Team B and the Backfire
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Some folks here will be familiar with the Backfire Bomber Controversy from the 1970s, which involved dueling intelligence assessments from the CIA, the Air Force, and independent journalists. Dwayne Day has a pretty good account of it at the Space Review:
The Backfire serves as a case study of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower had warned about when establishing the CIA’s role in overhead reconnaissance from aircraft and satellites: that the military services would interpret intelligence data to their advantage, exaggerating Soviet capabilities to justify larger budgets and new weapons systems. It was for this reason that Eisenhower wanted civilian control not only of intelligence interpretation, but also collection.
At the end of the Cold War, Ukraine had 60 Backfire bombers and destroyed almost all of them, preserving a few for a museum. Russia’s current inventory is unknown, but has clearly dwindled due to age, attrition, and warfare. Prior to Operation Spider’s Web, during over three years of war, Ukraine claims to have destroyed four other Backfires and damaged six more. The Russians, of course, dispute these numbers. The CIA probably has the best estimates.
Lots of very interesting stuff in this story in terms of different approaches to intel, conflicting bureaucratic incentives, outright fabrication…
Photo Credit: By Alex Beltyukov – http://russianplanes.net/id158141, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38930154