In February 2022, Moscow planned a ten-day campaign. It counted tanks, troops, and missiles, and it assumed Ukrainian society would fold. It did not count the engineers, the coders, or the citizens. Most of us make a version of the same mistake about our own lives: we count what is easy to measure, plan around the timeline we want, and build no fallback for the day our assumptions fail. Here are eleven lessons in planning, resourcefulness, adaptation, and endurance from one of the great strategic miscalculations of our time.
Introduction: A Strategic Error Ordinary People Make Every Day
In a companion piece on International Politics Insights, "What Russia Failed to Count," I argued that Russia's central miscalculation in 2022 was about the will and capacity of Ukrainian society to resist. Ukraine's technical workforce, Soviet-era engineering heritage, and habit of self-organization did not win the opening battles on their own. They help explain why a short war Russia expected to win became a long war it had not prepared to fight.
That article was about geopolitics. This one is about you and me.
The mistakes behind Russia's plan were not exotic military errors. They were errors of assessment, planning, and adaptation, the same kinds of errors individuals make when they size up a career change, launch a project, recover from a setback, or decide what they are capable of. A war is an extreme setting, but extreme settings make patterns easier to see.
Assessment was not the whole story. Logistics, corruption, a rigid top-down command structure that discouraged initiative, Ukrainian skill, Western help, and plain luck all mattered too. But assessment is the part of the story that transfers to ordinary life. You cannot fix a nation's logistics from your kitchen table, but you can notice when you are building a plan around the timeline you want instead of the obstacles you actually face.
The lessons fall into four groups:
- Planning: how to assess yourself and your situation honestly, and plan for being wrong.
- Resourcefulness: how to make full use of what you already have.
- Adaptation: how to improve faster than your problems change.
- Endurance: how to keep going when the short campaign turns into a long one.
Planning comes first because every other lesson depends on seeing clearly. You cannot draw on assets you have not counted, adapt to problems you have not noticed, or endure a long campaign you planned as a short one.
Part I: Planning
1. Count the Right Things
On paper, the balance in 2022 looked lopsided. Russia had a far larger population, economy, and arsenal. What its planners left out was everything that does not appear in a count of armored divisions: a large technology industry, a deep reserve of engineering know-how, and a society that had already shown, twice in a decade, that it would organize itself under pressure.
People do the same thing when they evaluate themselves. We count what is visible and easy to measure: degrees, job titles, income, age, hours available, money in the bank. We tend to undercount what is harder to see:
- Skills we are not currently using
- Judgment built up from experience, including experience of failure
- Relationships and the goodwill they carry
- The ability to learn a new domain quickly
- Persistence, and a track record of recovering from setbacks
The error cuts both ways. Someone who counts only the visible column will underestimate what they can do. Someone who counts only the invisible column, the "I could do anything if I tried" column, will overestimate it. Russia's planners made the first mistake about Ukraine; plenty of people make the second about themselves. Accurate assessment means counting both.
2. Don't Let the Schedule Set Your Assumptions
The most instructive detail in the Russian plan is a small one. According to a Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) study drawing on Ukrainian General Staff data, Russia planned to invade over roughly ten days and then occupy the country to enable annexation by August 2022. Its planners estimated that Ukraine could generate only about 40,000 additional troops, and that figure reflected the expected speed of the operation rather than a real assessment of Ukraine's ability to mobilize.1
In other words, the conclusion came first and the estimate was fitted to it. If the operation would be over in ten days, Ukraine would not have time to mobilize, so mobilization did not need to be taken seriously.
Psychologists have a name for the everyday version of this. The planning fallacy, a term coined by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, is the tendency to hold a confident belief that one's own project will go as planned even while knowing that most similar projects have run late. In a well-known 1994 study, Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross asked honors students to predict when they would finish their theses. The students' average best estimate was about 34 days; the average actual completion time was about 55 days.2
Pressure to move fast makes the problem worse. Economists who have modeled the planning fallacy note that incentives for accurate prediction reduce it, while incentives for rapid completion aggravate it.3 That is almost exactly what happened in Moscow: a plan built around speed produced estimates that assumed speed.
