February 18, 2024: The U.S. Army has spent more than $11 billion on failed attempts to develop a new scout helicopter. The scout helicopter was meant to find targets for the larger and heavily armed AH-64 helicopter. Apparently, no one involved with this research and development effort bothered to find out how other branches of the U.S. military as well as foreign armed forces were dealing with this problem. Even though the U.S. Army has established a system (CALL) to document past failures and successes and that this CALL system was easily available, commanders and staff personnel often did not use it as they made mistakes that CALL had documented and warned about not repeating. Some problems are obvious, like using a wrench as a hammer when hammers are available. Other problems are more subtle but also result in failure. The key problem is inability to recognize that you have a problem.

This often happens even when the solution is already visible, but some ignore that. This is what happened with the supporters of programs to develop a new scout helicopter. It takes effort, or an actual war, to demonstrate what new solutions work. That’s what happens in all wars and is happening now in Ukraine. The opportunity here is to find these solutions in peacetime. The first thing you should do is look around for how others coped with this or similar problems. That is often difficult to do but solutions have been found in the past. For example, in the mid-20th century Japan was seeking ways to break into American markets for manufactured goods. One thing Japanese did to help with this effort is compile databases on how American firms handled marketing, promotion, and sales chain problems the Japanese would encounter in a new foreign market. The Japanese database collected data worldwide, from all countries that had market economies. In doing this the Japanese found that there were many different ways to deal with the same problems or opportunities. It was also discovered that solutions developed in one country, say France, could be adapted and used successfully in the United States or Japan. This was important when making decisions on how to proceed with promoting or presenting a new product before that product is on the market and generating revenue.

The U.S. Army had already developed such a database after the Vietnam War. This was an effort to assemble a database of mistakes made and opportunities lost as well as new ideas that worked, what didn’t and why. The result was CALL or the Center for Army Lessons Learned. This was seen as a fundamental element in improving ground operations by analyzing past battles for what went right and what went wrong. The U.S. Army CALL system has been around since the 1980s, and U.S. commanders use it to determine what works in combat and what doesn't. This is more important than ever in the 21st century, where urban combat and counter-insurgency conflicts dominate. In urban warfare and counterinsurgency, the potential for mistakes to be made is exponentially larger than in conventional, large-scale warfare.

Instead of keeping all this knowledge secret, the US Army takes the data collected and analyzed at CALL and supplies it to allied armies in the hope they will use this information. This sharing is more than just a gesture of goodwill. This does not always work, especially in countries where corruption and reluctance to change makes it difficult to make changes that will improve combat effectiveness. This cultural resistance was encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan but not in Ukraine, where the Ukrainians adapted while their enemy did not.

CALL is divided into several major sections. The first collects data from previous engagements by interviewing and visiting units in the field. This section is tasked with discovering issues and areas of needed improvement in doctrine, training, and readiness. The Analysis Section deals with evaluating the data collected and assessing the methods needed to improve effectiveness and combat efficiency. Finally, the Information Integration Section is responsible for processing and distributing the suggestions and findings from the previous two departments.

The CALL is sometimes seen by other branches of the Army as a group of desk-bound analysts, but their suggestions and changes implemented in counterinsurgency and urban warfare tactics played a major role in maximizing the effectiveness of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Persuading the local military to change was often less successful. Without something like CALL, doctrine and tactics rarely change. On-site CALL troops visited nearly every single major combat zone in Iraq and Afghanistan. CALL soldiers also spent significant time with Iraqi Special Forces and were an integral part of the development process for the country's military and police. Call analysts also report on who is accepting and acting on their advice and who isn’t. The resistance to change was and remains a major problem in Iraq, Afghanistan and, we now know, in Russia.

Because of CALL and similar efforts by the U.S. Army Special Forces, American military advisors headed overseas are given a briefing on the culture they will be dealing with and how to deal with various types of obstacles. The army maintains a database of lessons learned that can be searched by region as well as situation. A major contributor to this database is army Special Forces troops, whose training concentrates on local customs and traditions and how to work within that. That’s why the Special Forces are organized around regional specialization. Special Forces operators learn the languages and customs of one region and usually spend their entire career working in that region. This Special Forces technique was learned from World War II experience where many of the founding members of Special Forces in the early 1950s had worked for the Office of Special Operations (OSS), an organization created, in part, to deal with contacting, communicating with and supporting local resistance groups in German or Japanese controlled territory. The success of the OSS led to the creation of the CIA and Special Forces to deal with the Cold War. This conflict, which did not end until 1991, had begun in the late 1940s when it became obvious that Soviet Russia was going to continue taking control of other nations any way it could.

It took decades before the American military and foreign service learned how to use these new intelligence and operational capabilities. Tradition slowed adoption of new ideas but by the 1980s the military services cooperated in creating SOCOM, Special Operations Command so that they all could benefit from what the OSS and Special Forces have developed. It took decades for most American military commanders to accept the findings and suggestions from CALL and SOCOM. Initially many senior American officers saw Special Forces and CALL operatives as a bunch of oddballs spouting nonsense.

