A General's Ringside Seat to Two Diverging Armies
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling commanded United States Army Europe and Seventh Army from 2011 to 2013, overseeing all American ground forces stationed across the continent. In this essay, originally published in April 2022 and republished by The Bulwark on the fourth anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Hertling draws on nearly four decades of direct observation to argue that the Russian and Ukrainian militaries took radically different trajectories after the Cold War. The piece is part memoir, part institutional analysis, and its core claim is straightforward: culture and leadership development matter more than hardware and headcount.
Hertling anchors the essay with an unlikely opening. A young American trumpet player, returning from a multinational band performance on Red Square, offered her assessment of the various militaries represented. The Russians were unimpressive. The Ukrainians stood out.
The Ukrainians--those soldiers really got it going on!
It is a small moment, but Hertling uses it to set up his larger argument about institutional character. A military band, he contends, requires many of the same organizational competencies as a combat unit: recruiting, equipping, training, leadership development, logistics, and morale.
The Russian Army Up Close
Hertling's first formal encounter with the Russian military came in 1994, during a Partnership for Peace visit arranged by the Pentagon. He toured barracks, observed exercises, climbed into a T-80 tank, and came away unimpressed. The barracks were spartan. The food was terrible. The training exercises were scripted performances rather than genuine skill-building events.
I came away from my first formal exchange with the Russian Army doubtful they were the ten-foot-tall behemoth we thought them to be.
That assessment never substantially improved. Nearly two decades later, as the commanding general of U.S. Army Europe, Hertling hosted Colonel-General Aleksandr Streitsov, commander of the Russian Ground Forces, for a reciprocal visit. Hertling deliberately avoided staged demonstrations, instead letting Streitsov pick locations to visit and showing him units as they actually were. Streitsov was visibly impressed by the competence of junior American officers and sergeants, and posed a revealing question.
I'm wondering if we could create that kind of culture in the Russian Army?
When Hertling later traveled to Moscow for a return visit, what he found confirmed the intelligence assessments. Classroom discussions at Russia's elite military academies were, in his word, "sophomoric." Units in training followed scripts with no genuine combined arms interaction. Infantry, armor, artillery, air, and resupply all trained in isolation from one another.
Streitsov's successor, Colonel-General Vladimir Chirkin, attended one of Hertling's annual conferences of European army chiefs and seemed genuinely engaged. He promised to send Russian forces to future multinational training events. Those promises went unfulfilled. Putin fired Chirkin in December 2013 on bribery charges.
Colonel-General Chirkin had, if nothing else, proved that he was acting in line with the role models in his senior leadership.
The observation is dry but pointed. Hertling sees corruption not as an aberration in the Russian officer corps but as a feature of its institutional culture, cascading downward from figures like Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Putin himself.
Ukraine's Painful Starting Point
Hertling is honest about how bad the Ukrainian military looked in his early encounters. In 2004, as assistant division commander of the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad, he watched American forces relieve a Ukrainian contingent in Al-Kut, Iraq. The scene was grim.
The Ukrainian soldiers were undisciplined and poorly trained, their combat vehicles were in terrible shape, the officers and appointed sergeants appeared corrupt, and there were even indicators that some of the Ukrainian contingent were selling old Iraqi artillery rounds to the insurgents for their roadside bombs.
A subsequent posting confirmed the pattern. A German KFOR commander in Kosovo reported the same problems with Ukrainian units: indiscipline, poor training, officers siphoning fuel for black market sales. Hertling admits these encounters cemented a bias. He doubted Ukraine could shake the institutional rot inherited from the Soviet system.
He was wrong, and the essay is at its strongest when he traces exactly how that transformation happened.
The Slow Work of Institutional Change
The turning point was a sustained, years-long American and multinational investment in training, education, and leadership development. U.S. Army Europe expanded its Non-Commissioned Officer Academy to allied nations. Multinational exercises proliferated at sites across Eastern Europe, including Yavoriv in western Ukraine. American Special Forces trained partner nations in unconventional warfare tactics. The U.S. Air Force provided advanced fighter training and close air support instruction.
