“Next year, both we and the enemy will enter a new round of scientific and technical revolution on the battlefield.”, — write: www.pravda.com.ua
On the eve of the new year, “Ukrainian Pravda” appealed to the laureates of the award “UP.100” with a request to evaluate the past year, record where the country and society are at the moment, and share expectations for 2025. We will publish the thoughts of our laureates in the coming days.
I am an optimist, so I look to the New Year 2025 with faith in large-scale positive changes.
At the same time, I am a fatalist. Therefore, I believe that without large-scale positive changes, we will simply disappear from the world map.
In 2025, there may or may not be a cessation of war. Under both options, we must do one thing: real reforms.
The time has come for many changes: in the army, military-industrial complex, economy, energy, etc. My job and area of responsibility now is to prevent the enemy from capturing a single meter of Kharkiv Oblast on a specific section of the front. Therefore, as a military man, I cannot speak about energy or the economy, but in my field I see an urgent need for long overdue and obvious solutions.
Next year, both we and the enemy will enter a new round of scientific and technical revolution on the battlefield.
Ground robotic unmanned systems will be as common as UAVs are now, UAVs will have machine vision, and FPV will have self-guidance.
This requires structural and personnel changes in the Defense Forces right now. The massive use of robotic and unmanned systems will reduce both the number of infantry and the load on them.
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Among other circumstances, in particular, this one pushes us to a series of steps. Most of them have already been tested by our largest in the Armed Forces, the Third Assault Brigade:
- Recruiting. Looking for people according to needs and functionality is a really working scheme and an overdue necessity;
- Quality and radically more professional the level of combat training of new people in the army and regular retraining of privates. A lot has been said about this, but the time we don’t have is to go beyond comments and interviews and go into practice: remove / retrain the sovkov instructors in “textbooks” and introduce NATO standards and systems with the integration of the experience of our combat brigades;
- Creation of a high-quality sergeant corpsbuilt according to the Western model. The sergeant is not a secondary role after the officers, but a parallel important branch. Professional training and education of sergeants is a vital need for the army today, because sergeants are its backbone;
- Radical change of staff culture. The current one can be described as terrible. Work in headquarters requires a high level of intelligence and motivation. Specialists should get into headquarters after IQ and psychological tests, and not by stars on their epaulettes. Staff employees must be trained according to the MDMP protocol (military decision-making process) and transfer them to the troops in ready-made sets. Where to take them, who should train them and for how long – we have tested them in 3OSHB and are ready to share our experience;
- A COMPLETE ban on “disengagement” of troops. Commanders must fight with their own units, not cut from pieces of others. It is better to fight with a smaller number, but with your own, than with a vinaigrette of dowries;
- We finally have move to larger operational and tactical structures – DIVISIONS and CORPS. This will eliminate the previously mentioned “distraction” and increase the effectiveness of combat interaction both in specific areas of the front and along its entire length. The implementation of large-scale offensive and defensive operations will reach a new level;
- Mass introduction of ground robotic complexes and staff structures under them. Thanks to this, the expansion of the strike and observation capabilities of combat units;
- Development of tactics (primarily in defense) of air and ground unmanned systems. I see this tactic in the creation of stationary UAV posts (unmanned aerial systems) with permanent attachment to positions, where units must understand their terrain, radio horizon, enemy REB pattern and so on. Along the entire front, with or without Kursk. They should consist of observation units, attack units, kamikaze ground drones, heavy bombers. Being in the second line behind the advanced units, they will be able to restrain the enemy in their sections of the front as effectively as possible and inflict maximum losses on him;
- MAXIMUM reduction in taxation of military industrial production and permission to export. Private business gives a head start to the state mastodons and manufactures the most successful samples of defense products: the “Bohdan” cannon, the “Neptune” missiles, a large range of EW and radio electronic intelligence equipment, which has long been superior or not inferior to Western analogues. Not to mention the variety of unmanned systems – from UAVs to ground-based ones. Enterprises should have a single iron restriction – orders from the state and teams. If the products are made, paid for, delivered on time, and the manufacturer can do more, he should be allowed to sell to friendly and neutral countries even in time of war. This is necessary so that the business has an incentive to produce more and have large working capital to keep up with the times in a very competitive market.
This is what common sense dictates and what is not debatable with the progressive section of our Defense Forces and society.
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The models of transformations within the army that I mentioned were successfully tested in the Third Assault Brigade, which managed to increase both staff structures and the required number of specialists during 2024.
We grew not only in absolute numbers, but also laid fundamental internal innovations. Our success is not magic, but the result of specific actions performed against many circumstances and obstacles.
Andriy Biletskyi, for UP