Every commander decides on incomplete information. Intelligence can narrow that uncertainty, sometimes dramatically, but it cannot remove the need to judge what the evidence means and what to do before the situation changes. The harder question is whether a commander’s judgement remains open to correction.

Intuition is often experience that has become instinct: earlier assessments, training and remembered encounters with an adversary. That makes it useful. It also makes it dangerous when the assumptions beneath it disappear from view. A belief that once explained events can become the filter through which every new event is interpreted.

Israel’s surprise in 1973, the British decision to attack the General Belgrano in 1982, and Russia’s opening invasion plan in 2022 show different relationships between belief and action. In one, an established assessment resisted warning. In another, incomplete intelligence supported a decision within the available time. In the third, political conviction constrained what intelligence and commanders could question. Together, they suggest that effective command depends on institutions that can revise an assessment and translate it into authorised action while it still matters.

Israel, 1973: when a working assumption becomes a rule

Before the Yom Kippur War, Israeli military intelligence relied on the “Concept”: an assessment that Egypt would not initiate war until it possessed the capabilities needed to counter Israel’s air superiority. This was a consequential judgement about what Egyptian leaders would consider necessary for war. As confidence in it hardened, preparations that might have challenged the assessment were interpreted within its terms.[1]

The distinction matters because warning is useful only if it changes a decision. An institution can collect evidence of military readiness and still judge that political intent is absent. If that judgement governs mobilisation, accurate reporting about preparations may coexist with dangerous inaction. Shapira’s retrospective identifies precisely this difficulty in integrating assessments of capabilities and intentions, alongside the need to encourage contrary interpretations.[1]

Uri Bar-Joseph’s account also emphasises the protection of the prevailing belief despite mounting evidence. His research on the “special means of collection” examines a further failure: a valuable collection capability was not properly activated before the attack, while senior decision-makers were left with a misleading impression of its use.[2] The problem therefore reached beyond how analysts interpreted a report. It affected what was collected and what commanders believed the intelligence system had checked.

Mobilisation also carried real costs. Calling up reserves disrupted the economy and risked diplomatic consequences; earlier alarms made another precautionary mobilisation harder to justify. Those pressures help explain the decision without making it sound inevitable. A judgement about the cost of another false alarm still depended on an assessment of the cost of being wrong.

The command lesson is that an assumption needs a route to revision before events destroy it. When the dominant assessment controls both the interpretation of warning and confidence in the collection system, disagreement has to reach someone with authority to reconsider the decision. Otherwise, dissent can exist inside the organisation without changing its conduct.

The Belgrano, 1982: deciding before uncertainty is resolved

The British decision to attack the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano on 2 May 1982 presents a different problem. British commanders had information about the cruiser group’s position from HMS Conqueror, alongside assessments of Argentine naval operations. They did not possess certainty about the group’s immediate intentions. Their concern was the threat it could pose to the task force in conjunction with the carrier group to the north.[3]

Position, capability and intent answer different questions. Knowing where a ship is does not establish what its commander will do next. Equally, its present course does not settle whether it can become a threat within the period for which a commander must plan. Woodward’s concern included the possibility that Conqueror would lose contact near the Burdwood Bank. Waiting could leave the British force with less information and fewer options.[3]

The resulting request to change the rules of engagement passed through Northwood and the senior military leadership to the War Cabinet. Political approval then returned through the command chain. Freedman and Gamba-Stonehouse describe a process in which operational concern, intelligence assessment and authorisation were connected within hours.[3] Intelligence informed a decision whose urgency was itself part of the judgement.

Thatcher’s later account presents the cruiser as a threat requiring action even outside the exclusion zone. It is the account of a participant defending the decision, and should be read as such.[4] The broader controversy over the sinking cannot be settled by demonstrating that the command chain functioned quickly. Nor does a subsequent operational advantage prove that every assessment made beforehand was correct.

For this comparison, the narrower point is sufficient. A commander may reasonably have to act before intentions become clear. The quality of that decision depends on how the threat is assessed, how the consequences of waiting are weighed, and who has authority to approve the response. Timeliness is valuable when those judgements remain accountable. Speed alone is no guarantee of sound command.

