Thread by @RadioFreeTom

I've been thinking about this article, and have now read the full CSIS report. Eliot and Phillips make some important points about expertise. But the idea that the experts botched this at the beginning seems to me to be some unduly harsh revisionism. /1

Longish🧵

https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1839677405704671398

The basic issue seems to be: Why did so many analysts overestimate RU and underestimate UKR? And the answer seems to be something like: Because they're intellectually ossified and they did stuff like count tanks instead of thinking more about social and political factors. /2

I'm not sure that's fair, but in any case, it was only the reasonable bet to assume that Russia would be more competent. It was also, for UKR, the worst-case scenario - which most analysts are paid to think through and focus on.
Experts do not, and should not, wishcast. /3

Put another way, experts don't dismiss everything they've ever learned and then say: "But because I hope for it, the least-likely thing will happen and I will advise based on that."
Yes, sometimes you knock out a Drago. Usually, however, you don't. Just ask Apollo Creed. /4

It would have been irresponsible to predict that the Russians would act like morons and ignore their own training and doctrine. And yet, that happened - but no one should have bet on it.
And it might not have gone that way. But the CSIS paper just waves away such objections. /5

Indeed, the CSIS paper dismisses such objections as mere rationalizations, including contingency. (Hostomel and other events, it argues, didn't really matter. That's a stunning assertion. If a few things had gone right for RU, we likely wouldn't be having this discussion.) /6

In that vein, the paper argues that analysts should have known UKR would effectively resist and fight well. That, too, would have been borderline wishcasting. But yes, UKR had improved more, and RU had improved less, than it seemed over the course of the past 10 years. /7

Ironically, there's an air of inevitability in the report of the kind the authors deplore from the early pessimists: Of course this was going to happen, of course everyone should have known, of course they got it wrong - because military analysis is all screwed up.
/8

But the belief in inevitability is also a sin of intellectual arrogance and short-sightedness - as is examining the deep factors of victory or defeat in a war that isn't over yet.
/9

Indeed, one of the things they still teach at the Naval War College is counterfactual history - which this report oddly dismisses - precisely to avoid this very same sense of inevitability and to remind us that most wars are not obvious wins or losses in their opening acts. /10

I'm all for including more generalists and more uncertainty in expert debates - I say so in my book on, uh, experts, which also, like CSIS, cites Tetlock's studies. But the CSIS report imo replicates some of the same missteps it accuses other analysts of making. /11

One relatively ignored issue is whether most experts revised their views. (They did.) Another is that the optimists - as opposed to those terrible expert pessimists - also got things wrong, including their predictions about the summer offensive a year ago. /12

I suspect the authors are - rightly -frustrated that worries about UKR resilience and fears about escalation hamstrung the Western response, and now are too firmly planted in a Biden WH that is now just stuck in a loop on those early appraisals. That's a legit argument. /13

But while saying that "experts who predicted a quick UKR collapse was wrong" is obviously correct, saying they're wrong because their field is inherently messed up is not correct. That's like saying everyone who tells you not to hit a 16 against a 6 in blackjack is dumb. /14

I leave a more detailed analysis of the CSIS report to others. And experts should hold each other accountable. I agree with the authors, for example, that "Putin is a strategic genius" is ridiculous, yet still seems embedded in many Western minds that should know better. /15

But this Michael Gove-like "enough of the experts" is the wrong way to approach this, imo. And it's just too soon for this kind of after-action analysis and criticism - especially in a war that's still going on. /16x