Ukraine’s mobilization law lowering conscription age from 27 to 25 took effect May 18. The embattled country’s military and political leadership hope that this will create enough manpower to fill gaps and continue to hold the Russian hordes at bay. Bolstered by new equipment and ammunition from the West, the country fights on.
What’s the best way to help? Bodying up — volunteering. That comes with many costs, though, particularly for foreigners: Pay is low, there are complicated laws to navigate and this isn’t simply a war of self-defense, but a very dangerous conflict in which the odds of being badly hurt or killed are high.
Americans and Europeans who feel satisfied lobbying for aid from afar may feel content knowing that ammunition, weapons and vehicles are en route from their nations. And it is certain that those items have done much to preserve lives in most of Ukraine. Russia began its invasion in 2022 hoping to plant its flag in Kyiv and Odesa, and at present is being halted again north of Kharkiv.
Some countries have begun openly considering returning soldiers withdrawn from Ukrainian territory when the invasion began, in order to make training recently mobilized citizens as easy and straightforward as possible.
There is another way to help. Experienced military veterans from countries such as America, Germany, the United Kingdom and France can provide expertise and training, as volunteers.
Training is the thing that gets talked and thought about least by people interested in military affairs. It’s not sexy like the advanced technology packed into an F-22; it’s not breathtaking like the maneuvers of tens of thousands of troops on the battlefield or awe-inspiring like an aircraft carrier. Done properly, it’s tedious, dirty and exhausting. But done properly, it wins wars.
Some may object that at this point, even very experienced veterans of the U.S., British, German and French militaries have little to offer Ukraine in its war of self-defense. Training in the West does not anticipate the tactical considerations facing soldiers looking up for drones and assaulting from trench to trench, fighting defensively from fixed positions or from buildings. This is a fair objection; the only veterans capable of training Ukraine fully at this point are Ukrainian veterans of this war. Specifically, veterans of the last year, during which time Russian drones and trench warfare has proliferated.
But “full training” isn’t necessary here. The foundation of successful military action, of war, is small-unit tactics and small-unit leadership, and those have not changed substantially for 100 years. Zooming out a little, and blurring the details, one could even stand by generalizations as broad as: The fundamentals of waging war successfully have not changed for thousands of years.
What are those fundamentals? Teamwork, maneuvering as a group and empowering people to lead ever-larger groups. The insights and technological developments of the last 100 years have led to increased decentralization. So training that focuses on preparing squad leaders to maneuver two to three teams of three to five people each is also preparing platoon leaders to maneuver three to four platoons of 20 to 40 people each. And that is the base on which all other modern warfare rests.
There is no military that does small-unit tactics and leadership better than the militaries of the U.S. and other nations that have embraced the egalitarian and meritocratic principles of the enlightenment, and the humanism on which those principles rest. Training unlocks the potential of those insights, and spreads it around a force, animating it.
The very ideals on which the U.S. military and allied formations are founded happen to be the ideals for which Ukrainians are fighting. This makes their military and citizens very receptive to this type of training.
To a great degree, Ukraine’s revolution against Russian dominance is a revolution for decentralization, and for the last 10 years that revolution has happened fastest and most effectively in Ukraine’s military, out of necessity. If it had not occurred there, Ukraine would have been vanquished by Russia already. The extent to which Russia has had military success is the extent to which it has fought against itself — the Russian colonels and generals who trained alongside Ukrainian colonels and generals decades ago as part of the Soviet military. The extent to which Ukraine has been able to frustrate and confound Russia is the extent to which it has empowered and elevated its junior officers of a decade ago. Meritocracy in action.
All of this makes Ukraine’s culture and military very fertile for the type of thinking and action for which Western militaries train. The people take quickly to the type of small-unit tactics and small-unit leadership that wins battles at the squad and platoon level. I and others saw this during two trips to train Ukrainian citizens and soldiers in 2022-23, and it is a large reason why combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan and I co-founded Citizens to Soldiers, International — a group that seeks to facilitate volunteers to help with training.
We weren’t alone — many other veterans organized training protocols and traveled to help train Ukrainians in those early days. Supporting those initiatives then was useful, and organizing and supporting them now would be, too.
The weapons and ammunition the West sends Ukraine are badly needed, and good; free countries must keep them coming. But Ukraine needs more than weapons — as it gears up another wave of mobilization, it also needs experienced veterans to help train those soldiers on the foundational tactics and leadership ideas that have been a key component of every great military.
Ukrainians are temperamentally suited for this type of fighting. Let’s give them the help they need to defend their families, and reinforce their instincts to adopt them in war. They’ll be very helpful combatting the Russian-style corruption against which Ukrainian citizens are fighting in their own country after the war, too. And veterans of the fighting against Russia will be poised to usher in a new age of justice, innovation, cooperation and good governance.
Adrian Bonenberger is a writer and a veteran of the U.S. Army. He is a co-founder of American Veterans for Ukraine.