LVIV, Ukraine — On their way to a better tomorrow, the Ukrainian Armed Forces should promote mutual trust between commanding officers and their subordinates, as well as the latters’ ability to take charge of major combat formations in unsettling situations, as Glen Grant, the retired British Army colonel and former advisor to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, said in a speech on Nov. 1 during the Lviv Security Forum.
During a panel titled “Leadership in the Army: A new paradigm for Ukraine,” Grant noted that in the past five years the Ukrainian military has done everything possible to deter Russia’s aggression against their country. But now the Ukrainian Armed Forces need to go one more step further and get rid of their deeply ineffective, Soviet-style approaches to military leadership.
As an example of what is missing in the Ukrainian military, Grant told a story from his own military career. Once upon a time during artillery drills in West Germany, he was entrusted to substitute for a commanding officer for four days. Back then, Grant had a rank of major, while his interim position was for a field officer of a much higher rank.
“Trust — the general had no worries about me as a major commanding the brigade,” Grant said. “It could be any other major, and he wouldn’t have any worries because our system breeds that trust. It breeds that confidence that junior officers are trained and ready to do these things.”
But the Ukrainian military has serious problems in this regard, Grant said.
“The Soviet paradigm that we have in (the Ukrainian) Armed Forces at the moment… does not allow the young officer these learning steps that they need to be great later on. The whole process of education and training needs to change.”
In many ways, junior officers are not prepared to take charge of combat formations beacause the rigid hierarchy of Ukrainian command and control never gives them a chance to try and learn from their mistakes for the better.
“Trust means that you let people fail,” Grant said.
This is something that has not changed in the last five years of war, he added, though according to Grant hope lies with political leadership, who can order the military to have exercises that give junior officers a chance to run big combat formations.
“You can change the system only through power,” Grant said. “Politicians can start demanding… that we have exercises that test captains and majors being in charge… We have to (notionally) kill off officers on exercises and actually rotate them in the way it happens in combat.”
Soldiers of Ukraine’s Azov Battalion draw a bead on a Ukrainian Mi-8 helicopter behind a ZU-23 anti-aircraft mount during seashore maneuvers near Urzuf on Oct. 9, 2018. (Volodymyr Petrov)
In actual all-out wars, such skills would save combat formations from being disorganized and beheaded after the loss of their commanding officers while encouraging lower-ranking officers to show initiative.
Grant added that Ukraine’s political leadership should also insist on running exercises during which troops practice stressful, exhausting maneuvers and deal with unforeseen situations on the battlefield rather than training the same, conventional and predictable plots from Soviet textbooks.
“For instance, how many brigades that we know have driven all the way from Lviv to the front of Kyiv to practice defense, in two days? None. I am absolutely sure… that the 28th (Mechanized Infantry Brigade) in Odesa has never driven all the way to Kyiv to fight. It gets on a train if it goes anywhere, but you can’t rely on trains in wartime. You have to practice 200-, 300-, 400-kilometer drives,” Grant said.
But then again, he added, without a strict order from Ukraine’s political leadership, the military will continue relying on staid exercises that do not apply in an all-out war.
“People need to do: nasty, hard military exercises,” Grant said. “If you do that, everybody will change — they have to.”
The Lviv Security Forum, one of Ukraine’s key foreign policy and security platforms, discusses the Kremlin’s threat to European democracies at its third annual meeting between Oct. 30 and Nov. 1 at Lviv’s Ukrainian Catholic University.
The forum traditionally presented in partnership with the Kyiv Post is titled “Russia in Europe: old mistakes and new challenges.”
This year, the forum welcomes over 200 experts and high profile officials from over 10 nations, including the United States, Great Britain, Latvia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Finland, Spain, and Germany.
