07-15-2022, 12:50 PM
(07-15-2022, 09:56 AM)Treefence Wrote: I've gotta say, it's pretty impressive that Ukrainians can learn so many systems in such a short amount of time, it's a bit of a frankensteins' monster, but it is what it is. Hopefully more HIMARS and other such systems will be on there way soon, it would be nice if Ukrainians could start using them on a wider range of targets.It is indeed impressive that they have learned as much as they have and got results. The HIMARS is actually pretty simple to use and it takes only a crew of three, one of whom doesn't need to know much. That said, it is still great they have got as far as they have, especially including the language barrier problems.
Where there may be problems is in the maintenance area and the size of the trained pool of operators. There is going to be some attrition in the operational forces just due to sickness, burnout, promotion, etc. There are also the possibility of casualties. Hopefully training continues full blast to increase the number of qualified operators. Often in the military the desire is to use existing operators to do the training, often OJT. This quite often doesn't work well and that is especially true if the original operators are only marginally trained themselves. They need real continuing out of country training for additional operators to increase the pool size.
Maintenance training is harder to evaluate because having systems fail in the field probably isn't being advertised much by the Ukrainians even if it is happening. I hope that things are going well, and I also hope there are a few "retired" techs working in Ukraine to fill out the maintenance efforts.
