Training Ukrainian soldiers has delivered an unexpected lesson back to NATO: the capabilities alliance forces allowed to atrophy after the Cold War have become urgently relevant again. A senior NATO commander told Business Insider that the experience of working alongside Ukrainian troops has forced his forces to confront skill sets that had been systematically deprioritized during the post-Cold War decades of counterinsurgency and stabilization operations. The war in Ukraine, he said, is functioning as a blunt corrective. The convergence of large-scale combined-arms combat, contested electromagnetic environments, and persistent drone surveillance has rendered disciplines like electronic warfare not just relevant but essential — and NATO partners training Ukrainians are relearning that reality alongside their students. This dynamic mirrors a broader alliance reckoning examined in NATO drone strategy, where adversary capabilities are accelerating procurement and doctrinal decisions simultaneously.

Electronic Warfare as the Central Lesson

Electronic warfare sits at the core of what NATO trainers say they are relearning. According to the Business Insider report, the NATO commander described the Ukrainian battlefield as a dense electromagnetic environment where jamming, signals intelligence, and spectrum control can determine whether a unit survives or is destroyed. Ukrainian forces have been operating in exactly that environment since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, developing a practitioner’s understanding of EW that, in many cases, surpasses what their NATO counterparts have maintained in formal training programs.

The feedback loop runs both ways. As NATO instructors work with Ukrainian soldiers, they are identifying gaps in their own forces’ readiness — gaps that institutional priorities built around the post-9/11 fight had obscured. The commander’s candor reflects an assessment that has been building across the alliance: a peer adversary like Russia demands a fundamentally different set of competencies than the irregular warfare missions that dominated NATO training cycles for two decades. Electronic warfare is among the most prominent of those competencies, and the Ukrainian experience is making the case for reinvestment in ways that years of internal debate had not.

What Ukrainian Soldiers Bring — and What They Still Need

The training relationship is not one-directional. A separate Western training program for Ukrainian soldiers has deliberately excluded drone piloting and electronic warfare from its curriculum — not because those subjects are unimportant, but because Ukrainian troops already arrive with advanced proficiency in both areas, honed under combat conditions. Western trainers have instead concentrated their instruction on areas where Ukrainian forces have identified their own shortfalls, allowing the curriculum to reflect the actual operational gaps rather than a standardized syllabus designed for a less experienced force.

That division of labor underscores a broader reality shaping how NATO views its Ukrainian training mission. The alliance is not simply transferring knowledge to a partner in need — it is engaged in a genuine exchange, one where Ukrainian battlefield experience is informing how NATO forces think about contested-environment operations. The implications extend beyond Ukraine’s immediate war effort. As GDD has reported on the cost drone warfare, the Ukrainian conflict is generating operational data that is reshaping doctrinal thinking across multiple alliance members simultaneously.

Broader Implications for Alliance Readiness

The NATO commander’s remarks carry implications that extend well beyond the immediate mission of preparing Ukrainian soldiers to fight. They amount to an acknowledgment that the alliance’s own readiness posture contains vulnerabilities exposed by the character of the war in Ukraine. Decades of counterinsurgency operations created institutional habits — in doctrine, procurement, and training — oriented toward a threat environment that bears little resemblance to what a conflict with a near-peer adversary would look like. Ukraine is demonstrating, in real time and at scale, what that near-peer environment actually demands.

The recognition that Cold War-era skills matter again is not new as an abstract assessment — alliance defense ministers and military chiefs have made variations of the argument for years. What is different now is that NATO officers working directly with Ukrainian counterparts are experiencing the gap firsthand, in practical training contexts, rather than reading about it in threat assessments. That ground-level validation is proving harder to dismiss and is beginning to drive concrete adjustments in how alliance forces structure their own training programs. Whether those adjustments translate into sustained investment in EW capacity and related disciplines will depend on budget cycles and political will — factors that, as recent alliance debates have made clear, remain anything but settled.