Western training for Ukrainian soldiers includes trying to make them as “lethal as possible” while also preserving ammunition, as they lack the deep ammo stores of their Russian foes.
Col. Boardman, the commanding officer of the UK-led training program Operation Interflex, told Business Insider that the training is designed to ensure that Ukraine’s soldiers use every shot that they have as effectively as possible.
“The Ukrainians don’t have the luxury of a huge amount of ammunition in the way the Russians do,” he said. It means Ukraine needs to “make best use of the ammunition they’ve got.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a grinding fight that has consumed mountains of ammunition. With a much smaller arsenal, Ukraine has often found itself at a disadvantage and grappling with critical shortages.
Fighting effectively while at that disadvantage has been baked into the training, which has been provided by the UK and 13 other allied nations to more than 56,000 Ukrainians.
“We are focusing on making sure the soldiers that we train are as lethal as possible,” Boardman said of the efforts to train them on small arms like rifles
“Making every shot count in a literal sense is really important for the Ukrainians,” he said. “So we spend quite a lot of time on the range coaching the marksmanship of the guys we’re training to make sure that they do make every shot count when they get to the front.”
He explained that they’re “trying to make the soldiers not only able to survive in the environment but also be as lethal, be as effective as they can be.”
Ukraine has a booming defense industry, but it still gets much of its weaponry and ammunition from Western partners. It’s faced shortages as partner stockpiles are strained and as the US, previously a major supplier of war aid, sometimes pauses support amid political drama.
Those shortages have, at times, meant that Ukraine’s soldiers have to ration ammunition, leaving them unable to prosecute targets in their sights, Western soldiers who have fought for Ukraine in this war have told Business Insider.
Big wars eat up a lot of ammunition
Ukraine’s ammunition struggles have been a serious wake-up call for Western militaries, which are closely watching the war to see what sort of weapons and tactics are needed for modern war against a great power adversary.
Western countries are sounding the alarm over not having enough ammunition.
The West is behind in solving that problem. Last month, the head of the NATO alliance warned that Russia produces as much ammunition in three months as NATO does in a year and called for a “quantum leap” in how Europe defends itself.
Both large defense companies and startups are trying to solve this issue, but there’s a huge gap to bridge.
The shortage is just one indication of how this war is different from those the West has experienced in the last few decades. Those have been fights like counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations against adversaries that Western militaries had outgunned.
Russia, by contrast, has one of the world’s largest militaries, and the war is one marked by the resurgence of old methods, like trench warfare, along with advanced technology like drones. It is a long and grinding fight with hundreds of thousands of war dead.
Ukraine is experiencing a fight unlike any the West has seen recently and passing lessons to Western partners that are not directly involved. That unusual dynamic is reflected in the Western trainings of Ukrainian soldiers, Boardman said.
Some of the soldiers trained already have front-line experience. So, for example, when they are being taught trench clearance, they “know very well how to clear a trench because they were doing it a few weeks ago.” They sometimes push back on what the instructors tell them to do, saying it won’t work in this conflict.
Boardman said that feedback is welcome.
What happens, he said, is that NATO best practices and the Ukrainians’ direct combat experience get combined. There is a “really rich mutual understanding going on,” and the training ultimately “ends up with the sum being much greater than the parts, which is really valuable for us.”
Boardman said that even though the UK has “spent 20 or so years in the counterinsurgency focus,” the training for Ukrainians is largely similar to what is given to the UK’s own basic recruits, just with some specific focuses tailored to their war, like mines, drone warfare, and electronic warfare.
“We probably teach them more than we would teach our British Army recruits because our British Army recruits don’t go straight to war off the back of their basic training,” he said.
Boardman said the UK and its allies benefit from training Ukrainians too, getting direct feedback about how to fight Russia for their soldiers. He said trainers are “learning a lot from the Ukrainians,” and “we are also feeding all that knowledge into the British Army.”
Boardman praised Ukraine’s soldiers, saying its new recruits pick up on “how to operate a weapon incredibly quickly.”
He said that Ukraine’s military focuses on the quality of its soldiers, choosing that as its strategy because it “hasn’t got the size, the sheer mass of the Russian military.”
He said Ukraine decided to increase the length of Interflex training from 35 days to almost 50.
“I’m really impressed, frankly, that they’ve done that because they could easily have said, ‘We need recruits quickly. We just need numbers. Can we shorten the course a bit? Can you get through to us faster?’ But they’ve done the opposite,” Boardman said.
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