Ukrainian Forces Get Crash Course on Javelin Missiles From U.S. Volunteers
By Yaroslav Trofimov, Apr. 29, 2022, WSJ

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine—An American trainer known to his
Ukrainian students simply as Texas carefully drew on a
school blackboard the outline of a Russian T-72 tank and
a plan of the surrounding area, and explained how he had
ambushed it with a Javelin missile earlier this month.
Then he picked up the missile and its charcoal-grey
command launch unit, or CLU, showing to a few dozen
Ukrainian soldiers the correct firing positions. Another
U.S. trainer, Mark Hayward, a 53-year-old retired U.S.
Special Forces operator from Alaska, stepped in with
advice on how to operate the antitank weapon in varying
weather and light conditions.

“I know you are all infantrymen, but with this, you need to
behave like snipers. Play spy games,” said Texas, a Ukrainian-
born American whose real first name is Anton and who didn’t
want to disclose his surname because his relatives still
reside in Ukraine. “Everything is in your hands; 90% of the
success depends on you, the operators, & only 10% on the missile.”

Weapons supplied by the U.S. and other Western allies,
particularly the Javelin missiles that have a range of up to
3 kilometers—longer than the ranges of guns on most Russian
tanks—have played a critical role in enabling outgunned
Ukrainian forces to repel the massive onslaught of Russian
armor since the war began on Feb. 24. Even more sophisticated
weapons systems, such as 155 mm howitzers with precision-guided
munitions, are beginning to flow to Ukraine as Washington and
partners start to provide Ukrainian troops with NATO-standard
heavy weapons that could blunt Russia’s advantage in armor,
artillery and aircraft.

The bottleneck for this influx of aid is training. Ukrainian
soldiers must be taught quickly to operate sophisticated and
unfamiliar systems—in the middle of a war, and as Russian cruise
missiles strike warehouses, railway hubs and bases deep in the
Ukrainian rear. In Western militaries, soldiers who operate
these weapons undergo weeks or months of training before firing
their first live shot. The U.S. and other nations in the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization pulled their military trainers from
Ukraine shortly before Russia invaded. This means that American
and other Western volunteers, such as Mr. Hayward and Anton, are
filling the skills gap, lecturing at Ukrainian military units
near the front lines—and sometimes taking part in the fight
themselves. “We wound up being Javelin trainers by default,”
Mr. Hayward said. That involved, among other things, watching
YouTube training videos and poring over complex manuals once he
arrived in Ukraine, to bring himself up-to-date.

The basic U.S. Army Javelin training program comprises 80 hours,
according to the field manual. “Here, we are trying to teach
soldiers to be able to use Javelins in two days, so they can go
out and carry out their combat tasks,” said Lt. Col. Serhiy,
the head of training for Ukraine’s 128th Separate Mountain
Assault Transcarpathian Brigade, which operates on the front
southeast of Zaporizhzhia and in Donbas. Like other Ukrainian
military personnel, he isn’t allowed to disclose his surname.
“Training during the war means less theory and more practice,”
Lt. Col. Serhiy said.

It takes only a few hours to master the shorter-range missiles,
such the British-made NLAW and German-made Panzerfaust, that are
better suited for the kind of urban combat that took place in the
suburbs of the capital Kyiv in March. The far more complicated
Javelins are indispensable for the battles under way now in the
wide-open areas where the 128th Brigade is deployed, such as the
rural countryside here in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, because
they allow troops to strike from afar before becoming targets
themselves. The U.S. has supplied some 5,500 Javelin missiles to
Ukrainian forces, according to the Pentagon.

“Javelins are perfect for effective fire here in the open fields,”
said Capt. Ivan, a company commander with the 128th Brigade whose
unit in recent days seized a village in the Zaporizhzhia region.
On Thursday, plumes of dark smoke from Russian shelling rose at a
nearby tree line as loud thuds shook the village’s buildings. A
burned-out Russian armored personnel carrier was on the roadside
nearby. Russian and Ukrainian positions in the village were about
2 kilometers apart, and troops attempting to advance with shorter-
range missiles such as NLAW exposed themselves to Russian fire well
before being able to strike, he said.

A private first class in Capt. Ivan’s company, Oleksandr, said he
started his Javelin training at a base in western Ukraine two days
before the war began, with a proper simulator. His first shot on a
simulator failed, he said, but the machine made him understand how
to operate the system in real life. “If you haven’t used a simulator,
it will be very hard to figure out the right sequence, the way the
joystick works, the right way to prepare,” Oleksandr said. He has
since destroyed nine Russian armored vehicles, including at least
3 tanks. “Without the Javelins, it would have been very hard to stop
the enemy pushing ahead,” Oleksandr said. “They now know that we have
the weapons that can hit them very effectively, and of course it
demoralizes the enemy and keeps them in check.”

Hayward, a resident of Nome, Alaska, came up with another solution
to make training easier. The Javelin’s launcher, or CLU, has a total
battery life of roughly 4 hours, which means that it drains quickly
even when it’s switched on for training. Units that he has worked
with in Ukraine were unable to procure spare batteries. So Hayward,
Anton and Ukrainian engineers assembled their own alternative power
source using motorcycle batteries, cables from a DIY store and a
3D-printed frame for classroom training. Hayward says he decided to
come to Ukraine immediately after hearing news of the Russian invasion, inspired by President Volodymyr Zelensky’s statement early in the war
that he needed weapons and not a ride out. A medical trainer who works
in indigenous communities across the Bering Strait from Russia, Hayward
said he had an additional reason to join the fight.

“I can guarantee you that the Russia that’s willing to invade Ukraine
and bomb its cities just because the government won’t surrender to it
is the same Russia that would be willing to cut off fuel barges to
Nome and let me and my family freeze,” he said.

In the first days of the war, he flew to Poland. There, a friendly
taxi driver arranged for him to buy a used ambulance for €4,000, or
about $4,200, which he painted green and now uses to move around
Ukraine, with a motorcycle and a large flag of Alaska inside. Anton,
35, a Houston-based manager for a large industrial-services company,
was moved into action after watching on TV scenes of his birthplace
in northern Ukraine being shelled by Russian troops in February. He
left his wife and three small children behind. “This is not a war
of good versus evil but of normal versus evil,” he said. “Normal
people were living normal lives, and then Russia decided to wage
war on them.” The two Americans—who are Mormon—met at a Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints chapel in Lviv, Ukraine, and ended
up connecting informally with a Ukrainian Marines brigade operating
out of the southern city of Mykolaiv.

The Mykolaiv Marines welcomed Anton, Hayward and a handful of American
and British veterans with Javelin experience. Anton, unlike other
foreigners, didn’t have any military experience, but the Marines
took him anyway because he is a competitive shooter and, more
important, speaks Ukrainian and Russian. Neither Hayward nor Anton
received any formal paperwork from the Ukrainian military, or signed
any contract. This week, following an informal referral from the Mykolaiv-based Marines, Anton & Hayward moved to the Zaporizhzhia
region to hook up with the 128th Brigade. They started off by “fixing”
3 supposedly malfunctioning CLUs after realizing a mistake in the
brigade’s translation of the manual. One soldier leaving the class,
Serhiy, recalled how he fought against Russian forces in Donbas in 2018.
“At the time, their tanks used to drive up and shoot straight at us,
and there was nothing we could do,” he said. “I wish we had Javelins
back then.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukrainian-forces-get-crash-course-on-javelin-missiles-from-u-s-volunteers-11651224602

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