NATO could not do combined arms warfare like this.

Ukraine can only do what it has been equipped to do.

Quick question. Why cant Ukraine fly to the moon? I mean, the US went there more than 50 year ago, so it cant be that hard. Right? Sounds like a reasonable question.

The answer, of course, is that Ukraine doesnt have a lunar rocket for godssake.

Sorry to start this midweek update with a rant, but the great criticism now being at Ukraine for not being able to execute NATO combined arms warfare (I mean a few units were trained on it for a few months—what more could you want) is getting silly. It started a few weeks. First, some unnamed German officers in Bild claimed that the problem with the Ukrainian counteroffensive is that the Ukrainians were not conducting NATO combined arms doctrine ‘correctly’.¹

Ukrainan troops training with western equipment—General Staff Ukraine

Yesterday the New York Times posted very similar remarks, this time from unnamed western officials. The crux of their criticism was that Ukraine was not doing what it had been trained to do. Ive cut and pasted the key parts.

“Biden administration officials had hoped the nine Western-trained brigades, some 36,000 troops, would show that the American way of warfare was superior to the Russian approach. While the Russians have a rigidly centralized command structure, the Americans taught the Ukrainians to empower senior enlisted soldiers to make quick decisions on the battlefield and to deploy combined arms tactics — synchronized attacks by infantry, armor and artillery forces.

Western officials championed that approach as more efficient than the costly strategy of wearing Russian forces down by attrition, which threatens to deplete Ukraine’s ammunition stocks.”²