INTELLIGENCE AND INTANGIBLES: HOW TO ASSESS A STATE’S WILL TO FIGHT
Josh Cheatham | 07.27.22
Intelligence and Intangibles: How to Assess a State’s Will to Fight
During a recent hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Angus King had a brief, but frank, exchange with Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines over the intelligence community’s difficulty in assessing a military’s will to fight compared to more material aspects of warfare. As King, himself, put it, “I realize will to fight is a lot harder to assess than number of tanks or volume of ammunition.” King then suggested that the intelligence community’s struggle to assess will to fight in Ukraine was responsible for the inaccurate assessment that Kyiv would fall in three days, followed by all of Ukraine in two weeks.
King indicated that he hoped the intelligence community was “doing some soul-searching,” and asked what was being done to improve assessments on will to fight. In response, DNI Haines informed Senator King that a process was already underway at the National Intelligence Council to address assessments of will, adding that it was a topic “quite challenging to provide effective analysis on and we’re looking at different methodologies for doing so.”
The particularly frustrating aspect of this exchange is that the arc of the academic literature on battlefield effectiveness over the past two decades has emphatically challenged material explanations for victory or defeat in modern conflict. Instead, scholars have focused on so-called human aspects of war, demonstrating an inextricable link between an army’s will to fight and its ability to fight.
https://mwi.usma.edu/intelligence-and-intangibles-how-to-assess-a-states-will-to-fight/
