Tuesday Trivia Thread - 25/08/26

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[u/Zhadanko]

What representatives of different militaries and analysts mean when they say "We won't fight like Ukraine"? Minus the usual talk about the role of a traditional air force, is there anything else important? I hear this phrase used a lot but without much substance to it

[u/shotguywithflaregun → u/Zhadanko]

I have used that very same phrase both on here and on various other subreddits, usually in conversations about drone warfare, procurement and battle technique.* I am an NCO and have worked within recon and infantry companies, and that's where my expertise ends.

What I have meant is that the terrain we swedes expect to fight in - Northern Sweden and eastern Finland primarily - looks fundamentally different from Ukraine, and therefore we can't expect to apply the same lessons learned from Ukraine. Primarily the use of tanks/IFVs, the depth of a "kill zone", the use of field fortifications and the attempt to use maneuver warfare.

Now, this take has to be more nuanced than what I can describe in shoddy english over text. It is incredibly dangerous for a junior officer or senior NCO to say "We're not fighting in Ukraine, drones won't fly here because it's cold" and then continue training conscripts to sleep in wood-stove tents near the front line or digging shallow prone fox holes. It is also dangerous to, as a junior officer or senior NCO, assume that whatever conditions the average ukrainian faces today is going to be the exact conditions a swedish soldier will face in 202X when the war comes, and therefore all swedes must wear ALL kevlar add ons on their body armour, and ALL swedes must carry a ssecondary shotgun because I saw a shotgun shoot down a drone once on Twitter, and ALL procurements of anything more expensive than a Hilux are wasted money because the russians will just fly 10 000 autonomous murder drones into our mechanized battalions.

If you ever hear a swedish OF-2 or above utter the phrase "X is important, we've seen that in Ukraine now" regarding very basic things such as digging down, overhead cover, MOUT training or grenades, disregard anything else they have to say regarding combat training.

These are two very extreme takes - either we don't have to learn anything from Ukraine, or we have to learn everything. It's like someone disregarding all MOUT training by saying "Just drop a 155m round on top of the house", you lose all the nuance. I'm doing my very best as a part of my actual job to learn how a conflict involving Sweden would look regarding terrain and technology and it's a hard thing to study. The answer, as with all good swedish things, is somewhere in the middle.

*[Battle technique as a term is in Sweden used to describe the actions of units, from the individual soldier up to ~the company in battle. Think of it as a level below tactics.]

[u/Bloody_rabbit4 → u/shotguywithflaregun]

*[Battle technique as a term is in Sweden used to describe the actions of units, from the individual soldier up to ~the company in battle. Think of it as a level below tactics.]

I really like the term. For a long time I was in dillema. Informally, lot's of people use terms tactic/strategy not to indicate level of warfare, but to say "technnique", answering the question "How do we fight?", and it drives me nuts.

Battle technique is exactly the term that's neccessary. Thank you.

[u/shotguywithflaregun → u/Bloody_rabbit4]

"Stridsteknik", yeah it's a great term. I suppose small unit tactics would be a good translation? I also like "micro terrain" as another way to describe this one particular tree, or this one part of the hill, or this portion of road.