Jake Epstein
To prepare for the next major conflict, the US military needs to forget nearly everything it has learned from two decades of fighting wars in the Middle East, an American veteran in Ukraine told Business Insider. Scooter, who serves as an instructor with the 4th Ranger Regiment of Ukraine's Special Operations Forces, said Russia's invasion offers lessons for the West about how it can prepare for future combat. The American could only be identified by his call sign for security reasons. The first lesson I would recommend to NATO and the United States is to forget the last lesson they learned," the American said during a video chat from an undisclosed location in central Ukraine.
A counterinsurgency, like the ones American forces fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, is "nothing like a conventional war" in terms of the intensity of combat and the types of threats. Scooter, a former US Navy sailor who fought Russia for two years alongside other foreign volunteers in Ukraine's International Legion before eventually joining the Ukrainian Special Operations Forces, said threats that soldiers face in this war — rocket fire from helicopters, fighter jet strikes, accurate artillery shelling — are vastly different from the scenes in the Middle East.
"Commanders need to be training their people to deal with a threat, very similar to what we were expecting during the Cold War, with whoever we end up in a war with next," he explained. "They need to be training them for much of the same threat that we would've faced in the 1980s." In a modern war, achieving air superiority through the suppression or destruction of enemy surface-to-air missile systems is critical. In the Middle East campaigns of the past couple of decades, this mission was much less of an issue for US forces, which could operate relatively uncontested in the skies.
Russia failed to achieve air superiority during the early stages of its invasion despite fielding a force of fighter jets and bombers vastly superior to that of Ukraine. This would come back to haunt Moscow, which is locked in a grinding, attritional fight, unable to make significant battlefield gains. Russian fighter aircraft have used highly destructive glide bombs to attack Ukrainian military and civilian targets. Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP Advanced air defenses on both sides prevent Russia and Ukraine from operating their aircraft too close to the front line.
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