Prognosticating about war is always a chancy business. Even the most arrogant pundit or politician soon learns to slip a qualifying “You never can tell” into their predictions. But making all allowance for that, it is striking just how bad Western governments, commentators, and leaders have been over the past few decades at gauging not only what course wars might take but how they have gone as they have unfolded.

In 1990, many respectable analysts and journalists predicted a bloodbath followed by a quagmire in the Kuwaiti and Iraqi deserts as battle-hardened Iraqi troops faced their outnumbered and supposedly softer American counterparts. The Gulf War, however, ended up being a swift conflict in which friendly fire and accidents did as much damage to the U.S. Army as hostile fire. The Iraqis were outgunned, outmaneuvered, out-led, and—as we later learned—actually outnumbered by the forces ranged against them.

[Garrett M. Graff: After 9/11, the U.S. got almost everything wrong]

American and European planners similarly overestimated their opponents in the Balkans in the 1990s. Historically misinformed references to the numbers of German divisions pinned down by Tito’s partisans during World War II had defense planners and commentators convinced that although the U.S. had won a smashing victory with ease against Iraq, intervening in Bosnia would be a much tougher fight. It wasn’t.

Misestimates in both directions have continued ever since. For four years after the start of the Iraq War in 2003, the U.S. flailed about, convincing itself that it was merely fighting a declining number of “former regime elements” and “bitter-enders” waging irregular warfare, who could be disposed of by the shaky new Iraqi army. It took a more realistic view—and the war’s best commander, General David Petraeus—to turn around both assessment and strategy.

If overoptimism had bedeviled the U.S. government in Iraq before 2007, and in Afghanistan as well, persistent and equally ungrounded pessimism about the possibilities of reversing the situation pervaded Congress. In fact, a freshman senator from Illinois and a senior senator from Delaware, both of whom would become president, were convinced that the Iraq War was hopeless just as Petraeus and his five new brigades turned it around. Back to overoptimism again: American administrations misjudged the pace and extent of the Taliban’s war against our Afghan allies in the early 2000s; in 2021, they were stunned by the collapse of the Afghan regime once we had announced our final withdrawal. They had been equally surprised by the re-eruption of the Islamic State after a similar, if lesser, withdrawal from Iraq a decade earlier.

Prominent analysts of the Russian military confidently projected a Russian blitzkrieg against Ukraine in February 2022. Yet well before the full weight of Western aid could be felt in Ukraine, the invader was shown to be far less competent, and the defenders far more effective, than anyone had anticipated. A similar pattern is occurring now, as anonymous military leakers and supposed experts say that the Ukrainian counteroffensive is a failure because fighters are not maneuvering in the manner of George S. Patton and the Third Army in the breakout from the Normandy beachheads in 1944.

How and why has this happened? Failing to project the actual course of a war is, after all, a phenomenon on both the right and the left of the political spectrum, and quite as common among serving officers and intelligence officials as among journalists and commentators.

To some extent, the explanations vary with the cases. The Iraq and Afghanistan misjudgments reflected in part the difficulty of overcoming the military’s self-imposed amnesia about counterinsurgency after Vietnam. The “We will never do that again” sentiment led the U.S. Army in particular to stop thinking about counterinsurgency. When I led a study for the Defense Policy Board on the subject in 2004, I discovered that the counterinsurgency manuals still on hand were of Vietnam vintage, presuming an opposing army of Communist-indoctrinated peasants in straw hats and black pajamas.

The Ukraine misjudgments came from different sources: narrow focus on numbers of weapons and pieces of kit, confusion of military doctrine with actual ability to execute it, and the enduring American suspicion that if you are allied with the United States, you are probably corrupt, incompetent, and cowardly. That was unfair with regard to the Vietnamese, Afghans, and Iraqis, who were in some measure each set up to fail, but it was grossly wrong with regard to Ukraine. And with an analytic subculture built around a certain reverence for the Russian bear, some had difficulty accepting that the bruin was rheumatic, myopic, mangy, and had mangled claws.

Very few people study war. In the past three or four decades, universities have been filled with courses on “security studies,” which means, in practice, things such as arms control, deterrence theory, and bargaining under threat. That is where today’s journalists, scholars, and officials were educated. Universities that once had eminent military historians—a Mac Coffman at the University of Wisconsin, a Gunther Rothenberg at Purdue, a Gordon Craig at Stanford, a Theodore Ropp at Duke—saw them replaced by respectable scholars who were less directly concerned (or not engaged at all) with what happens when nations summon up armies, fleets, and air armadas to make the final argument of kings.

For civilians, the end of the draft meant the vanishing of a gritty familiarity with what makes militaries work, and, just as important, with their numerous stupidities and inefficiencies. As military experience dried up in the political, scholarly, and journalistic worlds, professional officers operated exclusively in an environment in which, however, grueling and lethal the forever wars might seem, the United States always had overwhelming advantages, including supremacy in the air and in space, and secure logistical bases and lines of communication. These conflicts were hard and often bitter experiences, but they were not wars of the kind that kill hundreds or even thousands in a day, and they were not wars against countries that could contest our dominance in the air or at sea. That has not happened since 1945.

Our systems of higher military education only partly compensate for this lack of direct experience. When he was secretary of defense, James Mattis called for “putting the war back in war college.” But the war colleges, with important and respectable exceptions in terms of faculty and courses, are primarily designed to bring mid-career officers into the political-military world of international politics and foreign policy, of defense decision making and analysis. These are not the hatcheries of the elite war planners and scholars of war that we need.

The conviction remains in many quarters that somehow, real war will not again come to us. That is why even though military leaders know that ammunition stocks are way too low, they do not pound their civilian superiors’ desks pleading to build them up. It is why political leaders, in turn, fail to level with the American people that we need to spend more—a lot more—on defense, if we hope to prevent in other parts of the world the horrors that have befallen Ukraine. It is why humanitarian restrictions on some valuable weapons—mines and cluster munitions in particular—can make their way into law or policy, because we somehow think that these horrors will never become necessities.

[David Frum: The Iraq War reconsidered]

Two antidotes come to mind. The first is a lot more military history all around—old-fashioned guns-and-trumpets stuff, as antiquated and embarrassing as that is to the contemporary academic mind. One should read military history in width and depth, the 20th century’s greatest English-speaking military historian, Michael Howard, once said. One should know something about a lot of wars and a great deal about a few, to develop an instinct about what things in war will go well and which poorly, what one can anticipate and what one cannot.

And we should keep an honest accounting. Errors—even big errors—of military judgment are inevitable. But when misjudgments occur, those who make them should ask themselves some painful and searching questions. (I wrote the second chapter of  The Big Stick to reckon with my own misjudgments about Iraq.) And when such miscalls are truly egregious, persistent, and, what is much worse, unacknowledged and unexamined, journalists, pundits, and officials should consider whether that well-known name should still be on speed dial, as is the case with the Ukraine war today. Otherwise, the most recent set of errors will most definitely not be the last, or even the worst.

Pakistan accuses Taliban gov't of 'indiscriminate firing' at the key Torkham border crossing, closed for nearly a week.