1000 Days In – Junior Officers and the Ukraine-Russia Conflict – Continued Learning Part Two

In July of 2023, the Center for Junior Officers published a piece titled “500 Days and Counting – what Junior Officers can learn from the Ukraine-Russia Conflict.” Both Ukrainian and Russian forces have suffered high losses which required significant reconstitution of junior officers. The article discussed why junior officers need trust for cohesion, the difficulties with constantly rebuilding team dynamics, and why these aspects deserve focus. In the last ~500 days since the previous article, dialogue in the media and among leaders in the Department of Defense has shifted to focus on the impact technological integration into small units has played out on the front lines. “Part Two” provides further recommendations for Junior Officers on how to integrate technology into their training to continue to learn from this conflict.

Leaders, Trainers, and Trainees Build Unit Confidence

The modern battlefield, dominated by unconventional warfare, is saturated with technology that did not exist just a few years ago. It is essential that this technology is well understood and incorporated into training at every opportunity. The connective tissue between Part One and Part Two of this article series, put simply, is that trust and cohesion are built far afront of combat when junior officers conduct innovative, complex, and challenging training. In training scenarios that the junior officer and their team dream up and execute, they develop the ability for teammates to think critically before, during, and after engagements. Diverse and complex training enables rapid problem-solving and builds competence and confidence that will allow your unit to extrapolate lessons learned to a wider range of problems. To paraphrase Erwin Rommel, “Training errors are recorded on paper. Tactical errors are etched in stone.” Leaders, trainers, and trainees must come together as a “triangle of power” to understand and develop responsibilities and outcomes for training objectives.

There are two key recommendations we have for junior officers that seek to leverage the technological integration lessons learned from the last 1000 days and build confidence in their units through tough training

1. Leverage the many ways to train with and against the breakthrough threat of drones
2. Use unit innovation labs to solve complex technical problems.

If you are not leveraging drones, or training with or against them, you should be.

Home station tactical training should not be a place where your OPFOR is unmotivated, unchallenged, or representative of the same canned exercises and scenarios based on past conflicts. Junior officers are uniquely positioned in their units with less previous experience (and thus, bias) to try new things and test what works. Military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz states, there is no point in learning extensively if “knowledge does not become capability.” To that extent officers and leaders at every level only benefit from lessons learned from the Ukrainian front lines when these lessons are incorporated into innovative training at all levels. Drones are but one example that we see contemporarily – and utilizing them in training allows Junior Officers to translate lessons from Ukraine into effective training. An open-source tool to think through how a junior officer could plan event oriented training is the ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data), a disaggregated data mapping initiative. Filtering from the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, we see an increase from 53 incidents of “explosions and remote violence” due to air and drone strikes during the first week of conflict, to 466 incidents during the week of 6 September 2024. When using open-source data such as this, we also see differences in logistical patterns and opposing force adaptation. Material adaptation is facilitated by utilizing cheaper, more easily implementable platforms such as drones to validate targets effectively before expending expensive munitions, saving material production times and costs. Thus, we can assess with strong confidence that strike patterns will incorporate drones in the foreseeable future, more lightly augmented by artillery fires in support, depending on the disposition of the enemy force and how significant of a threat it might be deemed.

Junior officers can test new tactics in training by thinking through data sets like ACLED, combined with validation of opposing force SOPs from their intelligence sections. In the ACLED data set, the second-highest subsets of events across the span of conflict are “shelling events” and “armed clashes.” Simply speaking, a junior officer could connect these data points and their interrelation to drive tactical training. For example, you may need to refine SOPs when moving to contact with sUAS on the battlefield. Once the drone is identified during your movement, the squad, or platoon, has x amount of time to address the threat and re-locate based on the known responses, firing times, and round analysis of opposing force artillery pieces. Real-time data and knowledge of enemy-combined arms strategies drive this training concept. A training event like this might let junior officers know that no matter how good their SOPs are, maybe they don’t have the right tools to detect drones far enough out or react to ground and aerial contact simultaneously. These become “red flags” in training that can be brought up elsewhere.

Both Ukraine and Russia continue to integrate unmanned aerial systems in all layers of warfare across the battlespace, which requires the competence to detect, defeat, and deter them. Junior officers must focus on how to enable their forces (at the lowest level) to effectively handle these rapidly replenished and cost-effective systems. Finer points of training should incorporate both ISR and counter-ISR principles. Making your formation familiar with the components of drone warfare should include how you maneuver your formations, the cover you choose, EM and thermal signature discipline, utilization of deception, and how you detect and defeat sUAS and other unmanned aerial systems.