Another factor in the development of more effective tactics was the realization, during World War II, that when the enemy developed a new weapon or tactic, the speed with which you could analyze it and come up with an effective countermeasure was a matter of life or death as well as victory or defeat. The speed of analysis and quickness of response was expressed more vividly in the 1960s by John Boyd, a U.S. Air Force officer. Boyd demonstrated how the speed of assessing a combat situation, developing a plan, and executing it was decisive in all forms of combat. Boyd came up with the OODA (observe, orient, decide, and act) loop, which could be applied to air, naval and ground combat. This made sense to World War II veterans who had witnessed the OODA loop in action. It resonated with the Russians as well because superior speed with OODA was a German specialty which the Russians never mastered as well as the Germans did during World War II. By the 1980s some Russian theorists saw computers as a possible solution. Again, the West had a technological edge and from the end of the Cold War and into the 21st Century it was Westerners who made all this work in combat. Russia never caught up or caught on to how vulnerable it was to opponents who worked the OODA cycle faster than they did. This was demonstrated in Ukraine and Russian military and political leaders are still having a hard time accepting this OODA reality.

This became a problem for American military advisors working overseas, who frequently had solutions for problems encountered by foreign commanders they were supporting, but the real problem was local culture and resistance to change, especially the American emphasis on high-speed warfare and the need to quickly adopt new tactics to prevail.

Meanwhile Islamic terrorists were on the receiving end of many of these innovations and the survivors learned to adapt. The impact of high-speed warfare was demonstrated after September 11, 2001, when American forces used computerized data mining and analysis to speed up their OODA loops during counter-terrorism operations in Iraq and elsewhere. Sunni terrorists quickly learned that if an American raid was accompanied by intelligence specialists carrying biometric tools and communication links to huge databases of information on known terrorists and their organizations, there would quickly be additional raids. A few new names found on one raid would spawn additional raids and within 24 hours large terrorist operations could be rolled up. Microsoft contributed by developing a thumb drive that could quickly extract useful data from a laptop while rough but effective machine translation of many Arabic documents could quickly provide more leads, locations and who or what to look for.

The Ukrainian military did not accept much change after Ukraine became independent of the Soviet Union, and Russia, in 1991. The Ukrainians had to accept the fact that they could not afford to maintain a large peacetime military. Russia’s seizure of Crimea and the eastern Ukrainian Donbas region in 2014 was a wakeup call. The Russians had used KGB tactics, developed during the decades of communist rule that often used subversion and surprise to overthrow vulnerable governments. This included most East European countries who spent four decades under communist rule and Russian influence because of these tactics. The Russians tried to use these methods in Ukraine after 2000 and ran into resistance from many Ukrainians. After 2014 more Ukrainians were willing to accept advice from the Americans, who sent special forces and military advisors versed in CALL knowledge and willing to share with Ukrainians who were prepared to adapt. Initially it was Ukrainian military leaders and eventually political leaders, like current Ukrainian president Zelensky, who was elected in 2019 to make needed changes. That included lots of reforms to the Ukrainian military.

What happened in 2014 scared Ukrainians because they had agreements with Russia that were supposed to keep Ukraine intact. The Russians violated their written promises and the Ukrainians realized they had to prepare for the worst, which the Russians were openly discussing. The worst came in February 2022 when Russia invaded. The Ukrainians had changed and adapted while the Russians had not. The result was striking initial Russian defeats which many Russian leaders still don’t understand. The most important lesson was that you don’t invade a neighboring country expecting your attack if they are better prepared to deal with it. The Ukrainians had developed new tactics and used new weapons to defeat the invasion. Most Russian troops were not told they were conducting an invasion because their officers were assured that there would not be any effective resistance. There was effective resistance, and many Russian troops abandoned their armored vehicles and fled once they realized what they were up against. That resulted in about half the Russian tanks and other armored vehicles lost being abandoned intact by their crews in the first 90 days of the war.

The Ukrainians quickly developed procedures to adapt their vehicles to their own use with new insignia and some new communications equipment. The Ukrainians also used their newly acquired tanks more effectively than their former owners. Ukrainians, like the Russians, still used the same Cold War era tanks as the Russians but were more aware of the vulnerabilities of these Russian designed tanks. For example, even the Russians didn’t realize how vulnerable their tanks were to turret penetration by anti-tank weapons. Russia had made some changes to defeat the Western Cold War development of top attack anti-tank weapons. These weapons were not used against Russian attacks often enough, until 2022, to demonstrate that Russian tanks were extremely vulnerable because Russian tanks had been using autoloaders since the late 1960s. This replaced the human loader but put a dozen or more tank gun rounds in the turret at all times. If one of those rounds was detonated by an anti-tank weapon penetrating the turret, all those ready rounds exploded, destroying the turret and the tank as well as killing the entire crew. As soon as Russian tank crews understood this, they were quick to abandon their tanks as soon as enemy fire began blowing tanks up. Western tank designers were aware of this problem and never adopted the autoloader because of it. There was never more than one shell exposed in the turret at a time. The other shells were kept in a separate armored container with blow out panels. If those protected shells exploded the armored container quickly blew apart from the inside, leaving the crew unharmed and the tank reparable.

