What the West’s foes may be learning from the Ukraine war

But, “just like we, as NATO, are benefiting from what Ukraine is showing us and teaching us, we have to think about the other side as well,” Massicot said. “Russia’s allies and their partners are learning from them, and this is now a currency that Russia has to give to Iran, China, North Korea — that learning of our equipment.”

Help from abroad fuels the fight

Since the start of the war, NATO countries have provided Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars in security assistance, with the US alone accounting for more than $53 billion. This collection of military aid includes everything from smaller items like bullets and artillery shells to larger pieces of equipment like armored vehicles and air-defense systems.

But Ukraine is not the only party to the conflict that has received support from abroad.

Iran, China, and North Korea have provided Russia with varying degrees of military and economic assistance throughout the war, and the ever-deepening ties between those countries and Moscow have triggered alarm bells in the US and among its NATO allies.

Iran and North Korea have collectively outfitted Russia with a bunch of lethal aid, including missiles, rockets, artillery shells, and drones. In fact, Tehran’s Shahed-136 loitering munition has even emerged as one of the more notorious weapons that Moscow has employed, frequently used in attacks on Ukraine’s cities and civil infrastructure.

Russia has said that it has recovered intact European-made Storm Shadow missiles, as well as US Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) components. It’s also gotten its hands on Western armored vehicles, among other things.

Furthermore, in its war in Ukraine, Russia has learned useful information on ways to defeat the kind of precision-guided munitions the West depends heavily on, defeating a variety of weapons with electronic warfare. Shared externally with Western foes, this knowledge could create new headaches for the West in a potential future fight.

External actors are also able to gather data about how their weapons perform on the battlefield. One example of this came in April when Iran launched a massive air assault against Israel using missiles and drones, including ones used by Russia in Ukraine.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that in the same way we’re learning about how our weapons work on the modern-day battlefield — because we’re giving those to Ukraine — there’s no doubt that the Iranians are learning about what works and what doesn’t work, about their drones being used in Ukraine as well,” Luke Coffey, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, told The Hill in April.

Experts and officials have also said that North Korea is likely learning about how its weapons perform in actual combat conditions. In Ukraine, performance for North Korean weapons has been a bit of a mixed bag, with some systems exploding in flight and others doing unexpected things.

For Iran, experts said the mid-April attack strike package bore a resemblance to some of Russia’s attacks in Ukraine. Learning from that experience could pave the way for improvements in performance down the road.

“The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect,” conflict analysts at the Institute for the Study of War think tank wrote after Iran’s mid-April attack.

They said that “the Iranians will learn lessons from this strike and work to improve their abilities to penetrate Israeli defenses over time as the Russians have done in repeated strike series against Ukraine.”