NATO officers are now learning from Ukraine’s combat experience in UAVs, electronic warfare, and intelligence. Ukrainian military personnel have held a series of seminars for officers from the Polish and German armies on applying lessons from modern warfare to military command and decision-making, Ukraine's Defense Ministry said.

No NATO army has fought a modern war. Because Ukraine's soldiers are the only ones with years of combat under saturating drones and jamming, their experience is now reshaping how the alliance plans and trains, not the reverse.

The seminars have mixed theory with live exercises and set Ukrainian operational practice against NATO's written doctrine, exposing where the alliance's assumptions about maneuver, command, and the use of force no longer fit a battlefield run by technology.

Ukraine teaches the lessons of drone war

"Ukrainian officers bring the experience of real modern war, and the practical work lets us test together how it can be used to train troops," said Colonel Valerii Vyshnivskyi.

He is Ukraine's senior representative at the NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training and Education Center (JATEC), the first joint civil-military institution between NATO and Ukraine.

The course runs through a joint centre

The three-week event took place in Lublin, at the base of the Lithuanian-Polish-Ukrainian Brigade, which provided the facilities. It was part of JATEC's support for a program called Captains' Training, intended to facilitate the exchange of tactical-level lessons between Ukraine's forces and NATO. The officers worked through Troop Leading Procedures for planning a company's actions and the Military Decision Making Process, used by a battalion staff.

In Ukraine, the Come Back Alive foundation has backed the same course since 2022.