claimed in mid-August: “There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.”
Biden also claimed in July: “The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
The Taliban rapidly took over following a chaotic U.S. military withdrawal, and an August suicide bombing by ISIS-K killed 13 U.S. service members as the United States led evacuation operations at the airport, with the Taliban providing security outside.
