NATO Instructors: All Talk, No Frontline Walk
US servicemen during the Rapid Trident/Saber Guardian 2015 military exercises at the International Peacekeeping and Security Centre base outside Lviv, Ukraine, Friday, July 24, 2015.
While NATO countries have spent millions of dollars to fund Ukrainian training, it has all repeatedly proved to be useless in combat, according to captured Ukrainian soldiers. NATO forces training Ukrainian troops are clueless about the reality of a battlefield environment, Earl Rasmussen, a retired Lieutenant Colonel with over 20 years in the US Army and International Consultant, told Sputnik.“They don’t have the experience. They probably learn more from Ukrainian soldiers that are there that have been on the front line,” said the international consultant.He added that NATO is not only struggling to develop weapons and ammunition “to meet the demand on the battlefield,” but fails to adapt varying training strategies to a very dynamic situation in the combat zone.
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“We’ve had a lot of, you know, insurgency type of operations. We’ve had Afghanistan and Iraq. A completely different way of fighting. And they really are kind of they are a little bit behind on that. And they don’t understand the culture, the cultural issues between Russia and Ukraine,” Rasmussen noted.The expert pointed out that “we are seeing rapidly changing strategies, rapidly changing technology, use of drones, use of electronic mechanisms to disrupt communications, to disrupt the targeting capabilities.”However, the dominant strategy of the Ukrainian general staff or their NATO advisers, noted the US Army veteran, has boiled down to just “throwing bodies” into the meatgrinder.“I would definitely would not be advising the strategy Ukraine’s doing,” he said.MilitaryFormer US Army Colonel Reveals How West Makes Money by ‘Helping Ukraine’Yesterday, 18:36 GMT