NATO training leaves Ukrainian troops ‘underprepared’ for war: “Western instructors don’t understand the kind of war or enemy that we’re fighting, say Ukrainian soldiers”
by brayduck
NATO training leaves Ukrainian troops ‘underprepared’ for war: “Western instructors don’t understand the kind of war or enemy that we’re fighting, say Ukrainian soldiers”
by brayduck
26 comments
Article:
> 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.”
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> 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.
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> 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.
* They’re not receiving the full training program
* They don’t have time to learn and practice all of the skills and techniques it takes to fight like NATO would fight. Especially on a level where multiple units need to coordinate. This stuff is hard. It takes leadership with years of experience to plan and do properly.
* They don’t have NATO air power, which is a HUGE part of what NATO strategy & tactics are based on.
This reads more like “8 weeks of training aren’t enough to throw Ukrainian soldiers directly into combat, especially if the Western nations conducting it don’t want Ukrainian soldiers dying on their soil during that training.”
TLDR; NATO is still asleep at the wheel.
Hire up need to start taking this more seriously and drop the Middle Eastern insurgency obsession from the curriculum.
The headline should read “Allocated training time shorter than ideal but there’s a war on, don’t you know?”.
Tough cus they don’t have enough time to train like NATO soldiers unfortunately. Also, Ukraine does have to fight this war very differently from how other Western nations would be conducting this war. Not having air and naval superiority is a bitch.
>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.
That is both a very valid criticism, and absolutely nothing new.
Using WW2 as an example, the US Army sent combat veterans back to look at the various training courses. Depending on where they had served (Europe, Africa, or the Pacific), they would point to different things and say “That’s important” or “They don’t need to know that”.
Though, obviously, NATO should be listening to what Ukraine says it needs.
The training they’re getting is probably the best training they can get at the moment.
Also – training is only giving you the tools to survive the first skirmishes, after that it’s all experience.
I hope we all understand that the Nato training course is 5 weeks. Basic Training is what, 2 – 3 times longer in most Nato nations? Advanced Infantry Training that happens after Basic Training is an undreamed of luxury. Having said that, I suspect the Nato training course will likely be updated based on experience.
Most people have never served and might not fully understand what goes into being combat ready. Basic Training is just that. Basic. Even in the US Army, when soldiers complete basic training, they continue training at their unit, where they train as a squad, platoon, as a company, and as a battalion. It takes at least a year to make a unit combat effective. It makes sense that they go back to Ukraine and then the units prepare for war.
It’s okay to be critical, and this was expected. Nobody has ever fought a war like this. At least they got some form of basic training which I’m sure has helped them a bit. But without all the tools NATO has its just impossible to fight the same way. Im sure any future training programs will be updated accordingly.
Ukraine has themselves been pushing for shortened training programs
Before the invasion started, British soldiers were training Ukrainian soldiers in Ukraine. British special forces were training Ukrainian special forces from 2014 and still are. We know this from the documents leaked by the US traitor.
It’s time to send a relatively small force of a couple of hundred British soldiers to help train soldiers in Ukraine. They would, of course, all have to be volunteers. Sometime after, it’s likely other countries will, then, send trainers as well. In the Vietnam war, Russia sent more than 6000 generals and officers and more than 4,500 soldiers as specialists. In comparison a couple of hundred trainers is nothing.
This would free up the same number of experienced Ukrainian soldiers to help train Ukrainian soldiers in the West.
A win-win for everyone except the Russians – which to my mind is the best kind of win-win.
More bad news. Everyday bad news… 🙁
Oh, once the war is over I’ll bet they will Nato soldiers back with their new experience of drone and trench warfare etc.
Not surprising they’re only getting basic training due to time constraints.
More advanced training would not be as helpful as it would be for training a NATO force. NATO armies would just not have the stomach for the fighting Ukraine has to do to survive.
Fighting a war with no air cover, with fields mined 3 times as densely as you would normally expect. I very much doubt we have an adequate curriculum for that as we would not be willing to fight on those terms.
They need planes.
Seems like ruzzian bots have a new strategy. Post b.s. articles from ridiculous sources. Mods need to start paying more attention.
The NATO training they’re getting stops them being completely clueless on the battlefield and killed within hours if not days.
That is reserved for the Ruzzians…👍
I haven’t read the article but I agree with the quote. Every soldier I talk to says “they should do this” and what they describe is a war under NATO conditions like air superiority. Take away air superiority and the strategy doesn’t make sense. And people expecting a fast breakthrough, sorry but it only takes a few hours to mine an entire field. If Russians recognise they are going to lose an area they can mine the next area. Which means no massive breakthrough
I heard that Norwegian training is very good.
I spent three years in the US Marine Corps before my first war, over a year of which was basic training, advanced infantry training, specialty training, various training and schools, followed by two years of on-the-job training and application, all of which was in preparation for war, and I still felt unprepared for some things, through our first few battles. Realistically, adequate training for war happens prior to war, and even then, the war is never exactly the same as training. These are nonsensical articles.
I don’t think any training truly prepares you for real combat.
What they need is ukranian training done by themselves in poland with NATO support. The best battlehardened NCOs training their own with NATO tweeks to kill soviet thinking because the are still things that the ukranians do that the russians have fogured out
Honestly America should be inviting Ukrainian combat vets to give classes to American troops.
After this war it will be Ukrainian troops training NATO troops.