WESTERN MILITARY ADVISERS ARE CRITICIZING KYIV’S WAR EFFORT, BUT THE UKRAINIANS HAVE GAINED EXPERTISE OF THEIR OWN.

14 September 2023

WESTERN MILITARY ADVISERS ARE CRITICIZING KYIV’S WAR EFFORT, BUT THE UKRAINIANS HAVE GAINED EXPERTISE OF THEIR OWN.

The National

The only winners in the Ukraine conflict are the war hawks

The Atlantic

9 hours ago

What Ukraine Can Teach the U.S. About War - The Atlantic

By Phillips Payson O’Brien

SEPTEMBER 14, 2023, 12:40 PM ET

If the anonymous voices quoted by U.S. news outlets in recent months are any indication, many Western military experts think that they know how to fight Ukraine’s war better than the Ukrainians do. American officials, NBC News reported last month, have “privately expressed disappointment” about how Ukraine had deployed its soldiers and believe that Kyiv’s forces “have not necessarily applied the training principles they received” from NATO militaries. Yet despite such scolding, the Ukrainians keep conducting their war their way. Despite exhortations to gather more forces in the south and try to cut through Russian lines, even if that means exposing more soldiers to enemy air attacks, Ukrainian forces—stymied by minefields—have proceeded more cautiously, conserving personnel in what could be a protracted conflict with a far more populous nation. They have opted instead to attack, using homegrown weapons systems as well as those provided by allies, Russian supply chains and command-and-control facilities deep behind the front line while also focusing on destroying artillery closer to the fighting.Ukrainian commanders believe they understand the fundamental dynamics of the conflict far more clearly than those who have never encountered such conditions. Indeed, the longer this war goes on, the more clear it becomes that the Ukrainians have something to teach others, including the United States, about how to run military operations in the modern era.

In two recent speeches, Kathleen Hicks, the U.S. deputy secretary of defense, openly outlined how the United States might defend itself in a war with China, and the vision she described would sound familiar to Ukrainian military planners. Instead of directly butting heads with the People’s Liberation Army in a war of mass versus mass, Hicks spoke of achieving victory through ingenuity and innovation, yielding new military technologies that would be “harder to plan for, harder to hit, harder to beat.”

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