Is the US military learning enough from Ukraine?

The U.S. military speaks frequently about the lessons they’re learning from the war in Ukraine. 

The Air Force has sought to evaluate the Ukrainian military’s methods for detecting drones, while the Army has revamped training, fielded new drones, and re-evaluated its artillery stockpiles based on observations of the nearly three-year-old hot war there. The Army’s various analytic outlets have produced report after report by officers, intelligence analysts, and academics on the conflict. 

But at some of the military’s key centers for studying warfare, the services appear to treat the grinding yet tech-forward war with NATO’s top potential adversary as just one topic among many. Few analysts are tasked to study the war full-time, according to a Defense One review of service staffing. 

The Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint Lessons Learned Division, which helps spread findings among the services, has no “working groups or individuals” who focus solely on Ukraine, a spokesman said. 

At the Army’s Center for Lessons Learned, or CALL, four analysts on two teams focus on Ukraine, a spokesperson said in July. That’s out of the roughly 45 analysts the center employs. 

A review of the reports on CALL’s public-facing website showed few that exclusively cover lessons from Ukraine. At least one report focused on lessons from the command posts gleaned from a Ukrainian military manual. The spokesperson said CALL also interviews Ukrainian soldiers and commanders.

Other services appear to devote fewer resources to gleaning lessons from the Ukraine war. 

The Air Force’s Curtis E. LeMay Center, which develops air doctrine, has no single analyst dedicated to Ukraine, a spokesperson said in August. A spokesperson for the center said that “every member of our organization” has worked on assessing lessons from Ukraine, and said the center had worked with other organizations on more than five efforts focused on Ukraine. 

The Marine Corps likewise does not have a central body for exclusively evaluating lessons learned from Ukraine, a spokesperson said, although there are groups that study the war alongside other topics. The Corps has conducted four research efforts that sought to collect lessons learned from the war and will hold a follow-on study in fiscal year 2025.

The spokesperson said that the Corps has not directly interviewed Ukrainian military personnel, relying instead on other services and U.S. allies and partners to gather first-hand information. 

The picture from the Navy is hazier. The service was not able to describe their approach after queries were sent in July and September. Public affairs officers were not able to provide updates by the time of publication. 

Answers may yet be forthcoming. In April, the Defense Department’s Inspector General announced it would audit the Defense Department’s success in studying and applying lessons from the war to “doctrine, planning, training, and equipping.” The announcement of a study is not necessarily evidence that the Defense Department has made a misstep. The Inspector General has not yet released its report. 

Congress is also getting involved. The Senate National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2025 requires the military to regularly provide Congress with a report on efforts to “identify, disseminate, and implement” knowledge gained from observing the war in Ukraine. 

The report must include a description of the Defense Department’s process for learning and disseminating knowledge, and identify any working groups associated with this effort. It must also include a detailed summary of recommendations, identify which Defense Department organizations have the lead on implementing these recommendations, and provide a timeline for implementation.

Some Army officers have argued that observations from the war, while useful, are not always relevant to the U.S. military, which expects to fight with multi-service operations backed by highly trained soldiers funded by a military budget many times Ukraine’s gross domestic product. 

“If you look at the fight that's going on in Ukraine, you've got a large Soviet army fighting a small Soviet army, right? That is defensive-oriented, [artillery]-oriented.” said 101st Airborne Division commander Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia in an August interview. “That's not our [kind of] fight," he said, contrasting the U.S. Army's multi-domain, maneuver-centric approach with the grinding trench warfare that has defined much of the war in Ukraine. 

Anthony Tingle, formerly a program director at the Air Force Academy’s the Institute for Future Conflict and now an independent researcher who has spent time in Ukraine, said he could not say whether the Army’s four analysts were sufficient. CALL could be working with other academic institutions to analyze the war, he said. 

However, any U.S. observations of the war are ultimately limited by the U.S. military’s minimal  presence in Ukraine, said Tingle. 

“How many U.S. government employees have been to Donbass recording the electromagnetic spectrum or sitting down with the drone operators to say, ‘Well, okay, how do they frequency-hop? How do they try to thwart our drones?” said Tingle. “This is all stuff we're gonna have to relearn the first week of a war with anybody.”

The U.S. has repeatedly said it will not send military advisors to Ukraine, and maintains an even smaller presence in Kyiv than before the war. The Defense Department also maintains travel restrictions within Ukraine that prevent at least some staff from getting within a certain distance of the front line, according to a January report from the Inspector General.  

The academic community is similarly limited in the analysis it can provide, Tingle added, saying the number of academics with experience on the frontline was in the single digits. 

Tingle believes the military branches are at least partially writing off the conflict based on assumptions that the U.S. would not struggle with the same types of problems as Ukraine, such as establishing air dominance over Russia. 

Those assumptions may be true, Tingle said, but that doesn’t mean the war has nothing to teach. 

“There are lessons about modern warfare in general that we are not getting because of that attitude.”

This report was updated on Sept. 30 to add the congressional requirement.