The personal correction: estimate the obstacles first and derive the timeline from them, not the other way around. When you catch yourself thinking "it has to be done by Friday, so it will only take three days," you have reversed the order. A practical check is to ask how long similar projects actually took you in the past, not how long this one should take if everything goes right.
3. Build a Branch for "My Assumptions Were Wrong"
The same RUSI study found that the Russian plan had no fallback if its key assumptions proved wrong.1 When Kyiv did not fall and the Ukrainian government did not flee, there was no prepared next step. The result was improvisation under fire, and Russia abandoned the Kyiv offensive within weeks.
Most personal plans share this flaw. They describe what will happen if things go well and say nothing about what happens if they do not. Two simple tools help.
The first is the premortem, described by the psychologist Gary Klein in the Harvard Business Review. Before a project starts, you assume it has already failed and ask why. Klein's insight is that imagining a failure has already occurred makes it easier to come up with reasons for it, including reasons people would normally be reluctant to say out loud.4 You can run a premortem alone in fifteen minutes with a sheet of paper: "It is six months from now and this plan has failed. What went wrong?"
The second is the if-then plan, which psychologists call an implementation intention: "If situation X occurs, then I will do Y." A meta-analysis by Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran, covering 94 independent tests, found that forming if-then plans had a medium-to-large positive effect on goal attainment.5 If-then plans are usually used to start good behaviors, but they work just as well as contingency plans: "If the job offer falls through, then I will contact the three other firms on my list within a week."
Every serious plan has two or three load-bearing assumptions. Write them down. Then write one sentence for each describing what you will do if it fails.
Part II: Resourcefulness
Ukraine did not hold on by acquiring everything it needed from scratch. It made unusually full use of what it already had: inherited expertise, civilian skills, and commercial parts. Resourcefulness is the habit of asking what you can do with what is already in reach before concluding that you lack what you need.
4. Dormant Expertise Is a Reservoir, Not a Loss
In 1991, the territory of today's Ukraine held more than 3,594 enterprises and scientific organizations producing military and dual-use products, with about three million personnel. Much of that base shrank, decayed, or was sold off over the following three decades. Yet RUSI's study of wartime defense industry found that, while Ukraine lacked Russia's prepared plan for industrial mobilization, it could draw on its Soviet legacy to regenerate industrial capacity.6 Factories closed, but institutional memory, technical schools, and engineering culture did not vanish as quickly.
Individuals have the same kind of reservoir. A skill you practiced for years and then set aside is not gone. The nineteenth-century psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus measured this with what he called the "savings" method: material that seemed forgotten could be relearned with noticeably less effort than it took to learn it the first time.7 Ebbinghaus worked with memorized lists, not professional skills, so the principle should not be stretched too far. Skills do decay with disuse. But the general point holds: relearning is usually faster than learning from scratch.
This matters most for people with long, varied careers, and for anyone returning to work after a gap. The programmer who has not coded in a decade, the former salesperson, the writer who stopped writing: each is carrying stored capacity that a résumé scan will miss and that they themselves may undervalue. Before concluding that you would have to start over, ask what you would only have to restart.
5. Innovation Is Often Integration
Ukraine's battlefield innovations were rarely new inventions. The drone ecosystem relied heavily on adapting off-the-shelf civilian parts. As one RUSI commentary puts it, innovation in this model is often not the invention of a new platform but better integration of existing components.8
That matches a broader theory of how technology develops. The economist W. Brian Arthur argues in The Nature of Technology that novel technologies arise as combinations of existing technologies rather than appearing from nowhere.9 The jet engine, in his telling, was built from compressors, turbines, and combustors that already existed. What was new was how they were combined.
The personal lesson is that you rarely need a single world-class skill to be valuable. Two or three solid skills combined in an uncommon way can be worth more. A competent writer who also understands search engine optimization, or a sales professional who also understands a technical field, or a teacher who can also build websites, occupies a niche with far less competition than any one of those skills alone. When you look for your next opportunity, look at the intersections of what you already know.