Hertling's Ukrainian counterpart during this period was Colonel-General Henadii Vorobyov, a career soldier who had risen through the Soviet and then Ukrainian systems. Vorobyov was, in Hertling's telling, the kind of leader who transforms institutions from within. He was obsessed with building a professional NCO corps, replacing corrupt senior officers, and getting his young colonels into American war college programs.
In a one-on-one discussion over beer, he confessed that his senior officers were his biggest problem, and he needed to find a way to replace the corrupt generals who were "Russian-trained" and too close to Ukraine's older politicians.
Vorobyov retired in 2014, defended a doctoral dissertation that became the basis for Ukraine's military white paper, was recalled to lead the National Defense University, and died of a heart attack in 2017. The street in front of Ukraine's war college now bears his name.
After Russia's 2014 invasion of Crimea and the Donbas, the training infrastructure Vorobyov and his American partners had built accelerated dramatically. The 173rd Airborne Brigade established "Fearless Guardian" at Yavoriv. A permanent Joint Multinational Training Group brought American, Polish, Canadian, Lithuanian, and British trainers together to prepare Ukrainian battalions as combined arms teams. The NCO corps Vorobyov had envisioned became a formal institution.
Where the Argument Has Limits
Hertling's account is compelling, but it rests almost entirely on personal observation and anecdote. He acknowledges this openly, noting his stories come "with no associated metrics or figures." That candor is welcome, but it also means the essay asks readers to generalize from a relatively small number of encounters spanning decades. The Russian military's catastrophic performance in the opening months of the 2022 invasion has largely vindicated Hertling's assessment, yet his framework offers little predictive power for how institutional cultures might shift under wartime pressure. Russia has, however haltingly, adapted some of its tactics over four years of fighting. An essay that treats institutional culture as essentially fixed risks underestimating an adversary's capacity to learn, even a deeply dysfunctional one.
Similarly, Hertling's portrait of Ukraine's transformation gives heavy credit to American training programs. The Ukrainians themselves -- their political will, their willingness to fight for sovereignty, the grassroots civic mobilization that sustained the war effort -- receive somewhat less attention than the institutional mechanisms that shaped their officer and NCO corps.
The Parade Army Versus the Real One
Hertling closes with a passage from Jean Larteguy's novel The Centurions, in which a French officer describes two kinds of armies: one for display, with polished equipment and doddering generals, and one composed of young enthusiasts from whom impossible efforts are demanded.
I'd like [France] to have two armies: one for display with lovely guns, tanks, little soldiers, staffs, distinguished and doddering Generals, and dear little regimental officers who would be deeply concerned over their General's bowel movements or their Colonel's piles, an army that would be shown for a modest fee on every fairground in the country. The other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage uniforms, who would not be put on display, but from whom impossible efforts would be demanded and to whom all sorts of tricks would be taught.
The implication is unmistakable. Russia built the parade army. Ukraine, through painful years of reform, built something closer to the real one.
For all their bellicose rhetoric and Victory Day parades on Red Square, I sometimes wonder if Putin and Shoygu know the difference between the two types of armies. The Ukrainians sure do.
Bottom Line
Hertling's essay is a valuable firsthand account from a senior American officer who watched both armies evolve over decades. Its central insight -- that leadership culture, NCO development, and institutional willingness to confront corruption determine battlefield effectiveness far more than equipment inventories or troop numbers -- has been borne out by four years of war. The piece works best as a corrective to the pre-2022 conventional wisdom that Russia's military was a near-peer threat to NATO. It works less well as a complete explanation of Ukraine's resilience, which owes as much to national will and democratic conviction as to any training program. But as a reminder that armies are ultimately human institutions, shaped by the character of their leaders and the cultures those leaders build, it remains essential reading.