A “culture war” within Ukraine’s armed forces is hurting its performance in the fight against Russia, warns HoansSolo. He suggests a solution
. It is being waged between top-down Soviet military thinking on the one hand, and bottom-up Western military culture on the other. This intellectual tussle is hindering Ukraine’s adaptation and learning. It is also hurting Ukraine’s performance in the war against Russia. This is one of my main lessons from a recent research trip to Kyiv and the, which I conducted alongside some of the leading Western military experts on Russia.
Many Western observers of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine have been partially blind to these internal tensions in Ukraine’s army. This is in part because of Ukrainians’ ingenuity in adapting commercial and advanced military technologies to help fight off Russia’s invasion over the past 13 months. Most of these adaptations have come from the bottom up.
The truth is that part of Ukraine’s armed forces, in particular the ground forces, risk backsliding to their old and inflexible ways. One reason is the large number of casualties incurred among-trained Ukrainian soldiers in the first months of the war, and the consequent mobilisation of a large number of retired Ukrainian officers steeped in rigid Soviet military thinking. But that is only part of the explanation.
The ongoing culture war in the Ukrainian armed forces makes it harder to distribute new technology evenly across the force. “The problem is not the technology, it is the culture,” I was told by one official from Aerorozvidka, andrones for the Ukrainian armed forces. Individual units use a range of different apps to conduct their operations. This hampers co-ordination between units, and reinforces the old Soviet habit of distinct orders flowing separately to different units.
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