The military has a clear criterion of a bad commander — he’s afraid to take responsibility.
In general, commanders are different. They differ in experience, manner of communication, and attitude towards subordinates. You can get along with all these features, except for one — when the commander shifts responsibility to others.
War is the realm of unpopular decisions. Most processes here involve risk and losses. No one guarantees that a given decision will be optimal. No one promises that the order given will lead to a happy ending. And that’s why it’s very important to feel that there are people at the top who are ready not only to take responsibility even if something goes wrong.
So, it seems to me we have a significant shortage of commanders at the national level.
Example No. 1. The military needs more people. Someone is injured, someone is dismissed, the brigades are understaffed. Those who volunteered have long been in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Mobilization in our conditions cannot be a popular process, so the main question is simple: how fair it will be in its execution.
The only way out is for the state to introduce universal rules for everyone and then strictly enforce them. Up-to-date databases for recruitment centers. Online offices and digital draft notices. Inevitable punishment for those who decide to retroactively rewrite their social contract with the state. Accountability for military recruiters who might be inclined to accept a bribe.
Instead, all branches of government compete in trying to pass an unpopular policy to one another. The process, for which no one wants to take responsibility, is corroding our society. Grabbing men off the streets to forcibly deliver them to recruitment centers—instead of civilized mobilization. A complicated multi-stage system with loopholes—instead of punishment for draft dodgers. Archaic paperwork instead of digital accounting. The army is not getting enough fresh forces and the war is waged by exhausted people who signed up in 2022.
Example No. 2. Mobilization deferment. You must either work for the Armed Forces of Ukraine or toil for national victory in some other tangible way.
Instead, engineers working for drone manufacturers get mobilized, while those who have nothing to do with Ukraine’s survival get deferments from service. Now the country is being offered a legalized buyback system [referring to several bills under consideration by the Ukrainian parliament], when one can buy the right to ignore the war, and everything related to it, for an additional $500 a month in taxes.
Chaos begins in the army when no one wants to make decisions. When responsibility is shifted down to the junior level. When a strategic process is left without a conductor and it has to be administered on the ground, without a general outline or framework.
This approach never works. It creates chaos and leads to disaster. And the fact that our army has been successfully fighting a superior enemy for the third year in a row with a shortage of resources can only be explained by the fact that the army thinks much less about politics than our politicians do.
The state must set public priorities, describe which model of behavior it considers correct and normative. There is nothing really complicated here.
Those who attack draft officers should be put behind bars. Those who try to disrupt the mobilization should be summoned to the SBU security service for questioning. Those who sell “white tickets” [document that certifies an individual is unfit for military service] should go to prison along with those who send the unfit to serve. Otherwise, the malaise grows stronger, giving the impression that the state has abdicated from trying to preserve itself. That it makes decisions in the interests of those who have decided to forget about the state.
Anyone who has put on a uniform in the last two and a half years understands that this decision is associated with, to put it mildly, certain risks. But those who happen to be politicians in a country at war are for some reason convinced they can continue as if we’re at peace. Estimating their own popularity and approval rating whenever they are faced with a tough decision that must be made.
If the military operated on the same basis, we would have lost the war two years ago.