How To Strengthen Ukraine's Combat Culture

The same Ukrainian steadfastness that surprised every military observer in its tenacious resistance to Russia’s invasion also inhibits the tactical initiative necessary to make the most efficient use of tanks. Armored warfare between peer competitors, such as the German invasion of France in May of 1940, depends heavily on recon-pulled exploitation of fleeting opportunities, which requires a social culture of empowered decentralization coupled with a high standard of technical discipline. Ukraine’s advantages are motivational, compelled by the miserable prospect of being occupied and assimilated, coupled with Russia’s organizational neglect of its soldiery, manifested most saliently by its dedovshchina bullying culture. Ukraine’s failed summer offensive of 2023 demonstrated the bifurcation of its army into an experienced light-infantry national-militia, with a culture like that of its Russian counterpart, and a younger NATO-trained, but less experienced, mechanized force. The intensive training of the latter force, along the lines of decentralized mission-command and combined arms operations, and a selective and accelerated exposure to combat such as in the Kursk incursion, is the key to accentuating Ukraine’s combat culture advantage.

Wargame designers have long observed that techniques quantifying soldier and weapon totals produce poor predictions of combat outcome, without considering troop quality. It is understandable that the progressive, assimilationist, and optimistic American social culture of Pentagon planners would resist ranking ethnic groups by combat performance, such as the Arabs, Japanese, Italians or Indians, even though Foreign Area Officers become intimately familiar with these critical variations. Designer Frank Chadwick, in what is the most detailed commercial analysis of a 1973 Israeli-Egyptian battle, reduced the intangible performance difference between the two adversaries to perhaps fifteen percent, with the remainder accounted for by identifiable organizational and doctrinal differences, such as artillery net access, ease of combined arms, and stress on wreck recovery. Of course, organizational configuration may itself be a product of social culture; Chadwick has asserted the pervasive effect of higher educational levels (as opposed to ideological indoctrination) on combat performance. However, as Napoleon discovered in the entrenchments at Borodino in 1812, and the German Sixth Army learned at Stalingrad, under the right conditions stalwart Russian troops can close the performance gap with their better-trained adversaries to less than 2 to 1.  

The most recent cultural-performative survey, by business sociologist Geert Hofstede’s institute, still does not distinguish between Ukrainians and Russians. On measures such as pervasive social and political corruption, Ukrainian is only marginally better off than Russia. Hofstede found that Russians and Ukrainians are mid-way between individualism and collectivism (Westerners are hyper-individualist), and at an extreme value when it comes to power distance, both characteristics of which have a significantly detrimental effect on information sharing which is critical for winning in combat. Cultural collectivism is certainly preferred to an army composed of fragmented identity groups. Paradoxically “Western”-type individualism covaries and is buttressed by much higher levels of social trust, critical for combat cohesion, especially when casualties rise. Power distance is a shared community value of deference to authority figures, typified by French society, but is also associated with an initiative deficit required for high-tempo armored warfare.

Hofstede established that Russians and Ukrainians share a strong preference for social stability (termed uncertainty avoidance), the opposite for the U.S. and Chinese respondents. This is likely the result of a shared memory of the economic instability of the 1990s, during which Russia and Ukraine’s murder rate was ten times higher than the present. The Russian-Chinese difference may also have to do with the high saliency of a Russian defense mentality absent among Chinese citizens, who are primarily focused on domestic stability and aversion to foreign cultural contamination. Uncertainty avoidance may also be the principal driver behind the apathetic acceptance of authoritarianism in Moscow and until recently, in Kyiv. Russia and Ukraine were both found to have extreme social conservatism, with values similar to China, meaning that there is an expectation that past traditions are a guide to the future. This contrasts with moderate expectations of social value change in Western democracies, and extreme adaptability to change in the Middle East, likely a temporary result of the experience of the Arab Spring. The best regression test of Hofstede’s aggregation of variables is by Joint Forces Staff College Director Eric Fowler’s 2016 dissertation, who found that democracies perform better in combat because their cultural values of inclusivity, rewarded risk acceptance, and fluid exchange of ideas, align with superior information management manifested in better planning and execution of operations. The emphasis on superior information management is confirmed in Allan Stam and Dan Reiter’s 2002 statistical and case study of Democracies at War, which also found no democratic advantages with regard to technology, military skill, or even economic resources.

One Ukrainian performance advantage over Russia is due to the latter’s neglect of the primal combat unit. The Roman army was explicitly aware that combat performance depended on the cohesion of the small young-adult male hunting pack, which they consequently housed together inside an eight-man tent, the contubernium. The understandable political imperative of the Soviet Union to integrate its multi-ethnic society into a unified armed forces, and the natural suspicion of the military by the Communist Party, created pervasive surveillance that disrupted the creation of the primal Russian unit. The false hope that ideological awareness could supplant parochial Russian superstition, suspicion, and racism, resulted in battlefield losses much more catastrophic in the Second World War (eight million) than the First (two million). However, as Omer Bartov has shown, the famous Shils and Janowitz study of the Wehrmacht was wrong when it asserted that the primal unit produced more combat power than a highly politically-motivated army. Rites of passage and hazing in the Canadian Armed Forces were found by anthropologists to improve cohesion necessary for trust in high-intensity combat. Not only do young males psychologically crave the ritual of transformation, but often the brutal adaptation for battlefield survival requires a severe break with the lackadaisical practices of civilian life. Nevertheless, primal units need strict discipline if they are to remain obedient to their commanders, because of the sociological phenomenon of ingroupism/outgroupism which prioritizes group self-preservation.

