A Ukrainian soldier who was sent to Germany for training told what surprised him and his comrades the most about the training they received in the army of a NATO member country, his story also illustrates a serious shortcoming of the Western armed forces.

Military analyst Samuel Bendett, an expert in military robotics systems, artificial intelligence, and Russian weapons development, summarized the lengthy account of the Ukrainian fighter on Twitter on his page. Bendett works at the Center for Naval Analyses, a US think tank in Arlington, Virginia, specializing in military issues.

Bendett claims that one key point stands out from everything the Ukrainian military said:

“They (non-NATO soldiers) don’t rely on electronic devices at all, and the fact that we go on missions with Chinese smartphones and tablets seemed crazy to them.”

In his posts on Twitter, the Ukrainian military man noted that he and his comrades were also trained by American instructors, and not only by Germans.

“But after “Kropyva” I don’t want to return to paper documents at all,” said the Ukrainian, referring to one of the cartographic applications used by the Kyiv military for planning, calculating and orienting missions.

“For a week, we were taught to read maps, take azimuth, transfer azimuth from a compass to a map and vice versa. When I told them that we use electronic applications on tablets and phones, they did not take us seriously.”

Lack of cheap drones for NATO military, a shock for Ukrainians

The Ukrainian military also said that the NATO military has the same attitude to the use of quadcopters and civilian drones, saying that they “are not even part of their plans.”

“They have other types of drones, but only brigade level. This shows that, apart from the war with the aborigines in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, the Americans have not participated in a serious war for a long time,” said the Ukrainian military officer quite sarcastically.

“Their military has no counterpart to the Chinese Mavic 3 drone, which was a shock to us,” he added.

Samuel Bendett noted, for his part, that the lack of an equivalent for cheap drones, such as the commercial ones used by both sides of the war in Ukraine, has become a major topic of discussion and debate within the US military.

Since the early days of Vladimir Putin’s war, Ukrainian soldiers have used commercial drones converted for military use as a cheap replacement for aircraft in battlefield reconnaissance missions. Later, they switched to using kamikaze drones to defeat Russian military equipment.

More recently, the Russian military, in turn, began to widely use inexpensive drones to carry out combat strikes on valuable equipment received by the Ukrainian military from the West.

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