When hostilities erupted between the Ethiopian central government and the elected leadership in the Tigray nearly two years ago, Eritrea sent some troops in, more to pillage and rape than to achieve any strategic objective. That changed yesterday.  Eritrean forces along the entirety of their frontier poured into Tigray. Whether or not Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed chooses to defend Ethiopian sovereign territory, Eritrea’s actions represent an invasion of a neighboring state. The United States took no action diplomatically or otherwise to head off or warn against military action by a rogue state that could destabilize the entirety of the Horn of Africa. The open question is whether the US intelligence community knew about Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki’s plans in advance or whether his attack caught the US government by surprise.

It is a question that Congress should answer. Missing Eritrea’s invasion of Ethiopia, after all, is just the latest example of the United States seemingly being caught unaware when war erupts. In September 2020, Azerbaijan attacked Nagorno-Karabakh. Up until Azerbaijani rockets and airstrikes blanketed the territory, US diplomats involved in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Minsk Group process believed they were on the verge of an agreement. That episode also caught Washington by surprise. To date, neither the State Department nor the intelligence community have explained whether the surprise was due to an intelligence failure, bureaucratic inefficiencies preventing the intelligence from reaching decision-makers, or a failure of decision-making in the White House.

Congress never drilled down on the problem to prevent its recurrence and so it repeats. Last week, Azerbaijan attacked Armenia proper. The Azerbaijani action again caught the US government by surprise, even though Turkey, a supposed NATO ally, likely participated in helping Azerbaijan plan the operation. If the United States repeatedly misses wide-scale military deployments and US embassies in Addis Ababa, Ankara, and Baku, it should raise serious questions in the Pentagon, State Department, intelligence community, and National Security Council about where the process breaks down.

The issue, however, is not simply bureaucratic castigation or pouring billions of dollars into bureaucracies seemingly uninterested in fixing deficiencies. When intelligence showed a Russian invasion of Ukraine to be imminent, President Joe Biden’s national security team played their cards masterfully. Rather than sit on the intelligence, they exposed it even at the cost of letting some streams run dry. They told the world about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans both in terms of Russian deployments and neutered with exposure to Russian false flag operations to create a casus belli. Russia still invaded, but it did at a far greater cost and with public opinion even inside Russia itself, fractured.

The United States cannot involve itself in wars globally but it has an interest in preventing wide-scale destabilization or enabling aggressors to triumph at the expense of the liberal order. The fact that adversaries, aggressors, and even nominal allies surprise Washington should either raise questions about the validity of intelligence or about White House competence and willingness to betray allies by silence in the face of an imminent attack. Either way, it is time for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to demand answers.

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