What's The Story On Ukraine?

I'm still puzzled at the horrible quality of Ukraine war analysis. Here's a snippet of yesterday's assessment from the Institute for the Study of War:

CORRECTION: ISW mistakenly reported on April 23 that Russian troops seized Lozova, Kharkiv Oblast, approximately 100km west of Izyum. Russian troops actually seized Lozove, Donetsk Oblast, approximately 35km east of Izyum. We apologize for the error.

Every few days there's something like this. The authors listed at the top of yesterday's assessment are Mason Clark and Kateryna Stepanenko. Stepanenko is a Ukrainian name, and I assume that Ms Stepanenko is a native speaker and (at least presumably) famiiar with the country's geography. As far as I can see, this would be roughly equivalent to a California writer confusing Monterey, CA with Monterey Park, CA, locations 325 miles apart, an extremely sloppy error. I don't know what staff members at ISW make, but I've got to think whatever it is, it's too much.

The same ISW assessments had been predicting complete Russian victory in Mariupol "within days" throughout March and the first weeks of April, when the defenders in the Azov steel plant have continued to hold out and as of today are still being resupplied.

The question I have is whether the level of incompetence we see at the ISW also reflects a similar level in our intelligence and defense planning -- I assume staff at think tanks pass interchangeably into intelligence agencies, and this could well explain how the US utterly miscalculated the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Zelensky's ability to rally not just his own country but much of the West. The Mason Clarks and Kateryna Stepanenkos are presumably keeping up their mortgage payments in Bethesda nonetheless.

A New Yorker piece, Is the Russian Military a Paper Tiger? raises this question at least tangentially. The author interviews Joel Rayburn, a retired Army colonel now at a think tank, who suggests the whole Russian plan for invasion was unworkable from the start:

I think, over all, the campaign design was flawed from the start. It was an invasion force that was too small for the task, just in straight numbers—in the numbers of combat units, combat formations they were able to put on the battlefield. That task was essentially to dismember Ukraine and change the regime in Kyiv, and the force was too small for that purpose.

. . . What we can now see is that they simply do not have the institutional capacity to support offensive operations deep into enemy territory and aren’t able to give units supply and combat support of all kinds: artillery support, air support, air-defense support. With an already weak logistics base, it was an enormous mistake for them to chop their main offensive into four major axes that were widely geographically dispersed.

. . . And then they’re showing up on the battlefield in the axis of advance toward Kharkiv and Chernihiv and Kyiv with Cold War-era, non-modernized, armored combat vehicles—both infantry vehicles and tanks. And it’s like they took these things out of mothballs.

. . . What we’ve seen in action is a military machine on the Russian side that could not pull off a confrontation with any NATO power. So escalating into a confrontation with NATO would be suicidal for them. And I have to believe that they’re not suicidal. Imagine if that invasion force had stumbled into Poland instead. The casualties that we’re seeing now are high enough, but the entire invasion force would’ve been wiped out.

All well and good, but, er, even Col Rayburn is talking as though this was a surprise (and I assume his mortgage in Bethesda is up to date as well). Why was all this a surprise? US intelligence has made a point that it did in fact correctly predict Putin's invasion in late February -- but what about everything it's failed to predict since then? The mantra up until very recently was "we don't want to start World War III" by offending Putin in some way, like sending Ukraine heavy weapons or Migs.

Thankfully that's been dropped once the level of Russian incompetence became clear. But what caused our own massive miscalculation in the West? I wonder if these aren't the nieces, nephews, and Ivy League protégés of the same people who brought us the failure to predict the Soviet collapse more than a generation ago.