[Goose]

The thought that it's an authorized leak is hardly reassuring. I'm reminded of all the crowing that the Obama Administration did about the OBL operation, which resulted in a Pakistani physician, a friend of the US, ending up in prison.


Biden's political problems are beyond the scope of this line and likely verboten. But they are not going to be solved by anything that happens in the Ukraine

I am not "reassured" by it being an authorized leak either, but at least what was leaked is information the Russians probably believed anyway. Since the location of ships involves almost exclusively national technical means it is improbable any person will be "compromised". Generally, saying anything at all about intelligence capability is a bad idea. It is usually done for either domestic political reasons (always bad IMHO) or as a disinformation attack on the opponent.

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The US and UK were loudly telling the world that there is going to be an invasion. Europe was saying nah, probably just a scare tactic or exercise.



When we were proved right, that helped our credibility and helped get the rest of NATO on board with supporting Ukraine as strongly as the US and UK have pushed for.




A good article on this-


https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/05/06/br...embership/

I think the article is very mistaken in some regards. As I pointed out before, the difference between capability and intention is important. The US and everybody else saw the Russian capability. You are making the argument that the fact the US was "right" about Russian intentions is going to impress other countries. It isn't, because they all know these two things. First, estimating any other countries intentions at best involves reading tea leaves, even in a transparent democracy like the USA. They aren't telling you in so many words what they are going to do and even if they are you may regard it as disinformation or saber rattling. In many cases, even your opponent doesn't "know" what he is going to do. It is a work in progress. Second, in Russia, what happens next depends pretty much totally on Vladimir Putin intentions, and no matter what Putin is saying to even his inner circle he can turn on a dime and do something else. The CIA has psychiatrists that try to figure out what foreign leaders are thinking. So do other nations. No sane person is going to build their strategy on what those psychiatrists say. Any projection of Putin's intentions is by definition a guess. We guessed right, but that isn't going to have any traction among professionals. They recognize the limits of such estimates and plan accordingly. This is an age-old truism that a nation ignores at their peril.

Ideally, you always plan to respond to your opponents capabilities, not his intentions. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know his capabilities exactly. Even more unfortunately it may be too expensive to totally defend against you opponent's capabilities. At that point, your assessment of your opponent's intentions may guide you in what you actually do. However, doing this is historically how you get beat. You have to make appropriate risk/benefit analysis based on how sure you are of the opponents intention and the risk of being wrong. In this case, the Biden administration had almost no risk involved in assuming the worst about Putin's intention because all we had to do was plan for how much help we would give Ukraine. As is evident by our constantly changing upward what we are willing to do that planning was clearly imperfect. It was however certainly superior to assuming Putin would not act and doing nothing.

[Goose]

The thought that it's an authorized leak is hardly reassuring. I'm reminded of all the crowing that the Obama Administration did about the OBL operation, which resulted in a Pakistani physician, a friend of the US, ending up in prison.


Biden's political problems are beyond the scope of this line and likely verboten. But they are not going to be solved by anything that happens in the Ukraine

I am not "reassured" by it being an authorized leak either, but at least what was leaked is information the Russians probably believed anyway. Since the location of ships involves almost exclusively national technical means it is improbable any person will be "compromised". Generally, saying anything at all about intelligence capability is a bad idea. It is usually done for either domestic political reasons (always bad IMHO) or as a disinformation attack on the opponent.

---

The US and UK were loudly telling the world that there is going to be an invasion. Europe was saying nah, probably just a scare tactic or exercise.



When we were proved right, that helped our credibility and helped get the rest of NATO on board with supporting Ukraine as strongly as the US and UK have pushed for.




A good article on this-


https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/05/06/br...embership/

I think the article is very mistaken in some regards. As I pointed out before, the difference between capability and intention is important. The US and everybody else saw the Russian capability. You are making the argument that the fact the US was "right" about Russian intentions is going to impress other countries. It isn't, because they all know these two things. First, estimating any other countries intentions at best involves reading tea leaves, even in a transparent democracy like the USA. They aren't telling you in so many words what they are going to do and even if they are you may regard it as disinformation or saber rattling. In many cases, even your opponent doesn't "know" what he is going to do. It is a work in progress. Second, in Russia, what happens next depends pretty much totally on Vladimir Putin intentions, and no matter what Putin is saying to even his inner circle he can turn on a dime and do something else. The CIA has psychiatrists that try to figure out what foreign leaders are thinking. So do other nations. No sane person is going to build their strategy on what those psychiatrists say. Any projection of Putin's intentions is by definition a guess. We guessed right, but that isn't going to have any traction among professionals. They recognize the limits of such estimates and plan accordingly. This is an age-old truism that a nation ignores at their peril.

Ideally, you always plan to respond to your opponents capabilities, not his intentions. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know his capabilities exactly. Even more unfortunately it may be too expensive to totally defend against you opponent's capabilities. At that point, your assessment of your opponent's intentions may guide you in what you actually do. However, doing this is historically how you get beat. You have to make appropriate risk/benefit analysis based on how sure you are of the opponents intention and the risk of being wrong. In this case, the Biden administration had almost no risk involved in assuming the worst about Putin's intention because all we had to do was plan for how much help we would give Ukraine. As is evident by our constantly changing upward what we are willing to do that planning was clearly imperfect. It was however certainly superior to assuming Putin would not act and doing nothing.