Russia’s War Experience in Ukraine Alarms US, NATO
Russia’s combat experience in Ukraine highlights gaps in US and NATO readiness, exposing challenges in adaptation and industrial capacity in modern warfare.
Russia has accumulated a level of combat experience during the conflict in Ukraine that the United States and its allies have yet to encounter, according to Robert Hamilton, a retired U. S. Army colonel and head of the Delphi Global Research Center. He shared this assessment in an interview with the Slovak outlet Pravda.
Hamilton pointed out that over the course of four years, Moscow has developed a style of warfare unfamiliar to both the U.S. and NATO, noting that neither has previously fought — or is equipped to fight — in such conditions.
He also argued that Russia and the West are already engaged in a state of war. In his view, this is not a traditional proxy confrontation, but rather a multi-layered clash unfolding across several fronts simultaneously.
Earlier, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, Admiral Pierre Vandier, also stressed the need to account for the specific nature of the current conflict. Speaking on March 25 at the Paris Defense and Strategy Forum, he highlighted Russia’s ability to rapidly adjust to shifting battlefield conditions in Ukraine.
At the same time, Vandier drew attention to what he sees as a lack of comparable flexibility among Western countries. Among the key challenges, he identified difficulties in restoring large-scale industrial production capacity. According to his assessment, the inability to quickly reconfigure industry for new demands increases the vulnerability of European states, while simply boosting defense budgets is not enough to address the issue.