In contrast, the Russian bullying practice of dedovshchina instils discipline at the cost of poisoning trust and cohesion, and mitigating information exchange. Though less abusive, pervasive Ukrainian social culture among the 40 and 50 age cohort that constitutes most of the army, suffer from reduced innovativeness, hampering combined arms, and information sharing between superiors and subordinates, crippling mission-style commands. In an issue of Parameters, Hackett and Nagel found that changing the poorly trained battalion and brigade staffs, would come some way to fixing Ukraine’s weakness with regard to mission command.

According to business sociologists surveyed by Malcolm Gladwell, this pervasive tension between fostering primal units and maintaining obedience, is facilitated by a human predisposition to live or serve within a company-sized organization of approximately hundred persons. This is of course the most likely the size of the average hunter-gathering clan, within which every member knew each other, that dominated humanity’s experience over the previous 200,000 years of sexual and social selection. Three to nine of these companies can be aggregated into regiments, whose distinctive cultures raise a morale-enhancing esprit de corps, which generates a moral-commitment to the traditions of that larger unit. In both the British army, and Shaka’s Zulu Impi, the pervasive regulation of life and marriage by these institutions, allowed a dramatic segregation from the prevailing societal culture. It was found that the U.S. Army Division in Italy during the Second World War that was the most highly rated for aggressiveness and professionalism by the Germans, the 88^th (CEV 1.14), owed its success to the serendipitously low rate of personnel turn over. Of course, MIT professor Barry Posen has shown that military organizations, left on their own by their political leaders, are risk averse, and consequently suffer from a limited capacity for innovation.

Ukraine’s combat performance changed dramatically between its 2014 loss of Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk, and since February 2022, when it demonstrated obstinacy and innovativeness similar to Russia, but also selective capacity for the superior tactics of armored maneuver. This is unexpected because societies doggedly resist cultural change when it is tied so closely to the preservation of their identity. Ukraine’ surprisingly successful resistance can mostly be explained by the Ukrainian soldier’s innate tenacity, a common feature noted by foreign fighters. An additional cause is Ukraine’s lack of authoritarianism, which fostered a more innovatively minded under-35 cohort that had the capacity to incorporate new defensive technologies, in particular drones, artillery, electronic warfare, and light maneuver operations.

Deliberate cultural change is tricky, and its damage to traditional institutions and practices often produce violently unintended consequences, as evinced in the British, French, and Russian revolutions. China’s socially atomizing Cultural Revolution erased traditional resistance to Communist social organization, but at the cost of cohesion-enhancing manners and trust. Taiwan’s contemporary anti-authoritarianism, visible in the widespread closure of its military museums, has also undermined the social consensus on resisting a Chinese invasion. Harvard professor Stephen Peter Rosen, in his study of the cantonment system of South Asian militaries, showed that regimental military cultures, if isolated from their social communities, may culturally diverge and reduce those features that reduce combat performance. The Scharnhorst reform of the top-down Prussian army, instigated by the catastrophic 1806 defeat by Napoleon at Jena-Auerstedt, into one emphasizing limited initiative, is another such example of an organization’s capacity for reimprinting social culture. Ninety percent of Germany’s Wehrmacht that defeated France and Great Britain in 1940, had been raised in the previous five years, and its only combat experience was its brief invasion of Poland a year earlier. Israel’s high quality of human capital facilitated a dramatic shift from an armor-first doctrine to combined arms attacks with infantry, within just a week, during the 1973 October War.  

Intra-generational cultural change is unusual, as is visible with the slow decline of religion in Western societies, the shift in gender roles, and reactions to immigration. This is because much of a society’s culture depends on the bedtime stories mothers tell their children, and primary-school history courses, which shift only gradually. The most common cause of change is when a critical mass of the old believers in positions of legislative, educational and media authority, simply die off. This divergence in culture is most visible in the deep cleavage between the social media-savvy and cosmopolitan under-35 age cohorts in Russia, China and Iran, and their misgivings about military service, and the prevalent nationalist outlook of their current gerontocracies.

Ukraine’s demographic tree shows that it has a severe shortage of under-30s, which makes risking the expenditure of this cohort inadvisable so long as the war is expected to be an extended attritional contest. On the other hand, the widely available YouTube videos of Ukrainians engaged in leisurely vacationing in Odessa shows that Kyiv is not yet in an earnest mass mobilization warranting Western military support. Thus far, Ukraine’s defense has successfully relied on light infantry battalions, supported by outnumbered but accurate artillery guided by NATO targeting, with mobile “fire brigades,” but whose average age has reached forty years. The under-30 cohort’s leveraging of drone warfare is exemplary, but this instrument of war can never achieve the results of a combined arms armored attack. Ukraine must continue its gradual creation and exposure to combat of its Western equipped and trained armored brigades, which are the main loci of cultural transformation of its armed forces

Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill is associate professor of international relations at Concordia University, and author of Militarization and War (2007) and of Strategic Nuclear Sharing (2014). He has published extensively on Pakistan security issues and arms control and completed research contracts at the Office of Treaty Verification at the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, and the then Ballistic Missile Defense Office (BMDO). He has also conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Egypt, and is a consultant. He is a former Operations Officer, 3 Field Engineer Regiment, from the latter end of the Cold War to shortly after 9/11.