‘Battlefield evidence is everywhere. The will to act on it is the missing Western capability.’ Time to rediscover intellectual humility ⬇️
The War in Ukraine has now been underway for longer than World War I. Ukraine has transformed its military from one that everyone presumed to be an easy beat to amongst the largest and the most combat hardened military in Europe. Ukraine is not a charity case, its the most War ready nation in the free world.
The Royal United Services Institute podcast has a great episode on ‘Ukrainian Adaptation to War‘ with Jack Watling. Jack was a keynote speaker at the Chief of Army’s Symposium in 2024 and is a prolific author and one of the leading analysts of modern warfare, having written several reports on lessons from the war in Ukraine.
“The solution we come up with might look different to the Ukrainian solution, but you do need a solution. You can’t dismiss the problem. Whether that is the survivability of infantry under UAV attack, or how you degrade enemy reconnaissance to enable freedom of manoeuvre, et cetera. We need detailed battle drills for how we train our people to be able to solve those problems, which means accurately replicating that threat in training, but also giving people the freedom to test battle drills to counter them.”
Beaten Zone advisor Mick Ryan gave a sharp interview to the Kyiv Post on this topic – ‘Less Arrogance and a Little More Humility‘ captures the need perfectly. Australia needs to leverage the modern warfare experience Ukraine’s military has built fighting the Russians:
“I would like to see Ukrainian training teams in Australia teaching us how to do a lot of this stuff, because otherwise we’re just going to fumble around with what we read on the internet. I think having Ukrainian trainers at our training schools would be good.”
Mick’s long read, ‘Modern War and the Systemic Learning Deficit in Western Military Institutions‘ for the Lowy Institute, expands on this and is well worth your time:
“Western military institutions exhibit a systemic learning deficit that prioritises exploitation of existing competencies over exploration of new solutions. The result is dangerously slow adaptation to battlefield innovations, demonstrated in Ukraine and Iran despite unprecedented access to openly available evidence.”
Right now Australia has personnel in Europe training Ukrainian recruits, but is the ADF ready to acknowledge how much there is to learn about modern warfare from Ukraine? Take Integrated Air and Missile Defence, which the 2023 Defence Strategic Review flagged as a pressing priority for Australia. No military on earth has more combat experience in IAMD right now than the Armed Forces of Ukraine!
More humility, more curiosity — let’s leverage the lessons others have learned in the crucible of combat.
📷 via Wild Hornets — the Ukrainian mil-tech behind the Sting interceptor drone.