Regular news reporting on military exercises is pretty much useless. The news, and most lay people, think these are sports matches where you have a fair contest to see who wins. That’s not the point. The point is to learn. And you don’t learn shit by winning.

So pretty much all western military exercises start from a huge disadvantage, usually putting an unprepared force against a numerically and materially superior red team.

The blue team will always lose, because there the point. It simulates the worst case scenarios, to learn from them. “What if Russia comes at us with months of preptime and we only have our backpacks?” will teach you what to put in your backpacks to do better. “What if there are 20 of them and 5 of us” will teach you how to prepare for a tough fight, because you already know how to win an easy fight.

If the blue team wins consistently at an exercise, it’s a useless waste of time and money.

We are taught by the media to see war as the place where it is proved which of two or more competing methods of destruction is superior, the winner being coldly and analytically adopted by all sides inveitably or else they end up facing defeat.

War sort of works like this under certain conditions, but in many other instances war is hopelessly political and the movement of human bodies towards obliteration or success is determined by suffocating doctrine that attempts to project the idea of a higher up general who does not understand the battlefield onto an incongruous reality where the grunts suffer the consequences and are mindlessly ground to pieces.

Look at russia, they have evolved massively in many ways and yet they have not in other critical ways that existentially undermine their entire war effort. You cannot underestimate this tendency in nations, especially those that have not been forced to fight as underdogs, to behave in war in ways that have no relation to the actual realities of war. This is one of the oldest and most doggedly followed ideologies of war and is one of the reasons war proliferates like a contagion.

In general though with Ukraine and Sweden, we are talking about a military that has come fresh off the battlefield having had to learn the rhythms of modern combat… fighting a “tactically green” military coming from a historical context. There is always going to be an initial tactical mismatch until the awareness and skill of basic tactical counters spreads. What matters here is that these exercises are being held proactively and that this dialog is happening so that if the worst case scenario does arise Sweden won’t have to start from zero learning how it is to actually fight in the context of the cutting edge technology and tactics of that particular moment, which is inevitably a rough transition for any state lucky enough to experience durations of peace and stability.

It takes a long time for large organizations to learn lessons. At least they are challenging themselves.

Wow… I did not know about “Hedgehog 2025”. It is kind of a slap in the face wake-up call

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/02/a-nato-wargame-in-estonia-let-ukrainian-drone-experts-play-the-bad-guy-and-the-results-were-brutal/