I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies

thebulwark.com

13 pointsbelter4 comments

I nodded along with the author until I got to the end part about reforms in the Ukrainian military. It's light, but what he says sounds overly rosy. UK Lt. Col. Glen Grant wrote a critique of Ukrainian military reform efforts in Seven Years of Deadlock: Why Ukraine's Military Reforms Have Gone Nowhere, and How the US Should Respond. (https://jamestown.org/program/why-the-ukrainian-defense-syst...)

Interesting. The article by Lt. Col. Grant was published July 16, 2021 and is very critical of Ukraine. If I read the article in mid February, I would have expected the Ukrainian army to be defeated in 3-4 days.

They obviously got their shit together in a big way when Russia invaded. The army that is fighting Russia is not the army described by Lt. Col. Grant.

Or the Russian bear is more of a racoon

Yeah, you kind of put your finger on it. The Ukrainian performance has been surprising. The elephant in the room is how much of that is due to hidden NATO help, e.g. with signals intelligence (http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/blog/2022/04/02/how-much-is-u-...). Obviously, anyone who really knows won't be interested in talking about it for a long time.

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