Ukraine is Now Teaching the US Army How to Win Modern Wars
I served in the US military at a time when it was transforming itself to fight terrorists and insurgents. Now, watching it transform back, with Ukraine’s help, is fascinating.
Ukraine has come a long way since 1991. The 30-year transformation from a Soviet fighting force to today — training US troops — has been nothing short of incredible.
So, how did we get here?
Between 1991 and 2014, Ukraine’s military was systematically gutted, leaving the once formidable force barely recognizable.
Back in 1991, Ukraine boasted nearly 800,000 troops, thousands of tanks and armored vehicles, and a nuclear arsenal that included 2,500 warheads.
The country’s air force was no slouch either, with hundreds of planes and bombers ready for action.
But in 1993, Ukraine handed over its nuclear weapons to Russia in exchange for promises of territorial sovereignty from the UK, the US, and, ironically, Russia itself.
This agreement, known as the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, now lies in the dustbin of history, its assurances clearly meaningless.
Once the nukes were gone, Ukraine’s leaders started eyeing other cuts.
Maintaining a sizable air force, especially bombers, was costly. So were big armies, tanks, and anti-aircraft defenses.
Meanwhile, Ukraine was grappling with a brutal economic meltdown, with its GDP shrinking by nearly half. By the time 2014 rolled around, Ukraine’s military was a mere shadow of its former self.
The official headcount? Around 130,000 soldiers and about 800 tanks — hardly enough to fend off Russia when Putin executed his ‘little green men’ invasion of Crimea and the Donbas.
According to Foreign Policy magazine, out of those 130,000 Ukrainian soldiers, only about 7,000, across three brigades, were combat-effective in terms of training and equipment. And out of the 800 tanks, only a dozen were operational — and those were used for parades.
This was the low point.
As Ukraine began to expand its military in response to Russia’s 2014 land grab, including Putin’s illegal and unrecognized formation of the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics, the US started to send military trainers to help shift the AFU from Soviet doctrine to NATO.
This was the beginning of what would become a cherished partnership between Ukraine and the United States military.
In this official DoD image, US troops were helping train Ukrainian combat engineers how to breach a door with explosives. This took place in Yavoriv, Ukraine in 2017.
Training like this was commonplace between 2014 and the large-scale Russian invasion of 2022.
But the training wasn’t a one-way street. The Ukrainians were teaching just as much as they were learning from the US Army.
For instance, as the Italy-based 173rd Airborne Brigade was training Ukraine in 2016 and 2017, US leaders identified several “capability gaps” thanks to their Ukrainian comrades.
Some of the shortfalls, like the brigade’s lack of air defense and electronic warfare units, and over-reliance on satellite communications and GPS navigation systems, are the direct results of the Army’s years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the enemy has no air power or other high-end equipment and technology.
In other words, the US Army had let their warfighting skills atrophy — at least when it came to fighting large, near-peer adversaries.
These shortfalls were known all the way back in 2017, as reported in this Politico piece which got its hands on an internal Army memo that was circulating among Army leaders.
After the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the US Army continued its training — just no longer in Ukraine. Troops would travel to Poland, Romania, and Germany to continue to exchange lessons learned and get Ukraine comfortable with the new flood of NATO weapon systems the West was sending.
Shortly after the 2022 invasion, the DoD set up a dedicated unit just for this purpose in Wiesbaden, Germany called the “Security Assistance Group — Ukraine” (SAG-U) — it was made up of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines from all the US military’s primary branches.
Take a look at this job posting for Reserve Marines stationed in the US — it says it’s “looking for 23 volunteer Marines who meet the requirements (rank can be one up, one down) to take seven-month active-duty orders to support SAG-U over in US European Command” for a reporting date of January 2024.
Now, the US Army is finally implementing many of those lessons learned from our Ukrainian allies into a new doctrine it calls “transforming in contact.”
The big lesson from Ukraine, at least for the US Army, is that the new operating environment will be complex, over great distances, and putting the Army’s command posts, the hub of C2 (Command and Control), at risk at every stage of the fight.
Perhaps the biggest weakness currently on display in the US Army is its dependence on communications between people and systems to be effective on the battlefield.
This wasn’t a big deal in the desert wars where we owned every single aspect of the electronic environment. But in a contested fight, the Army recognizes that it needs to break out of its counterinsurgency mindset.
The best example of this is the brigade command post — previously a static, fixed location. But the war in Ukraine and the widespread use of drones and precision strikes have revealed how exposed command posts can become.
Ukraine’s soldiers and veterans are teaching the US Army that command post mobility is essential.
What’s more, lessons include deception tactics like creating fake command posts to lure in the enemy and force him to waste precision munitions while preserving the real command post.
Ukraine has also taught that networked communications systems within the US Army have to change and become more robust against near-peer listening — or jamming.
This means the Army’s myriad radios, blue force tracking (GPS-enabled systems for tracking people and assets), command post comms, fires support technologies, satellite systems, and other capabilities need to be rethought and tested.
Earlier this year, the Army tapped my old unit, the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, as the testbed for this new doctrine.
The division wasted no time, deploying these systems both before and during its third annual Operation Lethal Eagle exercise in April 2024.
“Lethal Eagle” is a rigorous 21-day training exercise designed to train individual and collective lethality, prototype Army initiatives, and build mastery of large-scale, long-range air assault capabilities throughout the 101st Airborne Division.
But the exercise wasn’t just a showcase of firepower — it was a proving ground for boosting soldier and unit lethality while the 2nd Brigade transitioned from a traditional infantry brigade combat team to a more agile “mobile brigade combat team.”
All thanks to Ukrainian soldiers’ teachings.
The 101st will continue refining its approach with these networked systems during an upcoming Joint Readiness Training Center in Louisiana later this year.
According to the DoD, Ukraine has been crucial in offering real-time feedback on how these new technologies and organizational tweaks are working on the ground.
One notable change I noticed in my conversations with battle buddies still serving in the 101st?
The division command post is now managing network architecture duties that used to fall under the brigade level, a shift that reflects the increasing complexity of modern warfare.
Meanwhile, pilots and dismounted troops are finding innovative ways to stay connected and share intel during long-range air assaults, bridging communication gaps that were once a battlefield headache.
What’s amazing to me is watching this transformation in real-time, after having served in the US military during the desert wars.
And Ukraine is playing a key role in US military modernization.
As soon as Ukraine signaled its desire for closer ties with Europe, NATO, and the West in the 2013 “Euromaidan,” the US did the right thing and committed its unwavering support.
And so far, that support hasn’t stopped. We can see evidence of this from 2014 to today from US Army trainers in Ukraine between 2014 and 2022 — and now billions of dollars in aid.
I sometimes hear people in the US complain that we’re giving Ukraine too much money — as if it’s coming out of their personal bank accounts.
“What are we getting for our money?” They ask.
Well, besides crippling an ideological adversary (Russia) at a relative bargain, the most important thing we’re buying is this:
We’re re-learning how to win modern wars.
And that is priceless.
Glory to Ukraine.
Glory to the Heroes.
Слава Україні!
As a 60s peacenik, now older and more conservative, I find your writing fascinating
We should be paying Ukraine more for R&D, field testing and experience transfer. Without their example we would have gone in the next war fighting the last war.