The problem is not only that during 9 years of war we were unable to change the Soviet legacy. The problem is that during 9 years of war we were unable to change the people who were supposed to change the Soviet legacy.
Yesterday, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valeriy Zaluzhny, in his article for CNN, named three main areas on which Ukraine and its allies should focus their main efforts in 2024. This is the creation of a system for providing our armed forces with high-tech equipment. Introducing a new philosophy of training and warfare that takes into account resource limitations and how to use them. And the fastest possible development of new combat capabilities.
In his article, he acknowledges the enemy’s “significant advantage in mobilizing human resources,” and at the same time points to “the inability of state institutions in Ukraine to improve the size of the armed forces without resorting to unpopular measures.” Zaluzhny also notes that the imperfection of the regulatory framework in Ukraine and the “partial monopolization of the military-industrial complex” increases dependence on allies for arms supplies.
Even more basic problems faced in the Armed Forces of Ukraine were described by Gleb Bityukov, a teacher at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, a social activist, and now a senior combat medic of the company of the 242nd separate Teroborone battalion, who fought twice near Bakhmut and was wounded there. His message on Facebook organically complements Valery Zaluzhny’s article.
Gleb Bityukov: New rules of the game and value system
We're all in the same mess. Everyone, without exception, in this country. And we will have no normal sleep, no future, no present, until the war is over and we get out of this ass.
In ten years, the Armed Forces of Ukraine should have been the center of reform, since the future of everyone, without exception, in this country depends only on how events unfold on the front line. They should have, but they never did.
Bacteria cannot be defeated by other bacteria. In order for us to defeat the army of armed bacteria, it is not enough to become more armed bacteria. We need to become antibiotics. Become smarter, better organized, trained and fast.
Until we change the most important things, we will remain the same small Soviet army.
Professional Development
The Ukrainian army operates a Soviet system of two parallel verticals - ranks and positions. Often a certain position presupposes the presence of a certain title or its assignment. That is, when getting a position, a person expects to receive a title that is “tied” to this position or receives it for the time spent in the service.
The perverted system of obtaining ranks leads to people jumping from position to position just to get a promotion in rank. The same person can be responsible for logistics, combat training, equipment repair, fuel accounting for one year, although in fact he does not know how to do any of these things.
Thus, the army puts itself in checkmate, because people with less knowledge and skills lead those who have more of both.
Stars on 'epaulets' grow like mushrooms after rain, regardless of whether the person who receives them has merit.
World practice is different. So, for example, in the American army, an officer who is sent to a combat zone is promoted to rank, but when he returns back, the rank is taken away, because in the rear he does not fulfill the duties that he performed at the front.
In our realities, everything happens the other way around. In the rear they become officers, officers receive new and new promotions, often without having either the experience or abilities for this. This is not motivation, it is its opposite. Motivation must come from within. From “Why am I here!”, “What do I want to do, and not “Give me the highest rank, and then I’ll jump to another position.”
The rigid track of traditions destroys the desire for initiative and a weak ability to change and use new practices. In the army, it is not those who take initiative and strive for development who reach the top, but those who write, drink no more than others and wash themselves at least sometimes. The urge to edit from within requires extraordinary effort and resistance from almost everywhere.
To turn isolated examples of initiatives into established practice, a new paradigm of thinking in the army is needed. In which being a warrior is the highest honor, and not a compulsion. Being part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces should be a source of pride and a basis for prestige, not a punishment. The best of the best must serve. Military personnel at all levels must be trained and developed.
Human potential
Today the army has a powerful tool for selecting candidates. Despite the risks and complexities, the Army can now more than ever offer financial incentives that have never been seen before in either the public sector or the Army. Most of those who serve now have never received a salary of this level in their lives. The state can offer benefits, fame, career growth. However, this tool is not used. The state does not conduct selection; the army now sets almost no requirements for the profile of those who perform these duties. There is no selection of personnel and, as a result, random people end up in random positions.
There must be an initial assessment of the abilities of candidates for service and a selection of functional responsibilities taking into account the strengths of each candidate. In the future, there will be constant professional development in this specialty and the most effective use of fighters, taking into account their professionalism.
It is not those who are better, smarter, more active who get into leadership positions, but those who spent more time in the army. Receiving another title “for length of service” is deprofessionalization. People who did not participate in hostilities do not have military achievements, but simply existed at headquarters and rise up the ladder of ranks and positions. They were surrounded by others like them, part of the paper environment. Negative selection arises - the best leave the departments, while others remain and occupy leadership positions.
Positions in the army should not be tied to rank, but rank to the time the military man spent in the army. Most army commanders are officers trained to Soviet standards. This is a war between two Soviet armies. A small Soviet army is fighting against a large Soviet army.
When we talk about a counteroffensive that did not live up to expectations, we first of all complain about the lack of equipment and ammunition support from our partners. But any military operation is first and foremost about people.