Russia, 2022: when the plan inherits political certainty

Russia’s opening invasion plan depended on a rapid defeat of the Ukrainian state. RUSI’s preliminary study describes a planned invasion lasting ten days, followed by occupation. It also identifies intense secrecy, limited preparation among the forces expected to execute the operation, and inadequate alternatives when the initial plan failed. The report warns that its underlying material is incomplete and should be treated as preliminary.[5]

Those findings expose a command problem even without reconstructing every private conversation in Moscow. If rapid success is built into the plan, but the forces executing it have little opportunity to prepare for failure, the assumption becomes an operational dependency. Commanders inherit its consequences while having limited scope to test it.

Huw Dylan and Elena Grossfeld interpret Russia’s intelligence failure through the relationship between strategic culture and political authority. They argue that the intelligence system failed to provide effective warning about Ukrainian resistance and the consequences of invasion, and examine the pressures that favoured reporting consistent with the leadership’s expectations.[6] On this reading, political conviction shaped the assessment against which the campaign was planned.

This differs from the Israeli case. In 1973, an established intelligence assessment acquired an authority that made contrary evidence difficult to accept. In Russia’s opening campaign, the research points to political expectations constraining intelligence and operational preparation together. The distinction concerns where the protected belief acquired its authority, and therefore where effective challenge would have had to occur.

The failure to take Kyiv cannot, by itself, establish everything Russian commanders knew or believed. Ukrainian resistance and Russian execution problems also mattered. The bounded lesson is that a plan becomes brittle when the expectation of success displaces preparation for alternatives. Intelligence cannot correct that brittleness if its institutional role is to confirm the expectation.

From assessment to action

These episodes do not offer a formula for the right proportion of intelligence and intuition. They show why that balance depends on the setting in which judgement operates. Commanders need assessments that expose their assumptions, channels through which contrary evidence can reach decision authority, and an authorisation process suited to the time available.

Revisability requires something concrete: identifying what evidence would change an assessment and what action would follow. If no conceivable observation can unsettle a belief, collecting more information is unlikely to improve the decision. If an assessment changes but the authority to act arrives too late, the warning may have little operational value.

Decision tempo also has to include the cost of delay. Waiting may preserve flexibility, allow diplomacy or avoid a costly mistake. It may also sacrifice contact, readiness or the opportunity to respond. The Belgrano case illustrates why incomplete information can support timely action; it does not make urgency a standing argument for force.

My earlier article on the Cuban Missile Crisis examined analytic bias and its implications for Taiwan. The focus here is the command relationship: whether an assessment can change what an institution authorises someone to do. A warning that survives analysis but cannot alter the decision has still failed to perform its purpose.

Intelligence earns its value through that relationship. It needs room to challenge a commander’s expectations, and a commander needs the judgement to act without waiting for certainty. Institutions make those demands compatible when they keep beliefs open to revision and connect revised assessments to decisions in time.

Sources and further reading

This article adapts my essay Intelligence in Conflict, with the comparison focused on command judgement and the institutional path from assessment to action.

[1] Itai Shapira, “The Yom Kippur Intelligence Failure after Fifty Years: What Lessons Can Be Learned?”, Intelligence and National Security 38, no. 6 (2023): 978–1002, especially 980–84 and 988–89.

[2] Uri Bar-Joseph, “The ‘Special Means of Collection’: The Missing Link in the Surprise of the Yom Kippur War”, The Middle East Journal 67, no. 4 (2013): 531–46, especially 539–40. See also his interview on the 1973 warning failure.

[3] Lawrence Freedman and Virginia Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War: The Falklands Conflict of 1982 (Princeton University Press, 1991), 261–69. The discussion follows the passages cited in the original essay.

[4] Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, 214–16, reproduced by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation as “Decision to Sink the Belgrano”.

[5] Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr V. Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds, Preliminary Lessons in Conventional Warfighting from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: February–July 2022 (RUSI, November 2022), executive summary and discussion of Russian planning.

[6] Huw Dylan and Elena Grossfeld, “Unveiling Russian Intelligence Failures in the Ukraine Conflict: A Strategic Culture Perspective”, Intelligence and National Security 40, no. 5 (2025): 926–50, especially 928–29 and 938–39.