Yves here. More and more Ukraine-supporting Western outlets are making admissions against interest as far as how the war is going. Consider the twofer in the headline: that Ukraine forces are by implication taking a drubbing from the Russians, and the once-implied-to-be-superior NATO training might be a big reason why.
This framing is a very big shift from repeated claims by US, NATO, and EU officials, as well as many commentators. Russia was running out of missiles. Russian troops had poor morale. Russian forces were badly led. The Russian military was hopelessly corrupt.
This sort of thing has finally started to die down as the much ballyhooed Ukraine counteroffensive has proven to be not just an embarrassing failure, but also a disaster. Independent Western experts like Douglas Macgregor (who recall has excellent contacts) suggest that Ukraine deaths in this campaign are approaching 40,000. To give a sense of significance, compare that to the 60,000 men specifically trained by NATO since March of last year to shore up Ukraine forces. And recall that there are additional, and significant, numbers of wounded men.
On top of that, we had the spectacle of Western equipment such as the vaunted Leopard 2 tanks meeting densely mined Russian “crumple zones” ahead of the Russian fortified lines and not coming out well from the encounter. Western experts also seemed surprised that Russia engaged in remote mining, delivering mines behind the advancing armored vehicles so that if they retreated, more would be lost.
It’s not clear who was behind the decision to try to conserve equipment, but Ukraine has changed tactics to a more manpower-intensive approach of trying to move men close to Russian positions in small groups, usually along tree lines which they hope offers cover, then getting out and moving in on foot.
As Alexander Mercouris in particular has chronicled, the US and NATO are engaged in a blame game with Ukraine. Ukraine is supposedly at fault for being forced to take on a military Mission Impossible, of attacking very well fortified Russian positions with no air support, and worse in a world of ISR where each side can see very well what the other is up to. So the Collective West line is that Ukraine is at fault for abandoning a “combined arms operation” approach like they were supposed to and reverting to something they hoped might work better.
So that is a long-winded way of explaining that this piece is part of the Ukraine effort to point a finger at its sponsors.
Those who have been following the war closely will notice all sorts of omissions and misleading spin. For instance, the piece says those trained by NATO since the war started get 35 days of basic training. As Brian Berletic and Mark Sleboda have pointed out, basic training for US service members is 90 days, and four months for Marines. Berletic made clear that was not remotely adequate for going into combat; he said something to the effect that all you know at that point is how to use a gun and that it takes many months more of working with a unit to reach a basic level of competence.
Scott Ritter has elaborated on that observation by describing how service members need to learn to operate within their unit, then those units need to learn to function effectively as part of a battalion, and then battalions need to learn to train as part of a brigade, and then brigades need to coordinate as part of an army. Ritter has stressed that Ukraine is now burning through its third army and its poor performance is no reflection on the courage of its men, but that you can’t expect forces built on the fly to be effective.
Ritter also stated that training Ukraine troops in so many different countries would lead to additional problems, since each NATO member has its own armed forces and not 100% consistent approaches to operations. That means differences in flavors of training would undermine cohesiveness in action
Berletic and Sleboda (I infer based on personal experience) said many months ago that NATO training is not so hot. Ritter and Macgregor have depicted NATO as in the business of fighting insurgents, as in noting even remotely approaching a peer power. The article confirms that criticism. For instance:
A key concern about the Western training is that the instructors have never fought a war of this kind, or against an enemy like Russia. For years, Western armies and their defence industries have focused on fighting insurgencies in the Middle East.
Even though this piece may seem fairly tame compared to what attentive war-watchers have seen elsewhere, the fact that it goes as far as it does is yet another proof that the West can no longer pretend that Project Ukraine is going well. But you see here nary an admission of how much our arrogance has cost in terms of Ukraine lives and loss of limb.
By Isobel Koshiw, a journalist based in London covering corruption. Originally published at openDemocracy
Ukrainian soldiers are being left underprepared for the realities of Russia’s war because of a disconnect between NATO and domestic military training, according to one frontline brigade.
So far, more than 60,000 Ukrainian soldiers have taken part in military training in the West.
Yet NATO can only currently offer Ukrainian soldiers basic training, shifting the burden of vital combat training back to Ukraine. Time constraints mean that stage two training doesn’t always happen, or happen in full, in Ukraine or the West.
“I don’t want to say anything against our partners, but they don’t quite understand our situation and how we are fighting,” said a senior intelligence sergeant in the newly formed 41st Mechanised Brigade who goes by the name ‘Dutchman’. “That’s why the main training and the integrated training happens here.”
Nick Reynolds, an expert at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a UK defence think tank, said that the West’s current training for the Ukrainian military is less realistic, but safer and simpler. He admits that this approach shifts the risk from things going wrong at the training stage to things going wrong during live operations.
“We do have a lot of health and safety regulations… yet this means they are going on to the battlefield less prepared,” Reynolds told openDemocracy.
Most of the day-to-day tactics used against Russia’s forces, along with combined arms training – where battalions learn to operate together as a brigade – are taught in Ukraine.