The people who plan it. Professional, trained commanders. Top positions in the Ukrainian army are occupied by people who were formed in the early post-Soviet period. Then Ukrainian weapons were sold on world shadow markets, and our warehouses were “exploded” to hide the consequences of this sale. You shouldn't expect breakthrough ideas from people who grew up in this environment. They are good specialists, but in a completely different area - the area of making money and getting positions.
We are amazed by the “meat” assaults of the Russian troops, but if we take a closer look, there is a clear hierarchy of personnel there. These assaults are carried out by those whom they do not feel sorry for. They are practically not trained, they can only carry out basic commands like “forward” and “backward”, they are provided with practically nothing. It's not worth spending money on a military unit whose cost of living is close to zero.
Behind them are more trained and prepared, but also not very expensive, soldiers. And somewhere in the depths there remain well-armed, trained and professional. They are protected and, hiding behind cheap consumables, they cause us the greatest harm. They have honed and perfected this strategy over the past almost two years. When we see the enemy's casualty statistics, we perceive it as an achievement, not realizing that in fact this is their deliberate strategy and we have inflicted small damage that does not affect the course of the war. They fight not by numbers of people, but by territories.
Nobody counts people. Six months and hundreds of thousands of people for the sake of one city, these are the planned results and they achieved them. Our information space is filled with narratives about the stupidity of Russians, which distorts the perception of reality. We laugh at claims that the enemy has achieved his goals. In fact, this is true. Step by step they achieve what they planned. We are simply not realistic about their achievements.
Our army, instead of creating a more effective strategy, copies the Russian one, without having the same number of people, it sends anyone from doctors to drone operators to positions just to hold the line of defense drawn by someone on the map. Otherwise, you will have to report “to the top” that the positions have been surrendered. And no one wants to hear this.
Positions must be maintained at all costs. As a rule, this price is the life of the most motivated and trained soldiers who go to hold plantings and villages, realizing that this is a one-way road, but they cannot help but do this, since the values for which we all came to the army are the defense of the Motherland under any conditions. What did this lead to?
Copying someone else's “meat” strategy, or in other words, the lack of one’s own human-effective strategy has led to the fact that these people have already run out. The best, most motivated people no longer exist. They either died or left the army in one way or another. We will not achieve victory by copying.
We need paradigm shifts in consciousness. Commanders should be leaders, and not those who have spent longer in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The best reaches out to the best, so leaders will gather teams around them. Leaders who are capable of taking responsibility require a certain attitude towards themselves. Clear rules of the game, decision-making authority, clear goals and the ability to assemble a team. Without this minimum, they will not be able to take responsibility for the results. Therefore, the mandate for independent decisions is an obligatory part of the responsibility-result chain.
Not everyone can be a leader, even if they are ready for it, so not everyone can be made a commander.
Economic efficiency
It’s worth finally starting to evaluate what effect spending on the army brings. The cost of the decision of each commander, each unit. From a squad or platoon to a battalion or brigade. It is necessary to learn to count the cost of all those senseless decisions of post-Soviet commanders.
The goal should not be saving money and keeping costs as low as possible, but economic efficiency, that is, getting the maximum effect for the money spent. The decision of each commander, or his inaction, must be assessed from the point of efficiency, including economic efficiency. What will be the maximum effect of these decisions?
When we retreated from positions in the already dilapidated Bakhmut, we moved from basement to basement in which we found a huge amount of supplies. Over time, I realized that in those basements you could find everything from AK cartridges to food, RPGs and grenades. There was no need to worry about being hungry and having nothing to shoot back with. And the main reason is not that it was difficult to remove all this, but that no one planned how much supplies were needed. There were no coordinated logistics and no sense of responsibility for the cost of each decision.
Another example is that one of my previous units was disbanded. The soldiers froze, awaiting further instructions from the command, receiving their salaries. The command was in no hurry to make any decisions. Everything happened as if in a slow motion movie. In the end, the order came and hundreds of people were not needed. At the height of the war, hundreds of people were unnecessary.
They were forced to look for a place of service. The whole process lasted about four months. The decision of the brigade command cost the state hundreds of thousands of hryvnia, because no one assessed its activities from the point of view of effectiveness. In addition, all the equipment that the fighters received remained on the unit’s balance sheet, and the fighters themselves were simply thrown overboard. The state, represented by the army, has once again lost confidence, having taken away for itself everything that, thanks to the support of volunteers, the soldiers had collected for so long and carefully.
A separate conversation about moving units to nowhere without a specific goal. This is justified during an offensive, but often happens when units are withdrawing for recovery, replenishment or training. Movement occurs chaotically to unprepared locations. As a result, a lot of equipment is lost, deteriorated and becomes unusable, since there is nothing to transport it with and nowhere to store it. People have nowhere to live.
