The most useful sentence in the record belongs to Jørgen, the Norwegian instructor on the camp's platoon leader course, because it names a price rather than a virtue. He says Ukrainian trainees are more creative than partner armies are able to be, and puts part of that down to Ukraine having fewer standardized procedures, which he calls a strength [5]. Read that as a purchase and the exchange at Jomsborg becomes legible: the procedure manual raises an army's floor and lowers its improvisation ceiling, and NATO is selling the floor while Norway tries to buy back some of the ceiling [1][3].
The rifle example is less about neglect than about definition. The soldiers Brigadier Atle Molde describes, two years of battlefield experience and unable to shoot straight [4], were in some cases mobilized quickly without the foundational course a Western army would run first, and small arms matter much less on a battlefield run by artillery and drones, so live rifle experience may simply be thin [6]. That makes "the basics" a forecast rather than an inventory. NATO teaches marksmanship under stress at Jomsborg [7] because of the war it expects to fight, not because of the war its trainees have been fighting.
Kyiv has been buying that floor back on its own account. Basic training was extended to 51 days last year with emphasis on shooting and counter-drone work [8], and the defence ministry's own description puts 137 hours of marksmanship practice and 56 firing exercises inside it [9]. Across 51 days that averages about 2.7 hours of range time a day [1], or roughly two and a half hours per firing exercise [2]. That is a substantial allocation. It also does not describe the men Molde met: nothing in the record says the veterans at Jomsborg passed through the lengthened course, and the ones mobilized early in the war could not have.
The spread is stated three times by three parties who are not quoting each other. Maj. John, the camp's operations officer, credits the creative methods and says conventional knowledge in some units has not been that great [12]. NATO's own camp description says trainees arrive with varying levels of skill, some hardened veterans after advanced tactics and others needing infantry combat skills [7]. And the concern predates the camp: early mass mobilization pushed the training burden onto front-line commanders, who found recruits short on marksmanship and maneuver [10].
What transfers from this to any organization sorting scar tissue from schooling is narrower than it first looks. Experience is specific to the problem it was earned on, which is why Molde calls the improvisation something to bring back home and learn from [3] and why he says leaving Ukraine's combat experience out of the syllabus would be stupid [11], while John holds that the conventional planning and decision-making methods the West brings still have value and that the combination produces a good result [13]. Skipping that competency now means paying remedial rates for it later. Norway's working bet is that imagination can be added to a standardized force faster than a floor can be rebuilt under an improvising one, and whether that bet is cheaper than rebuilding the floor is a question Jomsborg's record does not answer yet.