Norway's task force commander filters Ukraine's lessons by the constraint that produced them
Brigadier Atle Molde runs the camp he calls Norway's most important information sensor on modern war, and his working rule is that an adaptation is worth copying only once you know whether it came from insight or from scarcity.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Norway leads Operation Legio, a multinational effort training Ukrainian soldiers at Camp Jomsborg, a purpose-built site in Poland where Ukrainian instructors with battlefield experience work alongside Western trainers.
- Brigadier Atle Molde, who oversees Task Force Legio, told Business Insider the camp may be the most important sensor for information Norway has as allies try to read the war.
- Molde said Norway has to work out whether Ukraine uses a given tactic or piece of kit because it is genuinely innovative or because it is the last choice available, and he believes some of it is the latter.
- He said treating drones as a hallelujah in the West risks preparing a military for the last war rather than the next one.
- His rule for the alliance is that Ukrainian practice cannot be applied wholesale to another context, and that adoption has to be, in his words, very specific.
Why it matters
- decision The capability argument inside a small mechanized army becomes what keeps units moving rather than how much cheap mass to buy, which puts air defense, counter-drone systems and electronic warfare ahead of drone volume in the queue.
- contradiction Molde treats a years-long attritional fight as the outcome to design against, while officials cited in the same reporting warn heavy attrition may be unavoidable, so a force that filters out scarcity-driven practice could lack the skills it needs if it lands there anyway.
- exposure By putting the shortfall at whole-of-society level and saying no Western country is prepared, Molde moves the unfunded part of this problem outside the defense ministry and onto civil planning and budgets.
- precedent With a US Army course director applying the same discount to Ukrainian drone practice, the scarcity test is becoming the standard way allied training institutions read footage from the front, which sets an expectation that adoption proposals arrive with the constraint attached.
A clip of a drone strike travels easily, but the conditions that produced it usually do not, which is why this test is harder to run than to state. Molde said people often draw conclusions from exactly those clips and come away treating drones as a silver bullet that solves everything, which he says they are not [9]. What the clip omits is the artillery and aircraft that NATO holds and Ukraine does not, the absence of which produced many of the drone advances in the first place [8]. Molde's qualifier is the operative part: reading this war correctly "takes quite a bit of context, experience, and knowledge about what you're seeing" [3]. The importing organisation has to supply the missing half of the picture itself, so the real cost of adopting someone else's practice is the cost of reconstructing the constraint it answered.
The lesson Norway trusts most is a matter of scale, not tactics. Maj. John, the operations officer synchronising the training, said Russia likely cannot sustain another attritional fight at 35,000 people a month, a figure aligning with estimated losses in Ukraine, while Norway's five million people "won't exist as a nation for a very long period" at that rate [16]. The annual version makes the asymmetry concrete: 35,000 a month is 420,000 a year, roughly 8.4 percent of Norway's population [24]. That arithmetic is what drives John's priority, staying out of static attritional warfare and looking for ways to keep moving, rather than any particular piece of equipment [15].
The same conclusion holds up even outside Norway's own procurement interests. Justin Bronk, an airpower expert at RUSI, has called Ukraine's over-reliance on drones a product of shortages and not something Western militaries should attempt to replicate [12], and Jakub Jajcay, a former Slovak special forces soldier who fought in Ukraine, said operators often knew they were using the wrong weapon for the job [13]. The counter-evidence is also on the record: officials attribute 90 percent of Russia's front-line losses to drones, and drones still have not secured victory [11].
Where the test runs out is the question of whether Norway gets to choose. Many of Ukraine's capabilities emerged only after the war had already settled into a grinding, static fight [19], so discounting scarcity-driven practice assumes you never arrive at the same scarcity. NATO's Future Force Study in June said forces need to prepare to maintain the ability to manoeuvre even under heavy observation [20], which states a requirement rather than a method, and Ukraine's own gains under those conditions are often measured in hundreds of meters [23].
For anyone running this test on another organisation's playbook, the distinction worth holding is between the decision and the hedge. Whether NATO's larger air forces could seize control of the skies and open up movement on land is an expectation, not a demonstrated result [6], and a Ukrainian general told Molde that a NATO war with Russia "would not be like our war with Russia" [4], which cuts against confident extrapolation in both directions. Norway's response is to prepare across the whole society, down to a single soldier trained to take down a drone with a shotgun [22]. That hedge has a cost: dividing funding across both branches limits how much either one can build, and what gets funded this year decides which war the force is equipped for a decade out.
What to watch
- Whether Norway's next procurement rounds fund the manoeuvre enablers John named or reweight toward mass drone production.
- Whether NATO follows June's Future Force Study with a written standard for which Ukrainian practices allies should adopt.
- Whether estimates of Russian monthly losses hold, since John's argument rests on Russia being unable to sustain that rate.
