February 24, 2025: Ukrainians have been fighting the Russians for three years and are seeking to institutionalize their military lessons learned. The Russians are now short of resources and still operate under economic sanctions. Ukraine believes that with improved training for all their personnel, they will reduce their own casualties while increasing those of the Russians. Vladimir Putin vowed to keep fighting for as long as it took. That will be an empty promise if Putin discovers that a major change in troop quality makes any Russian military efforts futile and very costly in terms of men and resources.

Ukraine already has some units that had adopted these improved methods before the war but never had time or resources to retrain everyone. Over the last year Ukrainians have been standardizing their troop training and using methods that combine all that has been learned so far. This is done by simply by adopting what did work, discarding what didn’t and gradually retraining all units that were not using the most effective methods. All new recruits would be taught to use the new techniques, even if it lengthened the basic training.

NATO nations add individual training for sergeants and officers, some of it delivered via videos, including interactive versions. European NATO members play a larger role in this retraining because they are close enough, often adjacent, to Ukraine to receive Ukrainian trainees and send them back quickly after training is complete.

The Americans have been using the Center for Army Lessons Learned, of CALL, since the 1980s. CALL personnel have been compiling and organizing lessons learned in Ukraine for the Ukrainian. The CALL concept and implementing CALL results was one of the factors behind the revised training program. The reduced casualties encouraged more Ukrainian men to join and persuaded some military age men who fled the country to return.

By 2023 the Ukrainian military had grown to 700,000 troops plus over a quarter million police, border guard and reserves available. About fifteen percent of these million personnel were women, who , except for some snipers, handled support tasks. Several hundred thousand civilian workers also handled support tasks. This was a practice practiced by the Soviet Union military. When Ukraine became independent, as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, some Soviet military practices were retained. Unlike the Russians, who continue to send barely trained recruits into combat, Ukraine learned from NATO, particularly American, experience.