Imagination, Hopes, Delusion: Ukraine Invasion

 A war foretold:how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putin’s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them (The Guardian) inspired this post with the following:

Few in Ukraine believed a full-scale invasion was likely, but the country’s intelligence agencies had been picking up worrying signs of increasing Russian activity. Ivan Bakanov, the head of the SBU domestic agency, recalled that while Russian spy services had traditionally focused on trying to recruit high-level Ukrainian sources, in the year prior to the invasion “they were going after everyone”, including chauffeurs and low-level functionaries. Often, these pitches were “false flag”: the Russian recruiters would pretend to be from one of Ukraine’s own intelligence agencies.

The SBU also tracked clandestine meetings between officers from Russia’s FSB and Ukrainian civil servants or politicians. These meetings often took place in luxury hotels in Turkey or Egypt, where the Ukrainians travelled under the guise of tourism. Russia hoped these people, motivated variously by ideology, ego or money, would act as a fifth column inside Ukraine when the time came.

“Before I came to the SBU, I also thought we could do a deal with the Russians,” said Bakanov, who was an old business partner of Zelenskyy’s and had no intelligence background when appointed in 2019. “But when you see every day how they are trying to kill and recruit people, you understand that they have a different plan, that they are saying one thing and doing another.”

Still, the prevailing mood in Kyiv was that the US warnings were overegged. Ukraine had been fighting Russian proxy forces in the Donbas for eight years, but the idea of a full-fledged war – with missile attacks, tank columns and a march on Kyiv – seemed unimaginable. 

Similarly, How the Navy Prepared to Fight the Japanese Empire (The Dispatch) with this paragraph:

These strands of learning, arguing, and adapting converged in the Fleet Problems, a series of 21 naval exercises in the 1920s and ’30s that addressed specific concerns or operational expectations. Surface, air, and subsurface vessels all took part, and several incorporated Marine Corps landings as part of the exercise. Fleet Problem XIII included a wildly successful surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, but top Navy officials completely disregarded it because they insisted no enemy would actually be able to achieve that level of surprise and, furthermore, attacking on a Sunday morning was illegal. Overall though, the Fleet Problems provided valuable experience to virtually every senior officer who commanded in World War II and meaningful proficiency in the technologies that shaped the war. 

We are limited by our biases and our experiences (which may overlap) to deal with the future. History is littered with examples.

Ukraine has survived—so far — and America survived December 7, 1941. Survival came not from being prepared in particulars but from preparing for the possibilities. 

 

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