The Russians officially called their invasion a special operation meant to liberate the Ukrainians from neo-Nazi and NATO influence. Most Russian troops soon realized that the Ukrainians were more enthusiastic and determined to defend their country from foreign invaders and wanted to join NATO to discourage Russian attacks. Government corruption and inept military leadership meant the Russian troops were poorly supplied with food, medical care, and ammunition. New recruits were not trained or paid the cash bonuses promised. Troop morale plummeted because of this and soon Russia found it could not obtain enough troops to keep the special operation going. The Ukrainians went on the offensive in late August and rapidly drove the Russians out of much of the Ukrainian territory they had conquered in 2014 and early 2022. The Russian government did not want to admit they were losing but were unable to convince enough Russian soldiers to resist or Russians and Ukrainian collaborators living in the occupied territories to stay. The civilians fled and Russian troop numbers dwindled. All this had nothing to do with foreign observers asserting that tanks were obsolete, and warfare had changed dramatically. Neither was true but the reality was less newsworthy, so the situation was not reported accurately. The Ukrainians kept attacking Russian logistics, especially key supplies for the troops, while improving their own. This was the key to victory but made for dull headlines.

The Russians failed to note the extent and impact of Ukrainian military reforms since 2014. The Russians found that they were no longer fighting the same kind of Ukrainian military they had defeated in 2014. The Russians had ignored or misinterpreted those reforms and were still unable or unwilling to accept the effectiveness of the Ukrainian reforms. One reason for that is the Ukrainian reforms succeeded in converting the Ukrainian military's 2014 recycled Soviet model to one based on the more effective Western model. This transition happened gradually as the NATO military aid Ukraine requested after 2014 included trainers for existing Ukrainian units as well as new Ukrainian officers. The NATO trainers trained new Ukrainian combat battalions as well as newly recruited Ukraine officers. What the Russians didn’t appreciate until the 2022 invasion started was that NATO training produced very different results than the training Ukrainian and Russian forces were used to getting.

In 2014 the Ukrainian army was similar in skills and training to the methods Russia used. This was the old Soviet style of strict adherence to battle plans and discouragement of initiative among combat commanders. Western militaries approached these matters differently. Battle plans were created as estimates, not strict rules. Western commanders were trained to be flexible and adaptive in combat. As the NATO trainers did their work, the Ukrainian military was gradually reformed. Senior Ukrainian officers, all veterans of the old Soviet style of organization, command, and training, tolerated this new approach not because they understood it, but because Ukraine needed all the military aid it could get, and the Western combat unit and officer training seemed to work. When the Russians invaded, they and senior Ukrainian commanders were surprised at how effective NATO’s retraining of the Ukrainian armed forces worked. The Russians were dismayed and somewhat mystified at the relatively poor performance of their troops. The Ukrainians were told the post-2014 Ukrainian troops and officers would be more effective because that had been the experience in similar situations since the 1990s.

Another aspect of Western training and combat doctrine is that you rapidly modify your tactics and training as a result of recent, or ongoing combat experiences. NATO nations supplying Ukraine with vast quantities of weapons and equipment noted how the Ukrainians performed. For example, peacetime training standards called for months of training before troops were ready to effectively use Patriot Air Defense systems. The Ukrainians did it in weeks. The Ukrainians not only learned how to operate Patriot systems but also developed new uses. This surprised and pleased the Americans providing the equipment because the Ukrainians were making Patriot useful for all users. The Americans took notes and modified their performance specs and training methods.

The Ukrainian experience was somewhat unique because the Ukrainians had decades of experience with tweaking and upgrading existing systems. When Ukraine became independent in 1991, they inherited large quantities of Russian Cold War era weapons and equipment. Ukraine had been arguably the center of weapons development, production, and upgrades while part of the Soviet Union. After 1991 they merged those skills with newly acquired Western marketing savvy. The Ukrainians modified and upgraded their Soviet era weapons to be more attractive to potential buyers. By 2014 Ukrainian had made all this into a sizable portion of their economy. The Ukrainian skills and speed with learning and modifying new Western weapons was, in hindsight, obvious.

The Russians did not pay attention. The poor performance of the Russian military in Ukraine during its 2022 invasion was not a surprise to everyone. Journalists, politicians in general and the Russians were taken by surprise but military historians, the U.S. Army and the Ukrainian military were not. That’s because the American army finally realized, in the 1980s, that a fundamental problem in warfare was not paying attention to what had worked in the past and why. Those who possess this predictive capability also know that it’s best to keep quiet about what they know because the enemy will adapt once the shooting starts, and some foes do that rather quickly. Most do not because admitting you were wrong is something most senior military commander’s resist.

The Americans have CALL, which records mistakes as well as successes and helps users do what works and avoid what doesn’t and do it all in a timely manner. Because of the Ukraine War CALL now has a lot of useful advice on the use and abuse of UAVs. The developers of a new Americans scout helicopter made contributions to CALL on how not to solve problems using older technology when cheaper new tech like cheap UAVs were available.