In 1994, I was a Lieutenant Colonel squadron commander at Fort Knox, Kentucky, leading a unit of about 1000 people helping others learn to be tankers.
But I like to think they offer a little depth and color about who the people fighting in Ukraine are. My experiences observing or participating in exercises, personal engagements, and training aren’t meant to explain, much less predict, what’s going on in Ukraine as that nation’s military fights its Russian foe. My war stories about the Russian and Ukrainian militaries are also anecdotes, with no associated metrics or figures, but they give indications of what I’ve seen of the performance of two armies now facing each other on the battlefield. War stories are parables, and like much of military life, they’re sometimes about finding purpose-even profundity-in the mundane. In the military, stories like these are called “war stories”-and as often as not, they aren’t about war or combat. If abortion is really murder, there are no exceptions - that eventually will impact contraceptives…Īn interesting anecdote from an army bandsman. The sergeant I spoke to observed that what came through in the Ukrainians’ performance is that they wanted to be there, they wanted to be great, and their leaders were inspirational. It requires developing young leaders, managing logistics, and maintaining high morale. It requires training those people to work together to perform complicated tasks with impeccable timing. It requires equipping those people with the right technology-often highly specialized-so they can do their job. It requires recruiting the right people with the right talents (and many militaries, including the American military, use bands as a recruiting tool). But putting on great performance requires some of the same skills as conducting a military operation. What can you learn about a military from its band? Usually, not much. But the Ukrainians-those soldiers really got it going on!” “Germany was really good, and France performed some great music. I wasn’t impressed.” I asked which countries had impressed her. well, we wouldn’t allow leaders like them in our Army. They weren’t really soldiers they were musicians dressed like soldiers. When I pressed her for more details, she offered that the Russian musicians “were good, but they really weren’t very impressive. I had been back in the United States when, according to the band’s director, “America’s Musical Ambassadors in Europe” had “rocked Red Square in six performances.” Russia had invited military bands from a half-dozen countries to perform modern music from their respective countries, and soldiers’ from our European Army band had knocked-em-dead with a Michael Jackson medley outside the Kremlin.Ī very young sergeant, a trumpet player, confirmed to me that the Red Square concert had been a smashing success.
It was an event I witnessed secondhand-a visit by our U.S. Strangely, one memory that stands out had more to do with trumpets and rim-shots than tanks and rifles. I met their leaders, observed their maneuvers, and watched their development closely either up close or through reading intelligence reports. Over the course of nearly four decades, I spent a lot of time either engaging or working with the two armies now engaged in a bitter struggle in Ukraine. Countries like Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, the Baltic states, and others had transformed their governments and their militaries since the early 1990s, and a few of them were even fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Warsaw Pact countries who had been our foes during the Cold War were now our NATO allies and sovereign partners, and there was no border wall splitting Germany in two. Army in Europe had shrunk dramatically from the quarter-million soldiers stationed there during the Cold War, and it would shrink even more during my two years in command. Back then, it was our job to defend against the Soviet hordes.īut by 2011, things had changed. It was a dream job as it was in that command – in a different time and under much different circumstances – that I had begun my career 36 years earlier as a 2 nd lieutenant platoon leader, leading tanks on patrols of the then-West German border. Army forces stationed in various countries throughout Europe. Army Europe and Seventh Army, in command of all U.S.
In March 2011, I began a new posting as the Commanding General of U.S.