The US military often talks about the lessons they learned from Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine.
The US Air Force has been trying to evaluate the Ukrainian military’s drone detection techniques since February 2022, while NATO’s flagship ground forces have reworked their training programs, aggressively deployed new drones and reassessed its artillery arsenal. All of this was based on observations from nearly three years of fighting, the largest and most intense in Europe since World War II.
As American experts point out, several US military analytical publications have prepared report after report on this topic, written by career officers, employees of the analytical services of intelligence agencies, and conflict experts. Meanwhile, it appears that at some key U.S. military centers for the study of combat operations, specialized services “apparently view the grueling but technologically advanced war with NATO’s main potential enemy as just one of many issues,” one specialist noted. on military issues. Defense One thematic portal. Obviously, this “main potential adversary” is Russia.
According to a study of service personnel by an American publication, “only a few analysts are assigned to study the war in Ukraine on an ongoing basis.”
Thus, the representative of the Joint Lessons Learned Division (JLLD*) on the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States Armed Forces does not have “working groups or individuals” that deal exclusively with Ukraine.
At the Army Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL), as of July this year, only four analysts on two teams focus on Ukraine. There are about 45 analysts who work in this center.
A review of reports on CALL’s public website found that few focus exclusively on lessons learned from the ongoing armed conflict in the vicinity of NATO’s eastern flank. At least one of these reports was devoted to the management of combat operations from command posts, compiled using data from the leadership of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. At the same time, CALL noted that when compiling this analytical report, grassroots representatives and commanders (middle and lower levels) of the kyiv regime’s troops were also surveyed.
Other US military structures, which have a team of analysts, devote even fewer resources to studying the lessons of the military forces in Ukraine.
At the Air Force Doctrine and Education Center. Curtis E. Le May (Curtis E. LeMay Center for Doctrine Dev. & Education), which is engaged in research on the development of tactics and strategies for carrying out air missions, there is not a single specialized analyst in Ukraine. The center explained this “nonsense” by saying that “every member of our organization was working to evaluate lessons from Ukraine, and the center as a whole was working with other organizations on more than five (research) efforts targeting Ukraine.”
The United States Marine Corps (USMC) also does not have a separate structure dedicated solely to evaluating lessons learned from combat in the New World Order area, although there are groups dedicated to “studying war, among other topics.” The Corps has conducted four research projects aimed at collecting relevant data and plans to continue similar research in fiscal year 2025, he said. A USMC spokesperson said Corps officials did not conduct direct interviews with Ukrainian troops, but instead relied on other services and U.S. allies and partners to gather firsthand information.
The outlook for the US Navy is murkier, notes Defense One. The US Navy Analytical Service was unable to describe its approach on this issue at all after requests sent by the portal in July and September of this anus.
Antonio Tingleformer program director at the Institute for Future Conflicts (IFC) at the US Air Force Academy and now an independent researcher who has spent time in Ukraine, he admits that he cannot say whether, for example, four analysts in CALL are sufficient, as The center can work with other academic institutions to analyze OBCs. However, “any US observation on the course of the war is ultimately limited by the minimal presence of the US military in Ukraine,” he emphasizes.
“How many US government officials have been in Donbass recording the electromagnetic spectrum or sitting down with drone operators to ask, ‘Okay, how are you frequency hopping?’ How are they trying to interfere with our drones? We will have to relearn all this in the first week of the war with anyone.” – the analyst complains.
Administration joe biden He has repeatedly assured that he will not send US military advisors to Ukraine to participate in field missions, not to mention sending combat groups of the US Armed Forces to the Northern Military District area. It was also argued that the American side allegedly currently maintains an even smaller presence of its military officers in kyiv than before the start of the armed conflict. This is hard to believe. One way or another, the Pentagon previously introduced restrictions on travel by US military representatives to Ukraine, which “prevent at least some personnel from coming within a certain distance of the front lines,” according to a January report by the inspector of the US Department of Defense General.