Clarity's read
What the record supports and how the coverage leans. The claims behind it follow.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap0
- Incentives40
- Confidence60
Claim ledger
Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.
- [1]
Norway is leading Operation Legio, a multinational effort to train Ukrainian soldiers at Camp Jomsborg, a purpose-built training camp in Poland, where Ukrainian troops and instructors with battlefield experience work alongside Western trainers.
- [2]
Molde said Norway must understand whether Ukraine is using certain gear or tactics because they are genuinely innovative or because "it's the last option," "the last choice they have," and said he believes some of Ukraine's actions are done "because they don't have a choice."
- [3]
Molde said that when learning from the Ukrainian war it is important to understand what you hear and see, and that "takes quite a bit of context, experience, and knowledge about what you're seeing."
- [4]
Molde said a Ukrainian general once warned him that "your war with Russia, if it comes, would not be like our war with Russia."
- [5]
Molde said "We can't take everything that Ukrainians are doing and just apply it to our context," adding "Then we will miss," and that instead "we have to be very, very specific."
- [6]
NATO militaries expect to avoid many of the challenges Ukraine has faced and have significant advantages in combat power over Ukraine, such as larger air forces that could seize control of the skies and potentially enable more successful progress on land.
- [7]
Brigadier Atle Molde, the commander overseeing Task Force Legio, told Business Insider the camp might be "the most important sensor for information" for Norway as it, like other NATO allies, seeks to learn from Ukraine amid concerns Russian aggression may spill over NATO borders.
- [8]
Ukraine fields millions of drones of various types for missions from surveillance to logistics to strike and has built cheap mass, but many of these advances came from a lack of artillery, aircraft and other weapons that NATO has in its arsenal and Ukraine does not.
- [9]
Molde said people often draw conclusions from seeing videos of drone strikes on social media, leading them to view drones as a "silver bullet that solves everything," and said "It is not" - they are just another tool.
- [10]
Molde said some people treat drones as "kind of like a hallelujah in the West," and that adopting that mindset could lead a military to prepare for the last war rather than the next.
- [11]
Officials say drones are causing 90% of Russia's front-line losses, but drones have not secured victory for Ukraine.
- [12]
Justin Bronk, an airpower expert at the UK's Royal United Services Institute, previously warned that Ukraine's "over-reliance" on drones is driven by shortages and is "not something Western militaries should attempt to replicate."
- [13]
Jakub Jajcay, a former Slovak special forces soldier who fought in Ukraine, told Business Insider that drone operators often knew they were using the wrong weapons for the job, and that Western militaries should avoid making drones a substitute for weapons like artillery when artillery is the better choice.
- [14]
Maj. Rachel Martin, director of the US Army's Unmanned Advanced Lethality Course, previously told Business Insider that Ukrainians are "in a fight for their lives" and "using what they have available to them because they don't have those layered assets that we are lucky to have in our country," and that this affects how soldiers think about drones.
- [15]
Maj. John, the S3 Operations Officer in charge of synchronising the overall training operation, said the most important thing for Norway as a small nation is to avoid getting into a situation of static, attritional warfare, and that Norway is looking for solutions for how to maintain manoeuvrability.
- [16]
John said Russia likely cannot sustain another deeply attritional fight, "losing 35,000 people a month," a figure aligning with estimated losses in Ukraine, while Norway, with five million people, "won't exist as a nation for a very long period if that was to happen to us."
- [17]
Molde said the most important lesson learned is not to end up in a situation where a country has to fight for its survival for years, taking thousands of casualties, and that preparation is needed at a whole-society level: "we are not prepared. No Western country's prepared."
- [18]
John said Norway needs to focus on maintaining dynamic warfare using "air defense technologies that Ukraine is world-class on," as well as counter-drone systems and electronic warfare measures, so that its mechanized units can still move, adding "We are still a mechanized army."
- [19]
Many of the capabilities Ukraine developed emerged only after the war had already settled into a grinding, static fight, with deep defenses on both sides, constant drone observation, and the area around the front line regularly described as a "kill zone."
- [20]
NATO's Future Force Study in June said forces need to prepare to maintain the ability to manoeuvre even under heavy observation.
- [21]
Many officials still warn that heavy attrition could be inevitable and that militaries must also be capable of surviving a prolonged, Ukraine-style conflict.
- [22]
Molde said preparation runs from the society level down to preparing a single soldier to take down a drone with a shotgun, "and everything in between."
- [23]
Ukraine's defense industry has boomed, but breakthroughs are hard to come by and battlefield gains are often measured in hundreds of meters.
- [24]
Losses of 35,000 people a month amount to 420,000 a year, about 8.4 percent of Norway's population of five million.
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Topics
- Drone warfareFollow
- Training of Ukrainian forcesFollow
- Attritional warfareFollow
- NATO defence planningFollow