The Misuse of Ukrainian Special Forces?

Once again checking in with Willy OAM. I’ve been hitting his site lately as the plot may be thickening and a Russian breakthrough on the near horizon, but who knows. Anyhow, beginning at about the 13:00 mark, Willy talks about a knowledgeable, elite friend of his who has repeatedly lamented the misuse of Ukrainian ‘special forces.’  I wondered in a comment if it might not be that no ‘strategic uses’ exists because of lack of transport. Let’s assert two broad traditional use categories for special forces type personnel — training of foreign forces in guerrilla warfare and raiding (OK, we could tease out others). To do the training guerrilla bit, there has to be some territory into which the forces can be placed where there is an appreciable body of potential guerrillas. To achieve the other (some sort of raid), any mission proposal depends on transportation capacity to and from a target. If strategic movement cannot be reasonably effected, fuhgeddaboudit. Indeed, if special ops transport cannot be mounted, there is no special ops force, just a bunch of better, more resolute athletes who have been organized on the basis of elite mentality and some hope. As Borat might tell you, “The problem is transport.” Maybe Willy’s friend wants to think he’s with some special guys, but they are effectively a bunch of rangers who don’t have any ‘SF’ guys who need saving and no plane to jump out of. In fact, your friend is with a group that long ago became high-end infantry reserves. Maybe they are being put to their best possible use — shoring up areas where defensive fortifications were not well-enough prepared or where less well-trained troops cannot survive — which now looks like a lot of areas.