US intelligence assessments misjudged ISIS by misreading its territorial ambition

Evidence

The counteroffensive against ISIS was based on misjudgments that overestimated the competence and resolve of the Iraqi army and greatly underestimated the strength of ISIS, who was pursuing territorial conquests not just acting out resentments against the Shiite-dominated regime. Intelligence officials blamed the Obama administration for downgrading the seriousness of the militants’ offensive (Baker & Schmitt, 2014). They attributed the low priority to the demands of other crises and the administration’s reluctance to get bogged down in another Iraqi war. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2485

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense instance of institutional misperception: how crisis-saturation and reluctance to re-engage produce systematic miscalibration of an adversary’s intent — a profound mechanism not only of intelligence failure but of how institutions morally disengage by locating threat in the adversary’s essence rather than one’s own prior choices.