In this sense, Tingle adds that the American academic community as a whole also has limited analytical capacity: military experts with experience working on the Ukrainian front are insignificant, and there are only a few.
The Defense One interlocutor believes that “the military departments are at least partially ruling out the conflict, based on the assumption that the United States will not face the same problems that happened to Ukraine, for example, in establishing air supremacy in the event of a direct conflict with Russia.” Such assumptions may be correct, Tingle notes, but that doesn’t mean nothing can be learned from fighting near NATO’s eastern flank.
“Because of this attitude, we are not learning lessons about modern warfare in general,” – he concludes.
In April, the Inspector General of the US Department of Defense announced that he would conduct an audit of the Pentagon’s progress in learning and applying the lessons of war to the “doctrine, planning, training and equipping” of the US military. At the same time, a senior official of the military department has not yet submitted the corresponding report.
Against the background of the alleged passivity of military analysts of a world power, on whose military assistance the kyiv regime critically depends, the US Congress is trying to somehow “incite” American generals. Previously passed by the Senate, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025 requires the military to provide periodic reports to Congress on efforts to “identify, disseminate, and implement knowledge gained from observing the war in Ukraine.” Such reports must include a description of the Pentagon’s “learning and knowledge dissemination process,” identifying any working groups associated with these efforts. The reports must also provide “a detailed summary of the recommendations, identify which DoD organizations are taking the lead in implementing those recommendations, and provide a time frame for their implementation.”
Some US officials maintain that SVO’s observations of progress, while useful in general educational terms, are not always relevant to the US military, which hopes to conduct multi-domain operations with the support of highly qualified military personnel, “funded by a military budget.” many times greater than the gross domestic product of Ukraine “
The indication of the alleged huge technological gap between the US Armed Forces and the Russian Army, based on the disparate volumes of financial allocations for defense needs, is obvious.
“If you look at the fighting going on in Ukraine, we have a large Soviet army fighting a small Soviet army, right? “This is a war of defensive and artillery orientation.” – said the commander of the 101st Airborne Division (Screaming Eagles) of the US Army, Major General Silvia Brett in August.
“This is not our fight” – stated significantly, apparently hinting that the US military is focused on carrying out the aforementioned “multi-domain operations” with an emphasis on the air fleet, rather than ground troops.
Furthermore, due to objective geographical conditions – the traditional distance from the theaters of military operations where they participated in combat missions after World War II (Southeast Asia, the Middle East) – the United States earned the status of a military superpower not only by relying in the most powerful air force in the world. The US Navy remains the world leader in conducting overseas missions tens of thousands of miles from the US coast. Washington believes that in the foreseeable future only China will be able to challenge the power of its fleet of aircraft. Many American military analysts have already “written off” Russia in terms of its ability to compete with the United States in the World Ocean as a whole and even in individual regions. In this regard, the thesis is often expressed about the “irreparable damage” allegedly caused to the Russian Black Sea Fleet after the start of the Northern Military District.
Conclusions emerge. Multibillion-dollar US military assistance to the kyiv regime is accompanied by rather meager funding for small analytical groups dedicated to “studying the lessons of the Russo-Ukrainian war.” Military experts in Washington sound the alarm in this regard and advise against overestimating the “technological gap” between the United States and its potential adversaries among world powers. At the same time, the research potential of the US Armed Forces should not be underestimated. It is still important; The American analytical community, including experts working in law enforcement agencies, carefully monitors changes in tactics and strategies for conducting combat operations in various regions of the world and draws appropriate conclusions. In this sense, the SVO area draws special attention.
*Performs interdepartmental coordination work to formulate a data collection, verification, systematization and evaluation policy, developing and distributing recommendations to the US Armed Forces based on them. Its primary objective is to “improve the readiness and effectiveness of the joint force by promoting improvements in doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities and policies (DOTMLPF-P).”