We have to organize the life of hundreds of fighters from scratch, purchase means for cooking, heating and supply logistics. But each division must have its own hub with warehouses for storing equipment, logistics chains and conditions for accommodating personnel. Then there would be no need to transport absolutely all the property every time, but store it in the unit’s hub, using only what is needed at that moment.
If companies in the private sector acted according to such parameters, they would have gone bankrupt long ago.
Today the Armed Forces of Ukraine is about the ineffective use of resources - human, material, financial, time.
The key to maximum efficiency is planning. Effective work requires the existence of a feedback mechanism, which does not yet exist at all. The principle - I am the commander here, I decide, and everyone else just carries out - is not effective.
In critical combat situations, strict execution of orders is necessary. But the person who gives this order must be a professional. The key to a successful military mission is planning. The order must be supported by a strategy developed by the team, and strategic plans must be supported by specific operational tasks with deadlines and responsibilities. You achieve fame, honor and recognition. If you don't keep up, you'll be demoted in rank.
Stop imitating
You shouldn’t expect something to start working if it’s not legally documented on paper first. If the people who are responsible for compliance with the regulatory framework are unable or unwilling to formalize it legally so that it works, it will not work in reality. What seems like little things, puns, are actually of fundamental importance. Write-off of property, job responsibilities, paperwork, these are normative stones over which any initiative will stumble.
The order on the Military Military Commission contains a huge number of legal errors, due to which fighters cannot receive quality assistance and recognition of injuries by the state. You don't even need to dive that deep. The Charter of the Internal Service of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is a Soviet legacy, which contains legally illiterate norms. So, for example, it says that a serviceman must report his illness to the commander. Cough is not a disease.
Headache, high blood pressure, nausea are not a disease. These are signs or symptoms. But not a disease. A disease is a diagnosis. It can be installed by a doctor. That is, from a legal point of view, the serviceman has nothing to report, since no one has diagnosed him and, from a legal perspective, there are grounds to refuse to provide him with assistance.
These, at first glance, little things turn into a wall that military personnel face in hospitals. And this is only in the medical field. The same thing happens in others. The Charter contains a lot about beds and bedside tables, even about foot wraps, but almost nothing about professional development, goal setting and analysis.
The modern Ukrainian army consists of numerous paper reports that have no practical value. And this is in a country where there is 'Diya', and money can be sent to each other from card to card by shaking their phones. Accounting for and writing off property that is constantly being destroyed requires extreme effort. Everything is imitated. As a result, we get fake statistics and distorted data.
Those who keep records on the home front cling to the journals as if they were a lifeline, because they see this as the meaning of their existence. The system creates work for itself that cannot be avoided. Those who return from combat missions, motivated but tired, rightly do not accept the old approaches. The gap between those doing the hard fighting and those keeping score in the logistics support services is widening. Some don't understand others.
There must be digitalization of everything - from accounting and automatic calculation to medical data and directions.
Imitation and window dressing create a false, distorted picture that does not correspond to reality. The narrative about the “Bakhmut Fortress” was believed by everyone who heard it except those who were there. The city was not a fortress. Nothing was done to turn it into a fortress. No fortifications, no minefields. Even when the front line was 20 km from the city, in the spring of 2022 it was clear that the city would not survive with such tactics. There were people there who defended him with their lives.
However, society has heard the sweet story of the “fortress.” It was an imitation that was easy to articulate and reassure society. We lost Bakhmut in the spring of 2023. Quiet, no messages. The authorities are silent. The legend of Bakhmut was added to the legends of DAP, Saur-Mogila, Lugansk airport (which was also ours at a certain point in the war) and others. How many “cauldrons” did the Ukrainian army create during the 10 years of war? How many people received officer and, in addition, general ranks? Imitation is something that a lot of command has been doing. They were trained to do this in the Soviet army.
New rules of the game and value system
The army is a cross-section of society. During war, the army becomes a leader in many areas from the information field to employment. It creates an environment in which people stay for a long time. A system of rules and values makes it possible to organize even different people. The values on which the army will be built will determine how former military personnel will return to post-war life.
Transparency in decision-making and development of strategies, result orientation, team play, planning - behind each of these words there are meanings that can control and coordinate behavior much better than the tools of repression and fear. Management culture is low and strategic ambiguity is common. Added to this is the lack of performance evaluation.
Clear rules of the game are one of the main conditions that the best leaders set when considering the army as a space for achievement. They should be transparent and unchanging, engraved in granite. Then you can expect results. Result orientation burns out procrastination and stimulates initiative, and honesty eliminates behind-the-scenes appointments of mediocrity.
The problem is not only that during 9 years of war we were unable to change the Soviet legacy. The problem is that during 9 years of war we were unable to change the people who were supposed to change the Soviet legacy.
