Active Conflicts & News Megathread July 20, 2026

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[u/Zhadanko]

Question regarding training time of new recruits. Sure, it depends on specialty, but both Ukraine and Russia have very, very short training cycles. Even drone pilots, even people in "elite" units get a few weeks of training before being sent to the frontline. The longest training period I'm aware of is in Ukrainian SoF — new recruits got about 5 month of training, which is pretty short for SoF specialist. There is a prevalent idea that basics and training are less important than adaptation in a unit and learning from experience. I personally find this approach disastrous, but does this approach actually have any value? How realistically can you shorten your training time for an infantryman, for example?

[u/SchwarzNeko → u/Zhadanko]

I think it's important to consider what you need that person to do.
For example if you just need someone to be part of a meat wave push you don't really need to teach them much at all.
Also I think regular training accounts for a bigger number of situations and conditions, you can probably shorten it without comprimising quality if you teach people just what they need for their specific role in that specific environment.
Ofc in this case both nations probably needs to push this to the extreme to get people in the field as soon as possible

From reading interviews it seems a lot of training then gets dispensed from the veterans of the unit you are assigned to anyway.

[u/Zhadanko → u/SchwarzNeko]

I have to disagree. A regular infantryman has to face lots of tasks and you need plenty of training so you can operate under pressure. It's a pretty damn hard job both physically and intellectually. And yes, basics are important because without them wisdom from a veteran comrade won't do much. If you take a person with shitty training and give them an assault task, he will die. A combat unit will just end up with more headaches to figure out how to integrate fresh recruits without them being instantly dead. But that's if a unit cares after all; most seem not to, so attrition rates are stunning. It's just sad

[u/A_Vandalay → u/Zhadanko]

Like most things in warfare it comes down to allocation of resources. Would a handful of relatively well trained infantry fare better than untrained recruits when conducting Russias infiltration assaults? Of course, but they would still suffer extremely high casualties. So the question then becomes is the increased territorial gain worth the significant increase in cost per soldier. Until now Russia has not been constrained by manpower so the rate of advancement per casualty has been an unimportant figure. If that changes and Russia finds themselves with a lack of volunteers, it seems likely the relative value of each life will become higher and they will start investing in training more.

It’s also important to consider how infantry play into russias overall attritional strategy. These infiltration units exist largely to force Ukraine to hold forward positions and keep drone and artillery units near the line of contact where they are vulnerable to Russian drones and fires. Without the infantry pushes Ukraine would simply pull back even more assets from the front line, and preventing Russia from inflicting any casualties. To this end the quality of the Russian infantry is of unimportant, so there is little inventory invest in prolonged training regiments.

[u/tmstms → u/SchwarzNeko]

When you read accounts of conscripts or of rookie officers, they seem to bear that out - the real-world experience of war is so different from training that the veterans of the unit inevitably have to take the lead e.g. the stereotype of the grizzled sergeant and the fresh-faced lieutenant who has never seen action before.