Russia isn't hostile to the west. It's easy to think that everything a foreign country does is about "us". Putin needs an external enemy and a national narrative to support him. It's all domestic policy. We're just annoying background noise. What Putin wants is to stay in charge of his kleptocracy for as long as possible. He doesn't give a shit about the US.

It's the Russian equivalent of American currency disputes with China. While there is truth to the claims of an undervalued yuan it's really overblown. It's about identity politics and feelings. China just happened to be a convenient target.

To the downvoter: Do you think Putin just now found out he is homophobic? That his claims that NGOs with foreign ties are foreign agents aiming to destabilize the country are real? No, it's all theater, scaremongering and scapegoating.

We won pretty handedly in Afghanistan and Iraq and we had bad intelligence. We were flat out wrong about a number of things, yet we prevailed..

I think equating it to war fighting is a little naive and an over simplification. There is strategic and tactical war intelligence and there are real historical examples of them making the difference, no disputing that. But today, especially for the United States and most other g7 type nations, it's a communication channel for things that it's unpopular to communicate, don't under estimate this. Could any military in the world practice without the modern intelligence gathering that all these nations have? Also regarding any negotiation for anything, knowing when the other side is bluffing or telling the truth is huge, it's everything. Those powerful nations routinely ask/demand other nations to do things, stop doing things, etc.. Information is incredibly powerful in those discussions and these aren't commonly war related things.

Whether or not we need it, I don't know, I seriously doubt it would change the results of most wars though. Another world war? It could be decisive but with the global economy I think just about every body capable for world warring has too much invested and to risk to let that happen.

It's tough to dispute that this stuff is useful while in a major war, but I think the relevant question here is whether you need to have it all in place ahead of time, or whether you can spin it up on demand, as it were.

In any case, SIGINT certainly helped a great deal, but what really won the war for the allies was the roughly order of magnitude difference between the size of the economy of the United States and those of the countries it was fighting.