We Expect Our Policymakers To Be Poker Players

After all, the field of game thbeory came to prominence when it was used to develop nuclear strategy in the 1950s. The problem I'm seeing now is how little our policymakers seem to have learned about poker playing, and how little effort they're putting into the game. Thus we have the largely unmentioned issue arising from the Russo-Ukraine War, how Western intelligence wildly overestimated Russian military capability in the runup:

Ever since Ukraine launched a successful counteroffensive against Russian forces in late August, American officials have tried to claim credit, insisting that U.S. intelligence has been key to Ukraine’s battlefield victories.

Yet U.S. officials have simultaneously downplayed their intelligence failures in Ukraine — especially their glaring mistakes at the outset of the war. When Putin invaded in February, U.S. intelligence officials told the White House that Russia would win in a matter of days by quickly overwhelming the Ukrainian army, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, who asked not to be named to discuss sensitive information.

The Central Intelligence Agency was so pessimistic about Ukraine’s chances that officials told President Joe Biden and other policymakers that the best they could expect was that the remnants of Ukraine’s defeated forces would mount an insurgency, a guerrilla war against the Russian occupiers.

. . . The CIA “got it completely wrong,” said one former senior U.S. intelligence official, who is knowledgeable about what the CIA was reporting when the Russian invasion began. “They thought Russia would win right away.”

But remember that the collapse of the Afghan military that led to the disastrous US evacuation from Kabul last year was also said to result from an "intelligence failure".

U.S. military/intelligence leaders are directly responsible for the biggest intelligence failure since Tet in 1968. How did the Taliban plan, organize, position, and execute this massive offensive nation wide offensive under the noses of USMIL, CIA, DIA, NDS, ANDSF, etc.?

— Bill Roggio (@billroggio) August 12, 2021

The basic question I have is the CIA is estimated to have 21,575 employees with an annual budget of $15 billion. but this covers only one agency, as suggested by the tweet above. At least as relates to their track record in Afghanistan and Ukraine, we may as well not have had them on the payroll at all -- the cost of our catchup aid to Ukraine as of now is also roughly $15 billion. We could have saved that money one way or the other -- either a competent CIA might have helped avoid the war, or without the CIA, we could have paid for the aid with that extra cash.

This makes one Trump policy agenda all the more intriguing:

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday seemed to endorse a recently unveiled plan by a cadre of his former staffers to strip tens of thousands of federal workers of their civil service protections and fire them at will under the next Republican administration.

Trump spoke Tuesday at an event hosted by the America First Policy Institute, a think tank founded by former staffers in his administration. His speech came on the heels of an Axios report last week that former White House aides are planning to revive the controversial Schedule F, a job classification system that would take current federal workers in “policy-related” positions out of the competitive service, stripping them of civil service protections and making them effectively at-will employees.

Schedule F was authorized via executive order in October 2020, but the Trump administration failed to implement the measure before he left office in January 2021. One of President Biden’s first acts as president was to rescind the edict.

. . . Those involved in the effort to revive Schedule F told Government Executive last week that they have identified 50,000 federal employees that could be fired under the proposed new authority, although they hope to fire only a fraction of that total to create a “chilling effect” to keep the rest of them in line.

The basic problem as it relates to intelligence is that we expect our policymakers to be competent poker players. I browsed around for lists of those attributes, and I came up with these:

• An understanding of odds, but an awareness of possibilities
• A good grasp on risk management, but patience and timing
• An awareness of motivations, and impulse control
• Cognizance of how the game changes as players are taken out
• An ability to read others, and project for effect.

It seems to me that competent intelligence agencies are key to these traits at a geopolitical level, but of course, they need to be linked to competence in the key players who make and execute the policies. One current issue that will need to be addressed by Biden's successor will be cleaning out the intelligence agencies so they can contribute to these capabilities. But meanwhile, Biden is nothing but a regent, a placeholder. A good example is his remarks about "nuclear armageddon" yesterday:

But Biden’s comments also show that, in one way at least, Putin’s nuclear threats have worked: They have left his adversaries unsure how he might behave.

Biden told Democratic donors that the world had arrived at a dangerous moment.

“(For the) first time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have a direct threat of the use (of a) nuclear weapon if, in fact, things continue down the path they are going,” Biden said.

“We’ve got a guy I know fairly well,” Biden said of Putin.

The important quote here is the last line -- Biden is pumping up his own putative experience on the world stage, but at the same time, he knows nothing more than anyone else about what Putin might do, or more importantly, what his actual capabilities are. A few people have asked the real question, which is, in light of what we've learned so far this year about the Russian military, whether its nukes would even launch, much less reach their targets.

Somebody should have been working on that. And down the road, a bunch of people need to be fired.