A new training program for Ukrainian soldiers on NATO soil isn’t teaching them to pilot drones or conduct electronic warfare because Ukraine already knows how to teach those skills itself.
Ukrainian soldiers are learning battlefield skills at a purpose-built camp in southeastern Poland as part of a Norway-led multinational effort called Operation Legio, which Business Insider recently visited.
The effort aims to bring more Western expertise, doctrine, leadership, and specialist skills to Ukrainian troops, while Ukraine decides which skills it wants the training to focus on.
“We do not do drone courses. We do not do courses within electronic warfare,” Maj. John, the S3 Operations Officer in charge of synchronizing the overall training operation, told Business Insider, asking to be identified by his first name for security reasons.
Western militaries are teaching their own soldiers how to pilot drones with simulators and obstacle courses. But for Ukrainian troops at Camp Jomsborg, the training skips that step because “they have excellent drone training and education, and electronic warfare education. They can fix that themselves. So that hasn’t been a request from the Ukrainians,” John said.
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Instead, the program is built around what Ukraine says it needs. John said that it’s defined “as a Ukrainian training center” because it teaches what Ukraine requests, incorporates Ukrainian soldiers’ battle-won experience, and has Ukrainian instructors working alongside allied trainers and assistance from a host of other countries, including Estonia, Finland, and Sweden.
Defining it that way, John said, means Ukrainians can “hold us accountable for quality and delivering that realistic training.”
That doesn’t mean drones are absent. Quite the opposite. Drones are everywhere in training because they are everywhere in the war.
Soldiers don’t learn from scratch how to pilot them, but they do learn how to incorporate drones — and the threat from enemy drones — into their tactics and planning. Allies are also learning about drone warfare from Ukrainian instructors along the way.
Drones have fundamentally shaped the war, changing everything about how forces fight and how soldiers experience it. Leaders want the training to be as realistic as possible, and training soldiers without spy and attack drones overhead would hardly prepare them for the battlefield to which they’ll return.
John said they had to make drone use and exposure “part of the training mission because it’s such a big part of the current operational environment.”
At the training camp, Ukrainian instructors are always there to act as subject matter experts on drones and electronic warfare and share how Russia and Ukraine use and don’t use these capabilities, Brigadier Atle Molde, commander of Task Force Legio, told Business Insider.
He said that from the Ukrainian perspective, using electronic warfare and drones in all kinds of training, both friendly and enemy, “is of vital importance.”
The training includes a drone center, which John explained was designed in “very close cooperation with the Ukrainians.” It provides the gear needed for training, handles repairs, and gives troops a place to test tactics, experiment with drones, and use technology such as 3D printing. It also feeds many drone warfare lessons back to Norway and other allies involved in the training.
John said that the training is designed to mirror the fight as much as possible based on ongoing Ukrainian feedback, including what the terrain looks like, what tactics and weapons Russia is using, and what gear Ukrainian soldiers have access to.
Sinéad Baker
He described drones and electronic warfare as “just an asset in this camp that enhances all the different other courses.”
Drones are everywhere
Training at Camp Jomsborg includes medical, engineering, and infantry courses, with soldiers learning skills including assault, urban warfare, trench clearing, heavy weapons use, and medical treatment.
Drones are part of all of these training programs. Participating soldiers use drones to look into trenches to try to spot and attack the enemy; they have to respond to drone attacks while treating casualties; and they learn marksmanship skills to shoot down drones with shotguns.
The opposition force, role-playing as Russian forces and operating tanks and armored vehicles, also uses drones against Ukrainian soldiers to ensure they are exposed to the scenarios they will face in the war back home.
The training also focuses on improving Ukraine’s decision-making, with drones feeding commanders battlefield intelligence they must use to make decisions.
Ximena Borrazás/Getty Images
Drones that score a hit also have a demolition charge that explodes, adding realism without the danger of a live strike, John said.
Ground robots are included in a similar way. They are a growing part of Ukraine’s force, attacking, transporting gear, and carrying the wounded. Molde said that “when that becomes an important part of how they operate, then we have to start using those in training as well.”
It is the Ukrainians, he said, who report back on how they’re used and are “teaching us how they’re using it.”
In addition to the drone war, Ukraine is also fighting a fierce electronic warfare battle. Both sides are constantly trying to jam each other’s weaponry and communications while finding ways to keep their own working through the chaotic disruption.
Western militaries see Ukraine as a critical source of lessons. Molde said Ukraine’s experience shows that allies need to rebuild the electronic warfare capacity they had not focused on since the end of the Cold War.
The West is learning from Ukraine
Ukraine’s experience in new kinds of drone warfare, such as the use of cheap quadcopters to engage armored vehicles, reverses the traditional relationship between Western trainers and Ukrainian troops. On some of the war’s defining technologies, the students have more experience than the teachers.
Drone schools in Ukraine previously told Business Insider that nothing they teach soldiers comes from partners, only from Ukraine’s own experience and expertise.
Norway is learning from working with Ukraine, too. Molde said that the work at Camp Jomsborg means “we can learn from the Ukrainian experts every day” on drone and electronic warfare.
John said that soldiers who work with the Ukrainians in the drone center bring those skills and lessons back to Norway or other countries participating in the effort.
Several of Ukraine’s Western partners say they need to learn from Ukraine and have brought Ukrainian drone operators into their training so their own forces can learn. A US Department of War paper in June said that Ukrainian counter-drone technology and training from Ukrainian experts helped to protect US military bases and critical infrastructure against Iranian drones.
Other Western militaries helping to train Ukrainian soldiers say they’re also learning drone warfare lessons for their own forces.
Lt. Col. Ben Irwin-Clark, the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion of the Irish Guards, an elite British Army battalion, previously told Business Insider that helping to train Ukrainian soldiers under another multinational effort convinced his unit that drones are part of the “future of warfare.” Those lessons prompted the battalion to start training its soldiers and open a “drone hub” where drones can be fixed and made.
Irwin-Clark said his battalion is “learning the lessons on behalf of the rest of the army by picking them straight up from Ukrainians,” who were passing on the benefit of their knowledge.
John said it was ultimately a matter of combining the conventional knowledge and decades of experience of partner nations with Ukraine’s creativity and competence in modern warfare so that “we can evolve in parallel.”
