Obviously.
We will have a lot to learn from this war when it’s done. It’s the first war in a while were two developed countries fight eachother.
No country has “avoid getting a grenade dropped by a drone into your trench” in their training program. But they will have to after this war.
The instructors should adjust the training after every course if the Ukrainian officers advice them too. If they don’t they fail as instructors.
What the west could provide early on is to relieve the Ukrainian army with a lot of the training so they could focus on this new threat. As they have.
Ukraine also has a unique situation in that they have the soviet concepts and training in the past and now the western NATO concepts and training. They can and are going to be creating a new way of fighting that will be likely a hybrid of the both. As long as they keep getting western equipment we will keep seeing new and interesting uses of such.
America has never had to fight a defensive battle against an invading force, period*. Yes, they’re one of the most tactically advanced armies in the world, but they win through sheer force. “Shock and awe” wasn’t a joke. Ukraine can’t do that. They don’t have the equipment for it, but more importantly they aren’t just fighting to reclaim, but also to preserve. Yeah they could throw everything and everyone at Russia and probably win quicker, but the costs wouldn’t be worth it.
*ok, maybe you could argue the Civil War or the War of 1812, but that was 200 years ago
Also depends if you count our colonies or not. We got absolutely trashed by Japan in the Phillipines and Guam in the early war. Also an honorable mention for the Aleutian campaign.
“Okay, at this point we’d hunker down and call in 15 aircraft for air support, but we’re gonna skip that step.”
Based on Syria: we’d call support from a single carrier groups that by itself is a larger force than most of the world’s militaries.
The soldiers believe that instructors have never fought a war like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — the first clash of two heavily-armed militaries for decades.
Most Western forces have experience of very different conflicts, like those in Iraq and Afghanistan where their side had huge advantages in resources and far superior technology.
Well, that makes sense. Not every tactic and strategy works for every situation, battlefield, the arms at location and enemy.
The Western army fought no army on the same level as them for quite a while. Always inferior ones. And all memes aside, the Russian army is not that far away from the Ukrainian army, despite all incompetency and corruption. It’s also rare for Western armies to not have air superiority.
i’m sure his complaints are right on target, but like you say it’s completely understandable… this trench battle has a ton of new elements that both sides are adding to the global tactical lexicon on a daily basis… there’s no training base in the world capable of getting people up to speed on current conditions there… a big proportion of the effective responses to those conditions are brand new and being learned in the field for the first time… the Ukrainians are the experts who should be training everyone else now…
I think that “first clash of two heavily-armed militaries for decades” is quite misleading here.
They always manage to make this sound like idiot Westerners are decades behind as they haven’t fought a serious war for so long they have no clue. When the reality is the opposite: Their instructors don’t remember how to fight trench wars 1950s style with only light infantry and very limited support… because why would they?
An exception to that would be the Falklands.
While the UK were superior on paper, the specifics of the situation meant that it was a lot closer than it should have been. If Argentina had been a little more brash in their tactics against the task force then it could have went badly for the UK.
If I remember correctly just a single functional older Type 209 submarine was a major nuissance for the British and to this day the Argentinian side insists to have shot a salvo of several torpedos at one the British carriers that missed because of a technical malfunction…
They missed because they didn’t connect the guiding wires to the torpedoes properly, not because German torpedoes fired from a German sub don’t hit their target.
Ask American carrier group admirals.
The Falklands are a great case study of ‘you don’t have to be the best, just better than the other guy’.
Because there was a couple of really major opportunities that could have legitimately won the war for Argentina if they zigged instead of zagged.
The one that comes to my mind is during the San Carlos landings the Argentine aircraft chose to attack the major surface vessels and left the landing craft completely unmolested. If they had made runs on the mostly undefended soldiers rather than the big ships, or at least split between them then they would have dealt another significant blow to a force that was already pretty on the brink after the loss of the Atlantic Conveyor and the desperately valuable supplies and resources on it.
The British commanders had also made some pretty significant strategic blunders as well, such as placing the Type 42 Destroyers as the fleet med-high AD and early radar picket despite well knowing and being fearful of the Exocet missiles in the Argentine inventory. The Exocet was a surface skimming system which the defensive and detection systems on the Type 42s were unable to do anything about. After the sinking of the Sheffield the picket was made up of a Type 42 and 82 as they complimented each other to provide a wider AD capability.
If they took training from American cops, they’d be hiding outside of a school wondering what do you next
Well cops in a modern battlefield are not generally effective, just ask the Russian OMON officers.
https://thedebrief.org/know-no-mercy-the-russian-cops-who-tried-to-storm-kyiv-by-themselves/
Edgy
Don’t really see what the relevance of this comment is except to try and shoehorn in some whataboutism.
I would really hope that Western forces providing the training understand that, but I’d guess there’s a lot of ooh-rah super proud tough guys that don’t like hearing they’re wrong.
I’m curious what exactly was so wrong with our trench-clearing techniques.
Are they really talking about combined arms warfare?
They need combined arms warfare - but adapted to realities of the Russo-Ukrainian war.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Western allies of Ukraine have offered training to thousands of troops in the hope of steeling them for battle against Russia’s invasion force.
Most Western forces have experience of very different conflicts, like those in Iraq and Afghanistan where their side had huge advantages in resources and far superior technology.
In some cases, Ukrainian soldiers have decided to ditch their training completely because it proved ineffective on during their slow-moving counteroffensive, The New York Times reported earlier this year.
A report published by the UK-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) earlier this month argued that Western nations should stop training Ukrainians to become NATO-style officers.
Drills should focus on the conditions on the battlefield Ukrainians are fighting on, RUSI warned, instead of NATO-standard norms because it could increase the risk of things going wrong during live operations.
The 35-day crash course basic soldier training is mostly held in Germany and the UK, an unnamed source involved in the process told the outlet.
The original article contains 432 words, the summary contains 162 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I mean, it’s not exactly that Iraq and Afghanistan operations went all that well… I wonder if Afghani talibans are doing any pressure on Iran eastern border with all that’s been left behind after nato left Afghanistan.
The war went well. The occupation and aftermath turned out to be a bigger challenge.
I mean, if you ask most people when the war in Afghanistan ended they’re not going to say 2002 or whatever, so that’s a bit misleading.
Maybe not the best person to ask, but…
https://www.juanitajean.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Mission-Accomplished.jpg
