Between 1936 and 1939, military attaches, intelligence officers, and volunteer participants from across Europe and North America meticulously observed the Spanish Civil War. They studied tank engagements, anti-tank defenses, close air support, and strategic bombing. Yet the conclusions they drew were shaped less by the evidence than by pre-existing institutional assumptions - a dynamic that a new HCSS report argues is already visible in Western analysis of the war in Ukraine.
Iskander Rehman, the report's author, writes that interwar democracies drew "few durable military lessons" from Spain - not because information was unavailable, but because of "institutional rigidity, doctrinal precommitment, and the selective reading of ambiguous evidence," "Hvylya" reports, citing the study.
The British case is instructive. When Republican tanks failed without infantry support, British observers concluded that armor was inherently vulnerable - rather than recognizing that the real lesson was to develop combined-arms doctrine. Germany, observing the same battles, reached the opposite conclusion and built the Panzer divisions that would devastate France in 1940. British conventional wisdom led to a continued underinvestment in the organizational architecture of armored divisions - deficiencies that proved catastrophic during the Battle of France.
France's military drew technically precise observations but neutralized them within a broader organizational framework devoted to methodical, centralized battle. Evidence of armor's potential for rapid exploitation was acknowledged but deemed exceptional. The United States, constrained by neutrality legislation, had the most limited access and tended to confirm existing beliefs about the primacy of defense.
The report warns that similar analytical pathologies haunt contemporary discussions of Ukraine. Some commentators treat the conflict as an oracle for all future warfare, while others dismiss it as too localized to yield useful lessons for a potential Sino-American confrontation. Rehman argues that neither extreme is correct. The real challenge, he writes, is "not merely the difficulty of learning from others' wars, but of drawing the right lessons for the right theater before the moment of their application has passed."
"Hvylya" earlier reported on how the Iran war confirmed a lesson Ukraine learned years ago: cheap drones overwhelm expensive defenses.