Part III: Adaptation
6. Shorten the Feedback Loop
One of the advantages of Ukraine's drone ecosystem was that operators could report problems directly to the people building the equipment, and those builders could modify systems as battlefield conditions changed. The loop between using a tool and improving it was measured in days or weeks, not the years typical of traditional procurement.
Research on expertise points in the same direction. K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues introduced the idea of deliberate practice: effortful activity designed specifically to improve performance, as distinct from simply accumulating experience.10 Later work has found that the amount of practice explains less of the difference between performers than Ericsson originally claimed, so it should not be treated as the whole story. But the core distinction survives: doing something many times is not the same as doing it with feedback and correction.
For personal effectiveness, the question is how long it takes you to learn whether something is working. Annual reviews, once-a-year goal setting, and projects that are polished in private for months before anyone sees them all have long loops. Weekly reviews, rough drafts shown to real readers early, and small tests before big commitments have short ones. Shorten the loop and you get more chances to correct course.
7. Your Rate of Adaptation Is the Advantage
It would be a mistake to think Ukraine's technical edge is permanent. Russia has adapted too, scaling up its own drone production and relying on its long-standing strength in electronic warfare. A study by the Center for a New American Security concluded that drones have changed the battlefield in an evolutionary rather than revolutionary way, partly because both sides are locked in a fast cycle of innovation and imitation.11
In that kind of contest, what matters is not having the best system at any one moment but turning lessons into new equipment and tactics quickly, again and again. The American strategist John Boyd is best known for a version of this idea, the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act), often summarized as the claim that victory goes to the side that cycles through decisions faster. Boyd's scholars point out that his thinking was richer than that slogan, with much of it concerned with learning and reorienting in a changing environment.12
The personal application is humbling and freeing at the same time. No method, tool, routine, or skill you have today will stay optimal forever. Markets shift, technologies change, health changes, circumstances change. The durable asset is not any particular competence but your ability to notice when something has stopped working and replace it without too much delay or ego.
Part IV: Endurance
8. Fundamentals Win the Opening; Cleverness Wins the Long Game
It is tempting to tell the 2022 story as a triumph of technology. That would be wrong. RUSI's analysis credits the defense of Kyiv mainly to Ukrainian artillery, the dispersal of forces before the first Russian strikes, and Russia's own planning failures.1 The technical advantages became decisive later, once the war turned into a contest of endurance and adaptation.
Personal crises follow a similar order. In the first phase of a setback, such as a job loss, a health scare, or a family emergency, what holds the line is basic: sleep, routine, showing up, keeping essential commitments, and keeping money coming in. Productivity systems, clever apps, and ambitious self-improvement plans matter, but they matter after the fundamentals are secure. A common mistake is to reach for sophistication when what is needed is discipline. Just as Russia's problem was not only bad arithmetic, your problem is usually not only a bad plan. Fundamentals, logistics, and who you listen to matter too.
9. Keep Core Operations Running Under Pressure
Ukraine's IT sector proved remarkably durable under fire. In March 2022, the first full month of the war, computer-services exports were $522 million, compared with $546 million in the same month a year earlier, a retention of about 96%.13 Hard currency kept flowing into a wartime economy, and a large technical workforce stayed employed and organized.
When disruption hits, the first priority is to protect the one or two activities that keep resources flowing: income, health, key relationships. Ambitious new projects can wait until the core is stable. People who abandon their base to chase a dramatic recovery often end up worse off than people who quietly keep the lights on and rebuild from there.
10. Strategic Depth Is Relational
Ukraine has not fought alone. RUSI describes the West as becoming Ukraine's strategic depth from April 2022, and notes that Ukraine seized the initiative only once Western-supplied long-range fires began threatening Russian logistics.1
Individuals need strategic depth too, and it comes mostly from people: mentors, friends, colleagues, family, a church or community, and accountability partners. This is not a soft extra. A meta-analysis by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues, covering 148 studies and more than 300,000 participants, found that people with stronger social relationships had a 50% greater likelihood of survival over the study periods, an effect the authors judged comparable to well-established risk factors for mortality.14 If relationships matter that much for survival, they certainly matter for getting through a hard season of work or life.