“The Western training is good and the guys gain experience, particularly in shooting and [the use of] equipment… but the most useful training is still done in Ukraine,” said Dutchman, who joined as a volunteer fighter at the start of the conflict in 2014.
openDemocracy met Dutchman and other members of the 41st Brigade in Kupiansk, a town in north-eastern Ukraine, near one of the most active stretches of the frontline. Almost all the soldiers in the 41st have undergone training in the West.
It usually takes between one and two years to form a brigade, but wartime conditions mean that 90% of the 41st Brigade were mobilised this year. Recruitment started in January and they were dropped into Kupiansk in early July. Before the invasion, basic training for Ukrainian troops was six months, but some of the men openDemocracy met had been mobilised as recently as March, highlighting Ukraine’s critical demand for troops.
“It would be better if either [the instructors] came here to see what we’re facing or we went there to train their instructors to train our troops,” Dutchman added – though he recognises that the former would break NATO’s red line of ‘no boots on the ground’ in Ukraine, while the latter would probably not be acceptable to NATO bureaucracies which require instructors to have risen through the ranks under NATO tutelage.
A Different Kind of Enemy
So far, some 63,000 Ukrainians (17 brigades in total) have been trained in the West, mostly in the UK and Germany.
All receive a 35-day ‘boot camp’ of basic soldier training. A source involved in the UK training process described it as a “crash course” and the most that could be provided in the time available. They pointed out that a big plus was the thousands of pounds’ worth of equipment, including body armour and medical supplies, the Ukrainian troops take home with them.
A key concern about the Western training is that the instructors have never fought a war of this kind, or against an enemy like Russia. For years, Western armies and their defence industries have focused on fighting insurgencies in the Middle East.
Members of the 41st Brigade said that their instructors often used examples of NATO operations in the Middle East, where the objective is to clear houses and identify potential insurgents among the local population, but “that’s not really relevant to us”.
“For the most part, [Western instructors] have fought wars in cities and towns – urban settings. We are on flat ground a lot of the time,” said Dutchman.
The tactics that Ukrainian officers and commanders badly want their troops to learn while being trained abroad are either only part of the syllabus or not featured at all.
“We need people to understand how to effectively clear trenches, enter them, how to throw grenades effectively, how not to trip on booby traps, to understand what grenades the [Russians] throw – essentially to understand the enemy,” explained Dutchman.
Yura*, one of the newly mobilised soldiers from the 41st, gave the example of minefields. Russian forces have laid extensive minefields – some of which span several kilometres – to hamper the progress of Ukrainian troops involved in the recently launched counter-offensive.
“The [Western] training was good and interesting. But there was very little about de-mining,” Yura said. They showed us a minefield about two metres wide. The training lasted about two hours. But you get here and look at what’s in front of you, it’s just not comparable.”
Another major difference, argued Dutchman, who has attended several Western training courses in the UK and Germany, is in planning. Referring to the fact that NATO forces usually outgun (and overpower) their enemies, he said that Western instructors plan “with a weaker enemy in mind”.
Ukrainian commanders also have to think on their feet much more, he said. “There’s never going to be a warning regarding an offensive… So when the attack happens, we have to make decisions,” he said. “[In the West] they make the plan and act according to the plan and when something doesn’t go according to plan, they retreat and make another plan.”
NATO Training Regulations
Another issue is NATO regulations on health and safety protection for troops in training.
“The way that we build the pathway [the training stages for troops] is you accredit units as safe at a lower level, and you build up with each layer, getting the safety tick-off… A single death on a training ground in a NATO country is unacceptable,” said RUSI’s Reynolds.
But Ukraine does not have the time to put its troops through these various levels, which means they can’t access additional, more advanced training modules (on particular equipment or the responsibilities of different ranks, for example) that would be useful to them.
The condensed training currently offered to Ukrainian troops makes it difficult to reach a stage where NATO would be comfortable layering on additional training, according to Reynolds.
“I’m not saying one [training approach] is better than the other,” he continued.
“From a legal, regulatory, safety and permissions perspective, we can’t do [the type of training Ukrainians want], unless we make some fairly serious policy changes.”
But Reynolds said he believes there is some scope for changing the training, and that the limits of what the West can offer have not been reached: “Western militaries providing aid need to come around to the realisation of what is required to make collective training work outside Ukraine.”
For now, Ukraine’s 41st Brigade is acclimatising to what’s called the “second” line of defence outside Kupiansk – although they’re within comfortable range of Russian artillery and tank fire, they are not as targeted as the “first” or “zero” line. At some point, they will be moved forward to face some of the 50,000 or so Russian troops around the town, who are attempting to draw Ukrainian forces from other areas in the south and east.
Ultimately, said Dutchman, no soldier is properly trained until they are on the battlefield and can think through their reactions.
“However much you prepare someone, they won’t understand that they are in a war until they have been shelled… Most of the men here are unshelled,” he said.
*Names have been changed to protect identities