XI WEPT:

"If you were going to screw it up two or three weeks in, I might understand it," said Scott Boston, a senior defense analyst at the Rand Corp. think tank.

"But if you, like, tripped over the doorframe on the way into the house, you have another issue," he said.

The Pentagon and private sector experts expected Russian President Vladimir Putin's army to quickly destroy Ukraine's ability to fight back, undermining its command and control of the 200,000-strong Ukraine military, wrecking its missile defenses and destroying Kyiv's air force.

None of that has happened in the first six days. And, although there are no reliable estimates of the dead, injured and captured Russian troops, the numbers appear to be much higher than what would have been expected in a well-managed invasion.

"This is a colossal intelligence failure that vastly underestimated Ukrainian resistance, and military execution has been terrible," Michael Vickers, former US Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, said this week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"His main attack has been underweighted. It's been piecemeal. His reconnaissance elements have been captured, columns have been destroyed," he said.

"It's just a disaster, through and through."

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