A useful question to ask yourself: if your plan ran into serious trouble next month, who are the three people you could call, and when did you last talk to them?
11. Know-How Is Not Control of Inputs
Ukraine can design and adapt drones rapidly, but its drone industry depends heavily on imported components, particularly from China. The RUSI commentary cited earlier warns that this leaves the country exposed to supply disruption.8 Being able to design a system is not the same as being able to make every critical part of it.
The personal version is the single point of failure: one client who provides most of your income, one platform that holds your whole audience, one employer whose decisions control your future, one person you depend on for something essential. Knowing how to do your work well does not protect you if a key input disappears. Periodically list what your effectiveness depends on and ask which items you do not control and could not quickly replace. Then add a second source for the most fragile one.
The Eleven Lessons at a Glance
| Lesson | From the War | Personal Application |
|---|---|---|
| Part I: Planning | ||
| 1. Count the right things | Russia counted tanks, not engineers | Audit your uncounted assets |
| 2. Schedule ≠ assumptions | 40,000-troop guess fit the timeline | Estimate obstacles before deadlines |
| 3. Build a fallback | No plan if Kyiv held | Premortems and if-then plans |
| Part II: Resourcefulness | ||
| 4. Tap dormant expertise | Soviet know-how regenerated industry | Restart old skills, don't start over |
| 5. Integrate, don't just invent | Off-the-shelf parts, new combinations | Combine skills into a rare niche |
| Part III: Adaptation | ||
| 6. Shorten feedback loops | Operators talked to builders | Weekly reviews, early drafts |
| 7. Adapt faster | Innovation met countermeasure | Replace what stops working |
| Part IV: Endurance | ||
| 8. Fundamentals first | Artillery, not apps, saved Kyiv | Sleep, routine, showing up |
| 9. Protect the core | IT kept 96% of exports | Keep income and health stable |
| 10. Build strategic depth | The West as Ukraine's depth | Invest in relationships |
| 11. Secure your inputs | Drones rely on imported parts | Remove single points of failure |
A Practical Exercise: The Uncounted Assets Audit
Lessons are only useful if they change what you do. Here is a short exercise that pulls the eleven together. Set aside thirty minutes and answer these questions in writing.
- What would a rival miss about me?
- List skills, experience, relationships, and qualities that would not show up on a résumé or in a quick conversation.
- What am I overcounting?
- Be honest about where your self-estimate rests on hope rather than evidence. Which of your strengths have you not actually tested recently?
- What are my plan's load-bearing assumptions?
- Name two or three. For each, write one if-then sentence describing your response if it fails.
- Is my timeline derived from the obstacles, or the other way around?
- Compare your estimate with how long similar projects actually took you in the past.
- Which dormant skills could I restart?
- List skills you used to practice and estimate what it would take to bring each back to working level.
- How long is my feedback loop?
- For your most important project, how many days pass between acting and learning whether it worked? What would cut that in half?
- Who is my strategic depth?
- Name three people you could call if things went badly. When did you last contact each one?
- What is my most fragile input?
- Identify the single dependency that would hurt most if it disappeared, and one step to reduce that exposure.
The Limits of the Analogy
Three cautions keep these lessons honest.
Life is not war. Military metaphors can make ordinary life sound more adversarial than it is. Most of your colleagues, clients, and neighbors are not opponents, and most problems are not enemies with their own counter-strategies. The lessons here are about assessment, planning, and adaptation, which apply whether or not anyone is working against you. They should not be read as encouragement to treat everyday life as combat.
The stakes are not comparable. Ukrainians have paid for these lessons with lives, homes, and territory. Drawing personal lessons from their experience should be done with respect, and with the recognition that their endurance under those conditions is far beyond anything a career setback or a stalled project demands of us.
