fogredux
14 hr. ago
· edited 14 hr. ago
There's been a lot of pontificating about Ukrainian recruits getting minimal training before being throw into the meat grinder of late, and I thought a quick reminder of who's who wouldna do us any harm.
1 The 8 brigades (soon to be 9) of Air Assault are veteran formations. Replacements are fully trained and often volunteers from other established units.
2 The 2 brigades (soon to be 4) of the Marines are veteran, even elite forces that wouldn't touch a mobilized recruit with a ten foot battle mop. One of the new brigades (the 38th) is actually the 503rd battalion/regiment getting it's first big boy suit, and the 37th's seed pearl are Marine veterans rejoining the service, accepting veterans with service time back to 2014.
3. The 32 territorial defense brigades were formed with mostly green troops, but they are all volunteer, formed last spring and few haven't been at full 5 battalion strength since late summer .
4. The regular army has 45 brigades on the org chart, 12 of which are new units forming. They did form several Mech brigades last spring from green troops, though UAF were disappointed with early actions, and have shifted to a practice of organizing around established smaller units (to see how this works, look to the 3rd Assault, the 5th assault or the 47th Mech brigades), and even then, the brigades receive months of training. Several other newer brigades such as the 1st special purpose and presidential guards were actually transfers of already formed and experienced National Guard brigades. They receive green replacements, but for the most part, they are the volunteers receiving 3-5 weeks of western training, not mobilized troops, and units get the bulk of them when off the line, where they receive additional training and integration into veteran companies before they see the sharp end of the stick.
5. The Interior Ministry is the wild west, where you see everything from elite and veteran brigade sized forces (such as Kracken, Azov and the Second Rapid Reaction Brigade) down to small volunteer battalions of bored border guards and paramilitary police. They are aggressively forming new National Guard units and aren't real picky about where they come from, and I can't get a definitive handle on standards of training, or how quickly they see combat.
6. There are several additional oddball units out there such as the brigade of Guards, general staff, outside the normal org structure. There was a blog post (allegedly) from a mobilized gentleman who stated he was being sent to the front with 5 days training in one of them- It seemed like a stretch, but if the IM is the wild west, these units are outer space, so strange things that aren't supposed to happen could.
reddit.com |
