Lessons Learned from the 2014 Russia-Ukraine War and Major Doctrinal Changes in the U.S. Army

Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 without a major battle had a major political and military shock to the West. At this time, the method of warfare applied by Russia was called in the West by various terms such as 'New Generation Warfare', 'Hybrid Warfare', 'Cognitive Warfare', and 'Information Warfare'. Meanwhile, research to respond to this has been actively conducted and is still ongoing. Our military must also study the lessons of the Russia-Ukraine war and prepare for future wars. But how can we derive practical and objective lessons learned? There may be errors in deriving lessons learned from articles in media outlets such as newspapers and TV, and data from the Internet and SNS. Accurate analysis is limited unless you participate in a war or send a military lessons learned team. From our military's perspective, a realistic and efficient method is to refer to official military analysis data from countries that can practically and objectively observe the war, such as the US military and NATO, and the doctrine developed through that data. Since 2014, the U.S. military has organized a Russian next-generation warfare research team at the U.S. Army Training & Doctrine Command to analyze the Russia-Ukraine war, derive war lessons, and improve doctrine. In particular, the doctrine at the operational level showed fruition with the publication of FM 3-0 Operations in 2022 and ADP 3-13 Information in 2023. The key content is to reflect ‘adversarial competition below armed confloct’ in the continuum of competition and improve it so that non-physical activities such as ‘information power’ can be actively utilized in this situation. Since North Korea is also likely to apply Russia's methods of warfare, I think it is a very meaningful task to understand the content of the doctrine improvements that reflect the results of the research on Russia's methods of warfare conducted by the U.S. military for 10 years since 2014 and reflect them in our doctrine.