In The Line, Paul Wells talks to Lieutenant Colonel Melanie Lake, Royal Canadian Engineers, who commanded Operation Unifier from March to September, 2021:
Operation Unifier shoulder patch for Canadian troops in Ukraine.
Detail from a photo in the Operation Unifier image gallery – https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/operations/military-operations/current-operations/operation-unifier.html
Lake has had a hell of a career, as high-ranking soldiers usually have, though I cover soldiers rarely enough that I always manage to be surprised. She’s from Churchill Falls, Labrador and has a degree in chemical engineering from the Royal Military College. She served three tours in Afghanistan, including one collecting HUMINT, or human intelligence — interviewing Afghans in Kandahar for information on the insurgency. Later she led an explosives-clearance operation at Winisk, ON, way up north on Hudson Bay, where a DEW Line outpost had been shut down so quickly in the 1960s that large quantities of TNT had been left buried too close to the ground for comfort. This involved a lot of camping and trying to figure out how to explode only those parts of the landscape they wanted to explode, while trying not to explode one another. Canadian Forces Rangers worked with Lake’s team, keeping polar bears away. She really is a problem solver.
Lake confirmed both of my hunches about Op Unifier, at least in part. She sees a Ukrainian army that is performing well for specific important reasons, and a Russian army that is having serious trouble its commanders should have expected. She does think she and her colleagues in Op Unifier and other Western training missions — the United States, United Kingdom and Lithuania — can take some satisfaction in contributing to the substantial improvement of the Ukrainian defence effort since 2014. But she was careful to put a low ceiling over that effect.
“Certainly what the training missions provided have helped,” she said. “But I want to be really careful about taking credit for the performance that we’re seeing right now. We can’t teach courage. And [the Ukrainians] are showing that in spades.”
Where did training help? “The area where I think we had a really big influence is in helping them understand or institutionalize the idea of mission command. And decentralized decision-making — pushing authority and decision-making power down to lower levels. And helping them build a professional senior NCO corps. Those are things that, you know, when you look at the old Soviet system were certainly non-existent.”
Let’s unpack this. “Mission command” is a term of art in Western militaries. It holds commanders, down to quite junior levels, accountable for results while leaving them wide latitude to decide methods. How junior? “Senior NCO” refers to sergeants — career soldiers who’ve risen from the enlisted ranks and who are responsible for a section, which is between 6 and 20 soldiers. Canadian doctrine, American doctrine, NATO standards dictate that it should be routine for higher echelons to trust a section sergeant to figure out how to accomplish a task, and that’s something the Canadians have passed on to their Ukrainian colleagues.
The Russians haven’t built that trust into their system. This is an understatement. “A lot of what you’re seeing on the Russian side — you know, we keep talking about these general officers who are getting picked off, because they’re so far forward. They have no decentralized decision-making and their communication chain is breaking down. So you’ve got these generals going forward, way too far forward, trying to sort things out. And they’re just getting picked off left, right and centre. So training matters. Training matters an awful lot.”
To an Ottawa political reporter in the Trudeau era, there is a metaphor here as big as a billboard about what happens when too much decision-making is too centralized. But maybe just this once, I’ll resist the urge to jump in, more than I just did, and I’ll let Lake keep telling her story.
