ABSTRACT
Consider World War 1. Almost no one in Europe, with the exception of the obscure Polish-Jewish financier Ivan Bliokh, understood that World War I would be a protracted war of attrition and stalemate.2 Nearly everybody else expected that the coming pan-European war would be short and decisive, over in a matter of months, if not weeks.3 But the predictive skills of the leaders of the major powers did not improve later in the century. In 1940, for example, many Soviet leaders dismissed the idea that Germany could conduct a successful Blitzkrieg against the USSR, despite Hitler’s campaigns in Poland and France.4 Then, too, Japan, in preparing for a war against the United States in 1941 adopted a theory of victory that was utterly bizarre, that bespoke a fatal incomprehension of the US system of government and the temperament of its people.5 Still later, the United States itself failed to anticipate the Vietnam War and arguably never grasped its essential character, even at its end.6 Thus the Soviet Union also misunderstood the war on which it embarked in Afghanistan in 1979, with catastrophic results.7 This list could be expanded almost effortlessly, although it would be both unedifying and depressing to do so.
