Ukraine’s small drone teams keep beating NATO units in exercises, exposing an unsurprising experience gap.
NATO is bringing Ukrainian units into exercises to help allied troops prepare for modern drone warfare. In those drills, Ukrainian teams have repeatedly beaten the allied forces they faced. A Ukrainian defense official and NATO officials said the results are not surprising, but they are a warning the West needs to learn from.
Davyd Aloian, the deputy secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, said Ukraine’s advantage comes from “practical experience.”
“They always demolish the Russians on the front line,” he said. “So they have this experience.”
Ukraine’s NATO counterparts, meanwhile, have not fought a large-scale war like this for decades. That has made Ukraine one of Europe’s most battle-tested militaries and a force NATO is eager to learn from.
Tarja Jaakkola, NATO’s assistant secretary general for defense industry, innovation, and armaments, said Ukraine’s success in those exercises made sense because its troops are applying hard-won lessons learned in combat.
“I would be surprised if it would have been vice versa,” she said, because “the Ukrainians, they have the battlefield experience.”
Jaakkola and Aloian spoke at a drone summit in Latvia attended by Business Insider.
She framed the losses as useful for NATO, pointing to NATO Allied Command Transformation’s argument that “we should be failing in our exercises because that’s when we learn and that’s when we actually are able to develop as well.”
Head of that command, Adm. Pierre Vandier, said in March that “short of war, training is all we have to make ourselves better.”
“We therefore need to rebuild the training machine — making it harder, more realistic, and more demanding, because training must be the place where we can fail, learn, and adapt before war forces us to,” he said.
Carsten Breuer, chief of defense at the Federal Ministry of Defense of Germany, said at the summit that Ukraine’s victories weren’t surprising, and he’s glad NATO could learn about its shortfalls from these encounters.
“I think it’s clear that there’s a steep learning curve for us,” he said.
Ukraine’s recent exercise wins include a naval drone drill off Portugal, where a Ukraine-led “red team” beat NATO’s “blue team” in all five simulated scenarios. In Sweden, Ukrainian drone pilots playing the aggressor said they repeatedly overwhelmed Swedish troops during a NATO exercise, forcing the training to pause as the Swedes adjusted their tactics.
Sweden’s chief of defense, Gen. Michael Claesson, told the Associated Press after the exercise that Western forces must “learn rapidly” how to execute drone and counter-drone operations, and the “fastest” way is to listen to the Ukrainians.
The exercises are designed to push and test NATO forces, and some scenarios deliberately limit what NATO units can use. A loss in an exercise doesn’t mean those forces would lose in a real war, but officials across the West say Ukraine has experience in drone warfare and that the West needs to learn as much as it can.
Adm. Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, the chair of NATO’s military committee, said in April that Ukrainian personnel are frequently tasked with acting as a “red team ” in training scenarios, acting as the enemy against NATO units to teach those units to defend against drone attacks.
Aloian told Business Insider in an interview that Ukraine is sharing with partner nations and is “ready to give those lessons that we have learned and to contribute to the common defense.”
He described Ukraine’s soldiers as having knowledge and experience of “new strategies.” He said that “obviously they will have some more skills on some of the implementation of the new solutions.”
Olexandr Mischenko, Ukraine’s deputy minister of foreign affairs, said at the drone summit in Latvia that “Ukraine has become a source of unique combat experiences, in the use of amphibious drones, maritime unmanned platforms, electronic warfare, and the integration of advanced technologies into modern warfare. This experience is critically important for the security of all of Europe and the Euro-Atlantic community.”
Western militaries are increasingly turning to Ukrainian instructors to help train their own armies, consulting with the Ukrainian military for its expertise, and working with Ukrainian industry to learn as much as possible from it.
The West still has lots of weaponry and expertise Ukraine needs, but the dynamic has shifted, allowing Ukraine to become more of a partner than a dependent.
Western units that help train Ukrainian troops have said that they have learned key lessons in the process. They’ve said they use the opportunity to understand what they need to change about their own training and preparations.
Jaakkola said NATO is “truly thankful and grateful to Ukraine about how they also bring the knowledge they have gained during this awful war to the alliance as well.”
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