One might think that an intelligence failure can be benign: The good guys do far better than expected, the bad guys far worse. In fact, erring on the side of pessimism can be as big a problem as being too bullish. The period just before and after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, is a good example of this. At the West’s most influential research organizations, prominent analysts—many of them political scientists who follow Russian military affairs—confi...
