NATO is Using COIN in Ukraine (I Told You So)

Sometimes I’m wrong, but sometimes I’m right too. For the past eight months I’ve argued that thoroughly prepared for a war, but the wrong kind of war. This week, the Military Chronical Telegram channel started a rumor that was then picked up by other outlets. Let’s see what it was:

Captured in early and mid-November near Bakhmut, servicemen of the 71st, 58th and 53rd brigades of the Armed Forces of Ukraine claim that the training course in the UK and on the territory of Ukraine with the support of instructors from the United States, Canada and Australia was not designed for intense battles and harms the Ukrainian infantry.

According to the Military Chronicle, soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were trained under the NATO COIN program (Counterinsurgency — counter-guerrilla warfare). The COIN program was created to combat “non-state forces” and insurgents and does not assume that the enemy has effective artillery and heavy weapons, which are just available in a large numbers in the Russian Armed Forces.

In addition, the Armed Forces of Ukraine did not conduct a full training course of six months. For assault units, the crash course was conducted in 20 days, and for ordinary infantry, the training was completed in two weeks.

After the courses, Ukrainian military personnel trained according to COIN standards began to die en masse in battles. At first, losses were recorded in the Kherson direction, but now the most massive losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are observed in the Artemovsk and Liman directions, where the forces of the southern group of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were transferred.

Due to heavy losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Bakhmut in September, October and November, American instructors were sent to the units of the 30th, 53rd and 71st Brigades of the AFU, who were assigned to help with the management of Ukrainian infantry and reduce the level of losses.

According to the prisoners, the APU’s training in COIN tactics both abroad and at the Yavorov training ground was built around actions in small mobile groups. At the same time, the main areas of training were maneuvers on light vehicles (the so-called pickup truck war), storming buildings and filtration of civilians.

Earlier, the Military Chronicle has already written about the mistakes of American officers when planning counterattacks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine near Bakhmut. This was due to a misunderstanding of the capabilities of the Russian Armed Forces and Wagner’s PMC, which have a large number of artillery and heavy equipment.

I’ve been saying this for a while. Our fetish for light infantry and “irregular tactics” goes back many years. This infatuation combined with our ongoing experience with insurgencies in the Middle East and West Asia has caused us to forget that other types of warfare exist. The Ukraine model, built by us, was set up for failure before they even started.

On 2 April I wrote:

The Russians (according to NATO) before Feb. 24:

-Capable of defensive and limited offensive operations

-Heavily dependent on railways

-Any large-scale offensive would need to be paused after three days due to logistical limitations.

-A hypothetical Russian invasion could be defeated by a combination of air power and guerrilla warfare.

On 11 July, I wrote:

In 1989, a group of military theorists (including the famed William Lind) penned an article for the Marine Corps Gazette titled The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation. Over the next 30 years, this “Fourth Generation” would shape American and NATO’s entire philosophy toward warfare. There was just one problem, it was disastrously wrong...

4GW’s real world application, like any other battlefield doctrine, is about “us and them.” It’s a threat that we have to build an effective defense against, but also a weapon we can use ourselves against enemies. We failed on both counts. All of our wars against “4GW” enemies have failed to meet previously stated expectations (like Iraq) or ended in humiliating, costly failure (like Afghanistan).

Worse still, our attempts to use 4GW against perceived enemies have ended in failure too. Our proxy armies, namely ISIS and Ukraine, were built on the 4GW model, and have so far entirely failed to destroy the nation states they were aimed against. Think about how frustrating this must be for the Pentagon.

On 2 October, after the battle for Lyman, I wrote:

Russian sources claim that in the attacks against Lyman, more than 200 Ukrainian soldiers were killed, five tanks and IFVs destroyed. Such casualties are consistent with one or more assaults that were repulsed. There’s no way to know for sure, but I suspect most or all of those casualties were from Russian fire and close air support, and the initial Ukrainian attacks were insufficient in size to sustain such losses and still overcome resistance from the defenders of Lyman. It makes little sense for such a careless attack to happen with insufficient preparation, but remember that they were on a timeline. Those soldiers died because of their NATO officers’ unrealistic goal of capturing Lyman in time to embarrass Putin and ruin his ceremony on 30 September. Remember there’s a general 3:1 ratio for wounded and killed, and the Ukrainians endured equally bitter fighting and shelling in villages and forests surrounding Lyman. It’s not impossible, or far-fetched, to suggest that the Ukrainian forces tasked with putting Lyman in a pocket suffered 10% or even 20% casualties to do it. And still failed to actually fulfill their goal of trapping the garrison.

I’m not dismissing the territorial gains made by the Ukrainian armed forces. But I am pointing out that territorial gains mean very little, especially when NATO and Ukraine laid out very specific intentions for this maneuver and failed to deliver. NATO won’t defeat Russia by capturing tiny villages, and they certainly won’t win by suffering monstrous casualties each time. This failure isn’t unprecedented.

The initial preparations for a guerrilla war, like small drones and ATGMs, were woefully inadequate for a well-entrenched conventional enemy that didn’t overextend himself like we had planned for. The NATO command and logistical chain eventually, ponderously, transitioned to more conventional aid shipments focused on armor, artillery, and mass quantities of ammunition for them. But this can’t undo the damage of training everyone for one type of warfare then doing the opposite. Particularly when just about every trainer NATO could send to help only has real-life experience with COIN. So here we are.

There’s no better microcosm for this war than the photo below. An unarmored pickup truck loaded with journalists and an LGBT flag. This is quite literally how NATO was planning to win.

Ian Kummer

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