Ukrainian soldiers often showed far greater tactical imagination than their Western trainers, a former British trainer said, pointing to their ambush tactics.
The UK leads multinational training for Ukrainian soldiers to prepare them for war with Russia, sharing Western best practices. In the process, though, Ukraine has shared its hard-won combat experience. Its troops have impressed and taught the soldiers training them.
The Ukrainians “have a much greater tactical imagination than we do,” Maj. Maguire, a British military officer who helped lead the training, told Business Insider. He spoke on the condition that just his rank and last name be used.
It’s not that the British armed forces don’t have imagination. Ukrainian soldiers, out of necessity, are willing to take more risks and think out of the box, while British soldiers largely “have a training mindset” more focused on rules, he said.
He observed this firsthand during ambush planning. Maguire said he was “fixed into our doctrinal set of an ambush,” which includes a killing group and groups designed to cut off any soldiers trying to flee or any reinforcements arriving.
The Ukrainian soldiers he was with “sort of scurried away and planned this thing for six hours.” Then, they “came out with the most tactically brilliant plan I could think of.” The plan used the ground in ways he hadn’t considered. They were “far more flexible and comfortable coming off the doctrine,” he said.
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Maguire said Ukraine’s officer corps in particular is “less indoctrinated than ours.” He described them as civilians who have risen up, “and they’re not quite as constrained by the norms of military behavior.”
Ukrainian soldiers do things differently
He said Ukrainian soldiers aren’t as fixed by established doctrine and instead “they’re far happier taking levels of tactical risk, and consequently they’re just able to show a bit more imagination. Not all of them, but certainly the better ones can and did.”
The Ukrainians, Maguire shared, “were far more comfortable in taking tactical risks that we would not do as sort of a British Army because we would be concerned about control measures over it. And I think that’s just driven by necessity. They just get it. They have their objective.”
The UK, to some extent, is limited by still being in training mode.
That said, things are changing. Maguire said the British mindset before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 was more about being “tactically safe.”
“The Ukrainian mindset is very different,” he said.
Now the British Army’s mindset has shifted. A key question, though, is whether it is changing fast enough. Maguire wasn’t sure. But one major change he is seeing is soldiers going into work with a clearer understanding that they might die in this line of work.
Learning from Ukraine
Maguire led a subgroup that trained Ukrainian soldiers who already had experience on the battlefield. The training was conducted through Operation Interflex, the UK-led training that is also aided by 13 partner nations, including Canada, Australia, and Denmark.
The training also teaches new Ukrainian recruits who have not yet seen battle, and in total, the program has trained more than 62,000 Ukrainians.
Those seasoned soldiers have experience that the Western soldiers training them do not. The UK and its allies haven’t fought a large-scale industrial war in decades and are studying Ukraine to adapt.
Maguire said that training Ukrainians who already had experience was intimidating for Western trainers, but there was still a knowledge exchange that proved valuable for both sides.
The UK has taken a host of lessons both from watching the war and supporting Ukraine, especially in areas like drone warfare, with British units leaning hard into small drone warfighting tactics drawn from the war. The exchange has also been eye-opening in other ways as well.
Maguire said trainers were initially caught off guard by how slowly the Ukrainians moved in battle. What was first perceived as a bit of laziness was recognized as tactically sound for a battlefield rigged with traps.
He said the Ukrainians have “a greater understanding of what it takes to win, the sheer determination.”
