This brought Jed to the second subject he wanted to discuss: Russian tactics and doctrine. He said he had spent much of the past few weeks in the trenches northwest of Kyiv. “The Russians have no imagination,” he said. “They would shell our positions, attack in large formations, and when their assaults failed, do it all over again. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians would raid the Russian lines in small groups night after night, wearing them down.” Jed’s observation echoed a conversation I’d had the day before with Andriy Zagorodnyuk. After Russia’s invasion of the Donbas in 2014, Zagorodnyuk oversaw a number of reforms to the Ukrainian military that are now bearing fruit, chief among them changes in Ukraine’s military doctrine; then, from 2019 to 2020, he served as minister of defense.
Russian doctrine relies on centralized command and control, while mission-style command and control—as the name suggests—relies on the individual initiative of every soldier, from the private to the general, not only to understand the mission but then to use their initiative to adapt to the exigencies of a chaotic and ever-changing battlefield in order to accomplish that mission. Although the Russian military has modernized under Vladimir Putin, it has never embraced the decentralized mission-style command-and-control structure that is the hallmark of NATO militaries, and that the Ukrainians have since adopted.