Turns out that fighting a peer competitor is very different from bombing defenceless people
The NATO style of fighting, so heavily reliant on controlling the skies, has also only been tested in recent years in arenas where the alliance had air superiority, experts say.
“No living member of NATO armed forces has experienced combat close to what Ukrainians have experienced over the past 18 months,” Davis Ellison, a strategic analyst with the Hague Center for Security Studies (HCSS), told Newsweek.
“The NATO way of land warfare has never been seriously tested against a major state adversary, despite decades of investment and training,” he added.
Every time I ever did an exercise with americans they always had to change the rules to win. Imagine pulling a millennium challenge because your infantry company got routed by 10 dudes and still thinking you are good at what you do
Were you in the military?
I was but not in the USA, sometimes we would do training with them either as peers or to be Opposition Force
What’s your impression of the people there? Troops, officers?
In one word, stubborn. The officers I saw ranged from assholes (who salutes in the field?) to normal nerds with a history degree. The enlisted was really diverse, it ranged from frat bro types, wanna-be the bad guy from avatar 2 types, guys waiting for their contracts to end, guys who joined for their greencard which I think is particularly fucked up systemically, and a couple of nerds sprinkled in too. The officers didn’t really interact much with the troops off duty which was a bit strange for me, usually where I’m from while they still have separate messes it wouldn’t be unusual for an officer to be invited in after an exercise by their subordinates.
Thank you
Modern day gun boat diplomacy tactics do not work against a peer level force? Who would have thought!
“Air superiority” is kinda understating it a bit.
How do they manage to write an article that admits their vaunted training regimen is dogshit, while sounding obnoxiously self-assured and arrogant?
Also, archived version:
I also love how they keep lamenting Ukraine falling back to Soviet tactics, like you know stuff that actually works in practice.
That’s part of what I meant - it reads with an unspoken assumption that “Soviet tactics” (whatever that means) are inherently inferior to “NATO standards”
Decades of western propaganda are now clashing with reality, and people who’ve internalized it don’t know how to process this.
They believed the old “human waves” myth they themselves spread.
