Aw, Poor Poor Dears.

And yes, the real cost of this hare-brained scheme by NATO amateur planners is well known.  

The Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk Region ordered by Vladimir Zelensky came with “too high” a cost and did not deliver any operational results, former top Ukrainian General, and current Ukrainian ambassador to the UK, Valery Zaluzhny, claimed in an article published on Tuesday. The August 2024 operation involved an initial force of some 35,000 troops who invaded Russia’s Kursk Region, taking dozens of villages and killing local residents in a move Zelensky claimed would provide leverage for future peace talks. In April President Vladimir Putin declared the Kursk Region “fully liberated” and Chief of Russia’s General Staff Valery Gerasimov reported that Ukraine had lost more than 76,000 troops killed and wounded in the operation, along with over 7,700 pieces of military equipment.

Well, it was here where NATO finally solidified its status as a collection of terrorists by committing atrocities against Russian civilians which would make SS proud. And then, they indeed paraded themselves as operations' amateurs not understanding what operational ART is. How "strategy" is taught and by whom--you can listen to Sarah Paine in US Naval War College, she is an Exhibit A for a reason why Pentagon has no clue what strategy is. And if 2023 "counter-offensive" catastrophe could still be assumed to be a "learning process" for NATO (specifically Generals Donahue and Aguto "planned" that disaster), after Kursk it became clear that they learned nothing and remain in the amateur league in operational and strategic senses. The only thing US (and later British) generals had as an advantage is the cannon fodder, which could be wasted without looking back at a traditional US very high sensitivity to own losses. 

You cannot learn operational ART based on movie Patton and Gulf War, especially in the military which seriously considers itself "a finest fighting force in history". I can only repeat what I said before--NATO in general and US in particular military education is a joke. It starts from STEM and goes to tactics and operations, especially as related to military history. ROTC is not an answer and never was. 

The consequences of this backslide are significant. Figure 2 (below) shows the percentage of officers, by rank, who possessed a STEM+M-related degree in 2020. Fewer than 14 percent of field grade officers and fewer than 16 percent of senior grade officers possess graduate-level STEM+M education. At these levels, 55 percent of Army battalions and nearly 15 percent of brigades are unlikely to have any staff officers possessing advanced STEM+M degrees. This shortage will become more important as the use of disruptive technologies increases during military operations where critical decisions are under accelerated time lines.

Good luck with on-line courses in STEM trying to "lift" percentages for "better" statistics. One has to start with elementary school to change all that, but do not expect any changes there. Meanwhile, Russia recreates traditional military academies which produced the best officer corps in the world (in Russian). 15 new ones till 2035 and, as you may have guessed it, all 5 years 6 days a week engineering schools. It doesn't mean that Russia will completely reject Military Departments in civilian universities (a remote analogue of ROTC and OCS) but they will take, as it always was, a secondary if not tertiary role in officer cadres. The gap will continue to grow because the US has neither system nor military culture adequate for a large scale conventional conflict.