Paul Wells: 'Don’t underestimate the power that comes from the will to fight.’

I wanted to speak to somebody from Operation Unifier, the seven-year Canadian Armed Forces training mission in Ukraine, for two reasons. I knew a soldier would have particular insight into the way Russia’s invasion is playing out. And I suspected that the things Canada has been doing for seven years to prepare for this war might matter more than the things Canada has done since February to respond to it.

Where did training help? “The area where I think we had a really big influence is in helping them understand or institutionalize the idea of mission command. And decentralized decision-making — pushing authority and decision-making power down to lower levels. And helping them build a professional senior NCO corps. Those are things that, you know, when you look at the old Soviet system were certainly non-existent.

What else did the Canadians pass along? Lake mentioned “combined arms training.” Another term of art: using two or more parts of a complex expeditionary force to hit an enemy in more than one way at a time. Ideally you want to box the other side in, so that defending against one part of an attack makes them more vulnerable to the other part. “So how artillery supports maneuver, and having the engineers in play, and logistics, and how all of that comes together into a cohesive fight.

It was a hell of a welcome to Ukraine. “We had just hit the ground. We were a new team. A lot of our pre-deployment training had been done virtually because we were working in the COVID environment. So I didn't know my team all that well. And then when we got to Ukraine, 48 hours later, we were dispersed to 15 different locations.”

These exercises in helping the Ukrainians build an empowered and decentralized military also helped the Canadians do the same. Somewhere there’s a sergeant who, under Lake’s command but without much day-to-day supervision, designed and implemented a sniper-training program. That’s going to do wonders for that sergeant’s confidence and competence on their next assignment.

What are the defender’s other advantages? I asked Lake for two or three big lessons from all of this. She thought for nearly a minute before deciding how to answer. I’ve trimmed what she told me only a little for clarity:

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