Your questions answered: Are Ukraine’s allies advising its commanders on strategy?
Hundreds of messages have been flooding in since the return of our feature in which Sky News correspondents and military analysts answer your questions.
This one from reader Deighty has been put to our military analyst Sean Bell.
Are the allies of Ukraine (the UK and the US etc) offering advice to the Ukrainian commanders on strategic methods to assist in countering the Russian army?
Real-time solutions, rather than simply training recruits or soldiers.
Bell says…
Thank you for this interesting question.
Military doctrine and tactics are based on a variety of factors, but often have a national flavour based on history and domestic equipment capability.
Many former Soviet Union nations have relatively archaic military equipment, so base their military tactics on infantry assaults that often involve highly attritional warfare.
Russia also bases its warfighting tactics on attritional battles, and with a significantly greater pool of resources upon which to draw, it would inevitably seek to drag Ukraine into a punishing war of attrition that would favour the larger Russian forces.
After the horrors of successive world wars, the West developed a very different style of warfare to minimise casualties that was based on technology.
Western military support for Ukraine has focused on providing high-tech precision-strike weapons, which have provided Kyiv with an asymmetric advantage on the battlefield.
These technological weapons are only effective, however, when married to a tailored military doctrine and tactics, which will have been unfamiliar to Ukrainian forces, at least initially.
This is why the UK and other Western nations offered to train Ukrainian forces before the start of the spring offensive, and more than 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been trained in the use of Western weapons and associated tactics.
However, as you suggest, support for Ukraine has endured past the initial training demands, and the West continues to provide specialist advice to tactical and operational Ukrainian commanders, particularly to help ensure that the limited supplies of Western weapons and military equipment are used as effectively as possible.
Regardless, this is Ukraine’s war, and it is Ukrainian soldiers and leadership that make the ultimate decisions on the battlefield.
