By Deborah Sanders at Defence-in-Depth: https://defenceindepth.co/2017/07/05...t-in-the-east/

Introduction:

One of the key challenges of military reform for any military organisation is the question: 'are we preparing for the right war?' In my article The War We Want; The War That We Get: Ukraine’s Military Reform and the Conflict in the East, I examine this issue in the context of Ukrainian efforts before and after the start of the conflict in the Donbas.

Prior to the Russian annexation of Crimea and the emergence of conflict in the east of Ukraine, the Ukrainian military were engaged in a process of military reform. This process was influenced heavily by the so-called ‘transformation paradigm’: a model of war articulated by the US that identified future military effectiveness with such concepts as agility, concentration, digitisation, and information. However, by 2014 it had become increasingly evident that the Ukrainian government had been trying to adopt a model of warfare that was beyond the capability of the Ukrainian state to deliver and which did not fit the reality of the war that Ukraine’s armed forces actually had to face. By 2015 it had become increasingly clear that the war in the east was not the rapid and mobile warfare that the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) had been conceptually and structurally preparing for, at least in theory, since 2006. In my article, I examine how the UAF have been forced to adopt a new model of military reform – resuscitation – a process of recreating older approaches which, in the context of actual combat in the Donbas, is better suited to the nature of the conflict than continued attempts to replicate aspects of the transformation model. The key aspects of the resuscitation of the UAF have included: the reintroduction of mass; organic ‘bottom-up’ innovation; and the utilisation of what were, in effect, pre-modern methods of mobilisation.
Highlights:


  • The UAF reversed the process of professionalization as these forces were too small, and the war in Donbas has highlighted the need for mass, reserves and stockpiles. Conscription was reintroduced in May 2014 to raise the UAF to a strength of 250,000

  • Organic and bottom-up innovation has been key to Ukraine’s war effort. Civil society networks have crowd-funded and delivered funding and supplies to frontline UAF units

  • Some of the most effective Ukrainian units were militias raised by oligarchs, and these 50 volunteer battalions of ~10,000 fighters played a vital role in containing the separatists through 2014 and 2015, despite being under-equipped and trained

  • Was it the right decision for so many militaries to try to realize a transformation toward an American approach to warfighting that was overly ambitious?

  • In addition, can we presume that the conditions of war will allow us to fight the way we want to? The nature of the Donbas conflict poses questions about the resilience of many European militaries. Will militaries designed for short wars of maneuver be able to cope with protracted attrition?