Why The Constant Failure To Understand War? The US Made It Look Too Easy

Hi All,

This post is going to be a little nerdy. I spent much of the last few days writing the follow-up to the piece which focussed on my errors in 2025. This second piece discusses what I got right. However the more I wrote this, the more self-congratulatory it seemed and the less I wanted to send it out. As such I’m putting it on ice for a while to decide what to do.

In my festival of self-congratulation, I focussed on three areas, mirroring the previous piece on my errors. These were the course of the Russo-Ukraine War (the lack of breakthroughs in the land war/the growth of importance of the ranged war), the Trump administration positions on the war (foundationally pro-Russian which was going to have enormous repercussions), and the overall development of strategic understanding (where war is now and where it is going).

In thinking about the last point in particular and looking back at how the press and analytical community discussed war, I spent some time pondering just why there has been such constant shortcomings. Why does the analytical community in the USA (and much of the larger West—if we can even use that phrase any more) fail repeatedly to properly understand and evaluate what matters in a war? This obviously came into focus in late 2021 and early 2022 when analysts within and outside government had no idea how to understand what a Russian invasion of Ukraine would look like. Since then things have arguably not improved and could be said to be getting worse.

There have been repeated mistakes in judging what matters, from “strategic Pokrovsk” (which the BBC is still pushing), to what I would argue the enormous consensus that Ukraine was going to collapse from a manpower crisis and needed to draft all its young people. This last point was a chorus all year, whether one was pro-Trump or Trump-skeptical. In January 2025, Mike Waltz, who was then the incoming National Security Adviser, went on US television and said Ukraine needed to draft everyone from 18 year old on upwards. He even said they needed to do it to be “all in for democracy”. The irony of a man who was about to help enable Trump screw over democratic Ukraine for dictatorial Russia is beyond parody. And the chorus never let up. Two weeks ago John Bolton, not Trump’s favorite man, claimed that Ukraine needed to lower the draft age to 18 to “get more men on the battlefield”. Actually, Ukraine needs to find further ways to reduce the number of men on the battlefield, not raise it. But hey.

This consensus in the US discussion is fascinating, and it has reached the point that US voices are even telling Ukraine that it needs to draft all its women. The extraordinary confidence/arrogance coming from the US on this question which pays no attention to the very nuanced Ukrainian discussion of the same question, is not only depressing, it is a key indicator of just why the US has failed utterly during the period of its hegemony.

Ultimately the US made war look too easy.