Misapplied scope I: The red team considered a subsystem but applied the insights from the subsystem to the whole system.
Misapplied scope II>: The red team considered a system but failed to account for the system’s interfaces to other systems.
Misaligned skills: The red team’s skills exceeded the likely adversary’s by an order of magnitude. The findings and recommendations failed to account for the gap.
Cultural blinders/blunders: The red team failed to remove their Western/American glasses. Not only did they fail to intuit the effects of their worldview, they didn’t even consider that another worldview might exist. (This is a common one.)
Tool fetish: The red team was so enamored with their red teaming toolkit that they failed to see how each tool both revealed and concealed.
Method fetish: The red team was so enamored with their method that they failed to see how the method embodied a single decision method at the expense of others.
Rationality fetish: The red team stressed standards of normative thinking without accounting for real-world heuristics. (This can be dangerous when attempting to simulate any real-world adversary other than the Mad Logician.)
Arrogance: This is the bane of all good red teaming, and I’ve seen it far too often. I can’t speak much for red teams in other countries, but in my opinion it’s the standout issue among many American red teams. It can lead them to engage in all the issues mentioned previously while simultaneously asserting the awe-inspiring goodness of their red teaming efforts. (And yes, it can even lead them to assert that red teaming only reduces uncertainty and never adds to it.)
Hybrids: Any or all of these issues can combine to multiply the effects of uncertainty.