When Intelligence Isn’t Understanding: Why Cultural Blindness Wins Wars
“Know your enemy and know yourself, and you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The greatest failures in war are often attributed to intelligence failures. History is filled with commissions and inquiries examining why governments failed to predict an attack, misjudged an adversary’s capabilities, or misunderstood an opponent’s intentions. Yet intelligence is not merely the collection of information. It is the interpretation of information, and interpretation is inseparable from culture.
Nations frequently assess military capability with remarkable precision. They count aircraft, missiles, divisions, satellites, warships, industrial output, economic resilience and logistical capacity. These are measurable variables.
Far more difficult to quantify are belief, historical memory, identity and the cultural narratives that shape how a nation understands with respective to this assessment – ‘conflict’.
History repeatedly demonstrates that wars are seldom decided solely by material capability. They are equally shaped by among other factors a society’s willingness to endure hardship in pursuit of principles it considers sacred. This is where intelligence frequently fails.
The tendency within many Western strategic institutions has been to interpret adversaries through rational cost-benefit models. Decision-makers are assumed to calculate gains and losses in broadly similar ways. Military pressure, economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation are therefore expected to alter behavior by increasing the cost of resistance.
This strategic philosophy is reflected throughout modern Western political thought. President John F. Kennedy famously remarked: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”
Embedded within this statement is the belief that rational dialogue remains possible, even between adversaries. President Ronald Reagan later articulated another enduring principle of Western deterrence: “Peace through strength.”
The assumption is that overwhelming military and economic superiority discourages conflict by convincing an opponent that resistance is futile. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001
President George W. Bush declared before a joint session of Congress: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
The statement reflected a strategic framework that viewed international security through clearly defined alliances and decisive responses to perceived threats. These quotations are not presented as criticism. Rather, they illustrate a strategic culture grounded in deterrence, negotiation, military capability and rational calculation.
The difficulty arises when those same assumptions are projected onto societies whose historical experiences have produced fundamentally different understandings of legitimacy, sacrifice and victory. Nowhere is this more evident than in understanding the strategic culture of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
To many Western observers, Iran’s behavior appears difficult to reconcile with conventional cost-benefit analysis. Why would a nation continue to endure decades of sanctions, diplomatic isolation, economic hardship and military confrontation rather than compromise?
The question itself reveals the analytical problem. It assumes that material prosperity represents the highest national objective. For many within the ideological foundations of the Islamic Republic, history presents a different hierarchy of values.
At the center of Islamic Shi’a identity stands the Battle of Karbala.
In 680 CE, Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, confronted the vastly superior forces of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid. Militarily, Husayn’s defeat was inevitable. Yet within Shi’a Islam, Karbala became the defining moral victory—the triumph of principle over submission, of justice over tyranny, irrespective of earthly success. The lesson passed from generation to generation is not that survival is paramount. It is that resistance against perceived oppression may demand sacrifice, even certain death. Karbala is therefore not merely remembered as history. It remains a living element of political identity and societal framework.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini consciously embedded this historical narrative into the ideological foundations of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Throughout the Iranian Revolution and later during the Iran-Iraq War, he repeatedly invoked Karbala as the model for national resistance, declaring:
“The blood of the martyrs is the life of the nation.” For millions of Iranians, particularly during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, this was not metaphorical language. It reflected a deeply rooted historical understanding that sacrifice could preserve both faith and nation.
His successor, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has continued to employ the same historical framework. Following the death of General Qassem Soleimani, he stated: “In the enemy’s thinking, the martyrdom of General Soleimani was supposed to be a threat to us. However, the Muslim Iranian nation turned this threat into an opportunity.”
On another occasion he declared simply: “We have never surrendered so far, and we never will.”
Whether one agrees with these statements is immaterial to strategic analysis. Their importance lies in revealing how the leadership presents endurance, sacrifice and resistance not as unfortunate necessities but as sources of legitimacy and strength.
This does not imply that every Iranian embraces martyrdom, nor does it suggest that religion alone determines Iranian state policy. Iran is a sophisticated nation with competing political currents, economic interests, nationalist traditions and pragmatic decision-makers. However, strategic culture cannot be understood without acknowledging the enduring influence of Karbala upon the political language through which the Islamic Republic of Iran explains conflict.
An intelligence analyst may correctly conclude that Iran possesses a certain number of missiles, maintains specific military capabilities and suffers measurable economic hardship under sanctions.
Every one of those assessments may be accurate. Yet if the analyst fails to appreciate how historical memory shapes political decision-making, the broader strategic assessment may still prove incomplete. This is not an absence of intelligence. It is an absence of cultural intelligence.
History offers numerous examples. The United States measured communist military strength in Vietnam but underestimated Vietnamese nationalism. The Soviet Union measured Afghan weapons yet underestimated tribal identity and religious conviction. Coalition planners in Iraq counted military divisions but struggled to anticipate the enduring power of sectarian identity and historical grievance.
Again and again, technologically advanced nations have demonstrated remarkable capability in measuring military power while underestimating the cultural forces that sustain resistance.
Satellites cannot photograph historical memory. Signals intelligence cannot intercept identity.
Artificial intelligence can process extraordinary quantities of data. It cannot easily quantify honor as interpreted by each culture in its own particular way. Nor can it calculate humiliation, faith or civilizational memory.
Military capability explains what an adversary can do. Strategic culture intelligence helps explain what an adversary is willing to endure.
The distinction is profound. This is not an argument that Iran is unique, nor that Western intelligence communities ignore culture entirely. Modern intelligence organizations devote considerable resources to regional expertise, historical analysis and language capability.
The challenge is institutional. Political leaders naturally seek measurable certainty. Missiles can be counted. Economic indicators can be charted. Satellite imagery can be verified. Historical memory cannot.
Yet history consistently reminds us that the greatest strategic miscalculations often emerge not from ignorance of military capability, but from misunderstanding the civilization against which that capability will be employed. Perhaps the greatest lesson is one first articulated more than two thousand years ago by Sun Tzu. – “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles”.
Fundamentally, to know an enemy’s history is essential. For history shapes culture. Culture shapes belief. Belief shapes endurance. Endurance has altered the outcome of wars long after military superiority appeared to make victory inevitable.
The greatest intelligence failure is therefore not failing to know an enemy’s weapons. It is failing to understand why that enemy believes the struggle is worth enduring.
By: ‘Shaan’ Shahrukh Dhanji
July 31, 2026
Vilnius – Lithuania
I mostly agree that strategic culture is important for understanding a country’s behavior. We also need to compare official ideology with public opinion, political speeches with real actions, and cultural factors with security, economic, and geopolitical interests. Strategic culture is useful, but it should be part of a broader analysis.