Oh, Please!

The US Army studied armored warfare based on Patton's "advances" against virtually non-existent Wehrmacht's armor in Lorraine, and from the fairy tales by Manstein and Guderian, who had to confabulate in order to explain how, in the end, they got beaten by Katukov and Rotmistrov tank armies. The turkey shoot in the Gulf added very little, in fact--detracted, from the combined arms, and all attempts by honorable David Glantz and Jonathan House to change the perspective on the Red Army and WW II made a huge splash, but still failed. This was inevitable, when one operated on correlates of war, this ever valuable war statistics, lifted directly from Nazi sources. GIGO--Garbage In, Garbage Out. 

Now, as RT notices, they want to train based on... drum roll--"lessons from Ukraine". 

The US is preparing its troops for future wars by examining the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine and fielding its own experiments based on experience gained from that battlefield, Defense One reported on Thursday. The National Training Center (NTC) in California and the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) are training US service members to use drones, electronic surveillance, and satellites and combine them with artillery strikes, according to commanders who spoke with the outlet. At the same time, troops are learning to conceal themselves from enemy drones and surveillance. “The thing we struggle the most with is this business of a transparent battlefield,” Brigadier General Curtis Taylor, the head of the NTC, told the outlet. He explained that his center has been teaching soldiers to hide from UAVs in buildings and minimize the use of communication equipment. Meanwhile, the JRTC has reportedly been pushing units to simplify their command posts to be put up and taken down quickly. 

Ah, poor-poor lads, tactics is important and all--surely one needs to conceal oneself but tactical, let alone operational, manuals--the level at which outcomes of wars are decided--are written very differently than a collection of anecdotal evidence from grunts on the ground, however important those are. In order for one to understand, as the original from Defense One piece describes:

Drones, electronic surveillance, and satellites allow adversaries to easily identify U.S. formations, Taylor said—and combining that data with artillery or missiles means the enemy can strike anywhere, anytime. At JRTC, forces playing the “opposing force,” called OPFOR, have learned to fly drones that use apps to scan for Bluetooth or WiFi signals, Gardner said. 

While EMCON is just a teeny-weeny part of a much larger picture of massive scale combined arms and multi-domain operations one needs what the US never got from her wars starting from Korea, because one cannot interrogate the enemy which is not a loser but quite the opposite--has beaten the US. That means an extremely limited access to viable combat statistics, especially in terms of crucial correlates between combat effectiveness of formations and weapons' arsenal they use. Now, add here a complete caricature 404 provides in terms of combat data to NATO and you will get the idea. No number of the US Army officers on the ground in 404 will change the paradigm, even with 24/7 work of US ISR complex. One still NEEDS those huge arrays of combat information for systematization and generalization in order to develop operational and strategic models for victory on the battlefield. And bar some SIGINT and localized data at the locations of already utterly demolished VSU, US Army and Intel is not getting access to the most important data sets. 

And then, of course, there is the issue of hardware, or, speaking in more learned language--procurement policies. It is as simple as 2 x 4 piece of lumber:

1. If you don't have AD which even remotely is as capable as that of Russia--you are left only to despair (or salivate) at the element of war which you cannot change, because the impact of your air forces and long range fires is diminished dramatically. Suddenly, it becomes the issue of strategy and even politics. 

2. If you don't have hypersonic weapons, let alone integrate them into your TOE, what is that you gonna do? Train for what? Right, just conceal yourself and your HQ which still is NOT going to help since HQs and Comm. Posts by definition are C4 units and will be detected and annihilated. So, how are you going "to train" for that. Surely, the Parameters prescription is dubious at best: 

The Army must focus on developing command-and-control systems and mobile command posts that enable continuous movement, allow distributed collaboration, and synchronize across all warfighting functions to minimize electronic signature.  

You can minimize, you cannot eliminate it.

3. You CANNOT train the US Army for 3,600 casualties a day. Most importantly, you CANNOT train American public to accept such a price, especially being paid fighting who knows where for who knows what objectives, unless one turns the US into Orwellian prison-state, which is in progress as I type this. But even then...

At this stage the VSU lost half-a-million KIAs and at least twice this number of wounded. And this is the lower-end estimates. These numbers are much higher than US Army's all KIAs in WW II and Vietnam combined. 

But in the end, you cannot turn expeditionary colonial army into continental juggernaut--you simply cannot. Sheer economics and weapons enter the set of considerations here, which cannot be properly discussed within one short post. So, they can train whatever they want, but no training, however important on human-professional level, can substitute tools of 21st century war. But then again, I repeat ad nauseam--the West lost the arms race. To demonstrate, here is one such butt-hurt imbecile: 

The dismal performance of Russia’s conventional forces in the early days of the war in Ukraine risks convincing some in NATO that the future Russian threat to the Alliance can be deterred primarily via NATO’s conventional superiority, and that enhancing deterrence of Russian nuclear use in a future conflict is therefore no longer a high priority. This is a dangerous fallacy. 

The guy is full of shit, with "degree" in... international relations and is completely lost in his pseudo-expertise, but he is REPRESENTATIVE  of the "intellectual" level of current US military-political top which is NOT trainable or is capable of learning, and this is a grim reality of the defeat of the combined West. You cannot win when the only thing you know is how to operate in GIGO mode.