Ukraine has no conventional navy, but it has sunk a large number of Russian warships and pushed most of what’s left of the Black Sea fleet far away from its home port in Crimea. Ukrainian drones have destroyed Russian strategic bombers nearly 3,000 miles from the battlefields of the Donbas. Kyiv has used 3D printing to make drone parts in decentralized facilities across the country—one factor that helped them to produce nearly 3 million drones last year. Russia’s use of fiber-optic guidance systems for its own drones has left landscapes around eastern Ukraine draped in filaments like the silk of a million spiders.
This is a very short list of some of the astonishing developments since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine four years ago next week. The biggest surprise, of course, is the simple fact that the Ukrainians are holding and resisting—even though they remain significantly outnumbered and out-resourced by the Russians—after the most intense European combat since World War II. The war has now gone on longer than the Soviet Union’s fight against Nazi Germany, a particularly embarrassing comparison for Russian President Vladimir Putin, always so eager to place himself in the illustrious lineage of Russian military commanders.
Ukraine has no conventional navy, but it has sunk a large number of Russian warships and pushed most of what’s left of the Black Sea fleet far away from its home port in Crimea. Ukrainian drones have destroyed Russian strategic bombers nearly 3,000 miles from the battlefields of the Donbas. Kyiv has used 3D printing to make drone parts in decentralized facilities across the country—one factor that helped them to produce nearly 3 million drones last year. Russia’s use of fiber-optic guidance systems for its own drones has left landscapes around eastern Ukraine draped in filaments like the silk of a million spiders.
This is a very short list of some of the astonishing developments since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine four years ago next week. The biggest surprise, of course, is the simple fact that the Ukrainians are holding and resisting—even though they remain significantly outnumbered and out-resourced by the Russians—after the most intense European combat since World War II. The war has now gone on longer than the Soviet Union’s fight against Nazi Germany, a particularly embarrassing comparison for Russian President Vladimir Putin, always so eager to place himself in the illustrious lineage of Russian military commanders.
But Putin is not the only one guilty of epic miscalculation. This war has defied an uncountable number of forecasts. The initial consensus among Western military experts envisioned a quick Ukrainian defeat—and for good reason. Then as now, the numbers on paper all favored the Russians. The Ukrainians, after all, had failed to inflict serious damage on the Russian troops and their proxies who invaded Crimea and the Donbas in 2014. A few observers braved the consensus and foresaw that Kyiv would put up stiff resistance to a weaker-than-expected Russia, but it is hard to think of anyone who sketched out the wildly improbable particulars that followed. No one foretold the breakneck pace of battlefield innovation, the off-the-charts Russian casualty rate, or the many ways in which the conflict has transformed global politics. Given U.S. President Donald Trump’s return to power, some might have anticipated Washington’s new recalcitrance or the push for European rearmament. But who anticipated the startling news of North Korean soldiers dying to fight Russia’s war or Kyiv’s military intelligence helping to kill Russian mercenaries in Mali?
One might argue that war, that most volatile of human activities, has always defied easy prediction. At the start of the Civil War, most well-informed Americans assumed that it would be over in a few months. In the summer of 1914, European leaders on all sides declared that the burgeoning conflict would be over by Christmas. In the 1960s, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson believed he could guide the Vietnam War to a successful conclusion with the help of management consultants and computer geeks. One of his successors, George W. Bush, was convinced that defeating Saddam Hussein’s regime would conclude the fighting in Iraq. In many other realms of everyday life, the consequences of myopia are limited. In war, they can be devastating beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
Yet the gap between prediction and reality has been especially stark in the case of the Russia-Ukraine war. Perhaps this has to do with the insane pace of modern technological change, the speed of information sharing, or the specific power of Ukraine’s will to self-determination. Whatever the reason, we should take the record of our own shortsightedness in Ukraine as a salutary warning. The potential for fresh conflicts is growing around the world: in Iran, in South Asia, on the Korean Peninsula, and around Taiwan. Do we really understand all of the contingencies that each of these possible wars might unleash?
To make this observation is not to counsel some particular reform of policy mechanisms, intelligence analysis, or military strategy. Wars will not stop, obviously, just because we cannot anticipate how they will unfurl. The planners will go on making plans, and the politicians will continue to work up policies even when they have little idea what such policies will entail. But surely it cannot hurt to acknowledge the limits of our foresight. Indeed, it is often precisely the developments we failed to anticipate that turn out to be the most significant. The U.S. government inquiry into the 9/11 terrorist attacks rightly chided decision-makers and security experts for their incapacity to think beyond precedent when it concluded that “[t]he most important failure was one of imagination.” Ukraine has taught the Russians a harsh lesson about such failures. As the United States prepares for the wars of the future, its planners would be well-advised to consider the dangers of arrogance.