A war is not one mistake. Russia's failure had many causes: a force-generation model that, in RUSI's assessment, lacked the junior leadership to hold its improvised formations together; logistics problems; Ukrainian units that had spent eight years preparing for this fight; Western aid; and chance. Some of these flowed from the faulty assessment. RUSI found that the extreme secrecy that let Russia achieve surprise also left its own forces unprepared at the tactical level to carry out the plan,1 and a later RUSI study points to early logistics failures as evidence that Moscow did not expect serious resistance.15 Other causes had little to do with how Russia counted. Better assessment would have improved Russia's odds; it would not have guaranteed success. The same is true for us. Accurate assessment does not control outcomes. It improves the odds, and it means fewer of our failures will be self-inflicted.
Conclusion: Count Accurately, Use What You Have, Adapt, and Endure
Russia's 2022 invasion was, among other things, a failure of strategic assessment. Moscow counted what was easy to count, built its estimates around the timeline it wanted, and made no plan for being wrong. Ukraine, for its part, survived the opening with fundamentals, then outlasted expectations by drawing on uncounted assets, adapting faster than its opponent, keeping its economy partly running, and leaning on allies.
Each of those moves has a personal counterpart, and together they make up four disciplines: planning, resourcefulness, adaptation, and endurance. Assess yourself honestly, including the strengths that do not show up on paper and the weaknesses you would rather not see. Let the obstacles set the schedule. Plan for being wrong. Restart what you already know. Combine skills rather than waiting for a single breakthrough. Shorten the time between acting and learning. Protect the core. Invest in the people who give you depth. And know which of your inputs you do not control.
Russia counted the tanks. The question for each of us is what we are failing to count, in our circumstances, in our plans, and in ourselves.
Notes
- 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 Special Report, November 30, 2022. rusi.org ↩
- Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross, "Exploring the 'Planning Fallacy': Why People Underestimate Their Task Completion Times," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67, no. 3 (1994): 366–381. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.67.3.366 ↩
- Markus K. Brunnermeier, Filippos Papakonstantinou, and Jonathan A. Parker, "An Economic Model of the Planning Fallacy," NBER Working Paper 14228, August 2008. nber.org ↩
- Gary Klein, "Performing a Project Premortem," Harvard Business Review 85, no. 9 (September 2007): 18–19. hbr.org ↩
- Peter M. Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran, "Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Effects and Processes," Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38 (2006): 69–119. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1 ↩
- Oleksandr V. Danylyuk and Jack Watling, Winning the Industrial War: Comparing Russia, Europe and Ukraine, 2022–24, RUSI Occasional Paper, April 2025. rusi.org ↩
- Hermann Ebbinghaus, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (1885; English translation, New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1913). Online at Classics in the History of Psychology. psychclassics.yorku.ca ↩
- Mirko Niederkofler, "Drones Win Battles, Components Win Wars," RUSI Guest Commentary, December 17, 2025. rusi.org ↩
- W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (New York: Free Press, 2009). ↩
- K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer, "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance," Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363. For a replication that found a substantially smaller effect, see Brooke N. Macnamara and Megha Maitra, "The Role of Deliberate Practice in Expert Performance: Revisiting Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer (1993)," Royal Society Open Science 6 (2019): 190327. doi:10.1098/rsos.190327 ↩
- Stacie Pettyjohn, Evolution Not Revolution: Drone Warfare in Russia's 2022 Invasion of Ukraine, Center for a New American Security, February 8, 2024. cnas.org ↩
- Frans P. B. Osinga, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (London: Routledge, 2007). routledge.com ↩
- IT Ukraine Association, "Ukrainian IT Industry: Reboot in the Wartime," May 13, 2022. itukraine.org.ua ↩
- Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith, and J. Bradley Layton, "Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-Analytic Review," PLoS Medicine 7, no. 7 (2010): e1000316. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316 ↩
- Jack Watling, Oleksandr V. Danylyuk, and Nick Reynolds, Preliminary Lessons from Russia's Unconventional Operations During the Russo-Ukrainian War, February 2022–February 2023, RUSI Special Report, March 29, 2023. rusi.org ↩
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