Ukraine’s other big advantage in this new phase of the war is the “partisan” campaign behind the lines against the Russian occupiers. U.S. military commanders warned their Russian counterparts to expect this brutal irregular warfare, based on the U.S. experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. Russian officials didn’t listen, and now they’re facing attacks they don’t see coming and can’t root out, despite all their firepower. Every Ukrainian with a cellphone is an artillery spotter or intelligence collector.

This partisan campaign, like the HIMARS precision fire, is a product of U.S. planning and training of Ukrainian forces. Since 2014, U.S. Special Operations forces have been teaching the Ukrainians how to fight an occupying army — using special units like the ones that were so effective against al-Qaeda and Islamic State fighters.

Gen. Richard Clarke, who is retiring this week as head of U.S. Special Operations Command, explained in an interview how the United States built up its Ukrainian special operations forces (SOF) counterparts in anticipation of a coming campaign against Russian invaders.
“What we did, starting in 2014, was set the conditions,” Clarke recalled. “When the Russians invaded in February, we’d been working with Ukrainian SOF for seven years. With our assistance, they built the capacity, so they grew and they grew in numbers, but more importantly, they built capability,” in both combat assaults and information operations.

To prepare to repel the Russian invasion, each Ukrainian SOF brigade last year created and trained a “resistance company” recruited from the local population in areas such as Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and the Donbas that were likely to be Russian targets. As a result, Clarke said, “If you’re a Russian soldier today, your head must be on a swivel because you don’t know where the threat is. They can’t look at any Ukrainian and know if that person is an enemy.”