NATO Instructors: We Need to Learn from Ukraine’s Experience

Ukrainian troops operate at a pace that Western armies find difficult to adapt to, while procurement, training, and weapons-development processes in NATO countries often remain significantly slower. Business Insider writes about this, citing Western military personnel involved in training Ukrainian soldiers in Poland.

The publication cites Operation Legio, which Norway is conducting in eastern Poland, as one of the key examples. At Camp Jomsborg, multinational teams train Ukrainian soldiers, who in turn pass on the experience they have gained at the front to the armed forces of NATO countries.

Major John, the officer responsible for coordinating the training process, told Business Insider that the camp is effectively located “in the mental and geographical middle between the war in the east and peacetime in the West.”

According to him, the main problem lies in the difference in pace. Ukraine needs training and equipment as quickly as possible, whereas Western military structures are accustomed to working according to long-term plans. “The West is used to long planning horizons. Ukraine needs results now,” John said.

At the same time, the publication notes, Operation Legio demonstrates that Western structures are capable of speeding up when necessary. The Jomsborg camp itself was built in the middle of a forest in just a few months. The training program is also constantly changing: Ukrainian instructors and service members returning from the front pass on new lessons from the war, after which the training infrastructure, particularly the network of trenches, was rebuilt repeatedly.

The exercise commander, Norwegian Brigadier General Atle Molde, emphasized that the problem concerns more than training. According to him, peacetime rules for procuring and modernizing weapons create difficulties for the Norwegian army every day. The Ukrainian approach, by contrast, provides for making changes much more quickly directly during combat operations.

Molde cited drones as an example: in the Western system, an upgrade can take months, whereas in Ukraine, engineers close to the front can change software every few days or weeks in accordance with actual needs.

The Ukrainian experience is forcing the allies to reconsider their own approaches to bureaucracy, risk, and interaction with the defense industry. At the same time, Western military personnel acknowledge that Ukraine’s advantage in speed is partly explained by the very nature of the war, which creates a sense of urgency that peacetime armies usually lack.

The need to learn from this experience is also being discussed at the NATO level. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has called for reducing bureaucratic barriers in defense procurement and cross-border regulation. According to him, the Alliance needs a large-scale transformation of the defense industry so that Western armies can respond more quickly to new challenges.

100 years ago, Europeans also "supported" the Ukrainian People’s Republic, but in the end they handed it over. Should we now be training those who continue to fraternize with the Muscovites?