FAFO is a social media acronym that means F**k Around Find Out. It appears that the United States and NATO have decided to play that dangerous game with Moscow. I had an offline chat with Alastair Crooke this morning. He flagged an article in the Times of Israel that I had missed, and he discussed it with the Judge. The article is an interview with retired Israeli General, Itai Brun, the former head of the IDF’s Military Intelligence research and analysis division. Here are the salient points:
[Brun] warned Saturday that Israel’s inability to recognize that Hamas was preparing to invade shows a far-reaching systemic failure that cannot be fixed simply by replacing key officers and officials.
Correcting that strategic failure, said Brun in a TV interview, requires a fundamental change in the approach and culture of intelligence gathering, the processing of intelligence by the security establishment, and the interaction with the political leadership. . . .
But while Israel’s military intelligence community recognized that it had refused to even consider that Hamas could and would burst through the border fence, and “they realized that they needed to rethink” as regards Gaza, some fundamentally false conceptions continued to be held even after the invasion and slaughter.
Israeli intelligence still failed to recognize and internalize that the Iran-led axis believed it could destroy Israel, Brun specified. “They didn’t understand this change.”
He said Israeli intelligence had so much data, all indicating that Hamas was deterred and was not seeking a war, that there was a refusal to so much as countenance the possibility that this conception was erroneous — not even when the IDF obtained documentation such as the Jericho Wall material showing Hamas’s attack plans.
This intelligence failure is the result of at least two kinds of bias — reporting bias and confirmation bias.
Reporting bias is when managers and analysts selectively report or omit information based on the outcome of the research or personal beliefs.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to favour, seek out, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms one’s pre-existing beliefs or hypotheses, whilst giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities.
This is different than lying. And this phenomenon is not unique to Israel. In fact, I believe it is a major reason the US intelligence community has been so wrong, so often in its analysis of Russia and the war in Ukraine. We are seeing a manifestation of that now with Biden giving the Ukrainians the green light to use ATACMs inside Russian territory. Biden and his inept advisors have convinced themselves that they can unleash Ukraine and Russia will not respond. If Ukraine goes forward and launches the missiles — with the help of US intelligence data to program the missiles — then Russia will respond in a forceful way. Initially, I believe they will limit their response to Ukrainian territory, but Putin will authorize targeting NATO sites that have gone unscathed until now.
Hellbound and Down 