[August]

It’s Time to Ukrainify US Military Assistance

Jahara Matisek and William Reno | 11.10.23

Ukraine is in a bloody slugfest with Russia. It wasn’t supposed to become an ugly war of attrition—when Russian forces invaded last year, almost nobody expected Ukraine to hold out so long, much less hold its own. In less than two years, Western governments have provided over $80 billion of military aid to Ukraine. Along with training, that material support aimed to build a modern Ukrainian force that could conduct dynamic combined arms maneuver, which requires the close coordination of armor, infantry, artillery, and airpower.

But some of the Western military training is not working. The US military, in particular, as the leading provider of support to Ukrainian forces, is repeating the mistakes of Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead of adapting training methods and objectives to the battlefield realities in Ukraine, the US bureaucracy acts as though the Ukrainians are fighting an American-style conventional war.

There is growing acknowledgement that this training is inadequate. Our observations, including at training facilities in Europe and on the ground in Ukraine’s combat zones as part of a US Department of Defense-funded Minerva research project, point to a more basic flaw: NATO and particularly US trainers tend to train Ukrainian soldiers to fight like American soldiers. The Ukrainian soldiers we interviewed find value in US training and combat drills but are frustrated by US military doctrine and training assumptions biased toward maneuver. Ukraine’s armed forces fight in a context of Russian (and now Ukrainian) continuous defense in depth that is beyond the experience of most US trainers.

Retooling the Training of Ukrainians: Listening and Flexibility

An experienced British Army officer contrasted the American approach with his own: “Our training courses are more effective because we started listening and collaborating with the Ukrainians. . . . They’ve forced us to update our own doctrine, training, and manuals on how to fight a modern war.” The British officer accepted the fact that most Ukrainian soldiers he trains have extensive experience in trench warfare and have faced artillery and armor without the protection of air superiority—battlefield experience that not a single US soldier has today. Such listening and flexibility by British military personnel is not new. Our past fieldwork and interviews across Africa have shown that most infantry prefer to be trained by the British because they listen to their concerns and are flexible in teaching drills and military exercises that simulate the army they have, instead of forcing them to emulate a British template.

Observing Ukrainian soldiers, both at US and NATO training sites and near the front lines in Ukraine, it’s becoming apparent that US training programs are often ineffective. Many American training programs teach the Ukrainians how to fight in the most advanced styles of combined arms warfare. This way of fighting is about concentrating firepower at decisive points on the battlefield to execute a series of dynamic thrusts against enemy positions and create a turbulent and deteriorating situation with which the enemy cannot cope.

Current training approaches teach useful skills and outline sound tactics and maneuvers for battlefield success. But the Ukrainian troops often tell us time is wasted with absurdly long PowerPoint presentations containing useless information. They don’t want training for an ideal military situation. Ukrainians need advice and skills specific to their own military limits (e.g., lack of airpower) and the realities of their battlefield context (e.g., proliferation of drones, jamming, etc.). Russian forces have constructed 800 kilometers of defensive lines with an “insane” amount of mining of up to “5 mines per square meter,” which per a RUSI report “included the laying of two anti-tank mines together—one atop the other—compensating for reduced density by ensuring that vehicles are immobilised by single mine-strikes.” This has impeded the ability of the Ukrainians to rapidly advance because of demining operations under fire, leading to an average daily advance of ninety meters.

Frustration abounds—as one Ukrainian general asked us in an interview, “How do you expect us to conduct a successful counteroffensive when your [US] military does not have the doctrine or experience for what our army is facing?”

https://mwi.westpoint.edu/its-time-t...ry-assistance/