[Business Insider] More than 100 days after Russia renewed its attack on Ukraine, and the world has seen that the Russian military isn't what it was believed to be.The Russian force the US military and intelligence agencies believed to be a near-peer adversary hasn't shown up. The force that did appear had its main thrust blunted by smaller Ukrainian units. After taking heavy casualties and achieving few objects, Moscow pulled back its troops and lowered its ambitions.
Something was off in US assessments of Russia's military, and the Pentagon and intelligence community have admitted that they missed indications that Moscow was in fact fielding a "hollow force."
The US intelligence community is conducting an internal review of its processes after underestimating Ukrainian resolve and overestimating Russian military capabilities.
The faulty assessment in Ukraine comes after the Pentagon's extremely poor assessment of the Afghan military, which US leaders thought would be able to hold off the Taliban for months after the US withdrawal.
During a Senate Armed Services committee hearing in May, lawmakers questioned Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, and Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, about their agencies' assumptions in Ukraine, focusing on assessments that Kyiv would fall in three to four days and that the war would last only two weeks.
"We assessed their capacity to face the size of the Russian forces that were amassed on their border was going to be very difficult for them," Berrier said of the Ukrainians.