Decisive Point Podcast – Ep 6-4 – Ilmari Käihkö, Jan Willem Honig, and Antulio J. Echevarria II – Ukraine’s Not-So-Whole-of-Society at War: Force Generation in Modern Developed Societies

This podcast argues that Ukraine offers a cautionary tale regarding the two main modern models of force generation. Neither the professional high-tech war model, favored by Western militaries, nor the whole-of-society war approach, said to have saved Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, proved successful formulas for Ukraine. Considering that Ukraine is fighting for survival, with Russian forces inside the country, the failure of both models in action has serious implications for NATO member states as they deliberate their choices regarding future force generation.

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You are listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. I’m in the studio with Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria today.

Joining us remotely are Dr. Ilmari Käihkö and Jan Willem Honig.

Käihkö and Honig are the authors of “Ukraine's Not-So-Whole-of-Society at War: Force Generation in Modern Developed Societies,” which was published in the Spring 2025 issue of Parameters.

Käihkö is an associate professor of war studies, guest researcher at the Swedish Defense University, and a guest researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He’s also a veteran of the Finnish Defence Forces.

Honig is professor of international security studies, emeritus, at the Netherlands Defence Academy and a visiting professor in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.

Echevarria is currently a professor of strategy at the US Army War College. He has held the General Douglas MacArthur Chair of Research and the Elihu Root Chair of Military Studies and is the author of six books on military strategy.

Welcome to Decisive Point.

Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria II

For the benefit of our listeners, would you two please summarize your article for us? It’s been a while, just to refocus everyone.

Jan Willem Honig

What we tried to explain was that, where as we all expected and thought that initially Ukraine, as a society, mobilized and resisted the Russian attack in 2022, it very quickly turned out that it was a very partial mobilization of Ukrainian society [and] that very limited parts of the population, largely volunteers with a regular element, managed to stop and resist and turn back some of the invasion.

And that was something that seemed to be very important because not only was it the case that Ukraine struggled to mobilize all of society in a case of a war that should be the most clear-cut that you could imagine [as] it is a war of aggression. You would expect the population to rise up against this invading force.

[It] didn’t quite happen, but it provides us with warnings and potentially lessons [about] whether we can mobilize as a population when we need to. But also, it reflects on Russia, where people don’t tend to realize maybe [the] extent to which the Russians also struggle to mobilize their population [and] that the numbers of forces on the Russian side that fight on the frontline is also very limited.

And the result of that is a very particular type of war, not the high-technology professional type of war that we tended to project on what the Russians would do but also how we have prepared—and are still preparing—to fight warfare. It turned out that in the case of Ukraine, neither side could fight this high-intensity, militarily decisive, high-technology, professional type of war. That holds a second major sort of warning lesson for the West, in our view, that not only can’t we rely, in all likelihood, on all of society to mobilize and fight, but we probably can’t also rely on our professional high-technology forces to successfully fight war.

Echevarria

Ilmari, did you want to add to that?

Ilmari Käihkö

Yeah, I think this was a very good summary of the article. And also, theoretically, what we did was go back to a column on Clausewitz and one of his trinities of the army, the government, and the people and to look at the relationships between these three. And more generally, one can, of course, say that there are always tensions and suspicion between these three elements.

They are more general than only [the] Ukrainian phenomenon, and this is one reason why we should be mindful about Ukrainian examples and lessons from this war. I don’t think we have looked at the sociological aspects of this war closely enough. There are many things that we don’t yet understand. And when it comes to the Ukrainian society’s role in the war, in 2014, when the war in Donbas started, when Russia invaded Crimea and then got involved in Eastern Ukraine, there was this limited societal participation in the war in the form of so-called volunteer battalions.

The assumption of even the volunteers, who re-mobilized in 2022, was that now, when this war is existential, then surely everyone will get involved in it, all the Ukrainian people. But nevertheless, it has been a limited war in this sense. And, there is something here that I think we should pay more attention to.

Echevarria

I wonder if I could draw either or both of you out a little bit more and talk about some of the factors that caused the whole-of-society concept to fail or to be only partially implemented. Some factors, like [the] political implementation of it, came very late in the game, according to some of the interviews that we were able to do earlier. Zelensky did not want to put that policy completely into effect because he was afraid it might antagonize the Russians and maybe provoke an attack. So, that was one thing.

And the other thing might be the fact that Russian and Ukrainian populations along the border, leaving aside the Donbas, for instance, have shared commerce, shared interactions, and shared relationships [and have] relatives on either side of the border. The line between the two states might be clear on a map, but socially and culturally, [things are] much more intermixed.

And so, it is difficult sometimes, perhaps, to get the whole society involved when you’re living next door to someone and [they don’t] really appear to be a threat to you.

The third thing I was going to ask about [is] the issues of corruption throughout Ukrainian government, all the way down and in the military and so on. [I am] not saying Russia, has not also had that problem. It certainly does. But getting any kind of policy implemented when you face a bureaucracy, leaders, and so on who are supposed to implement these policies but are taking money from the other side or somewhere else other than from their own government and so forth [is difficult].

Honig

I would say three things. [The] first one is something optimistic about this conflict that you can conclude, I think. We’ve always wondered how big the proclivity for war of populations of people was. What I think the war in Ukraine illustrates is that certainly, in developed societies, the populations on the whole—and massively, more massively than ever before, it seems—don’t like war [and] don’t want to get involved.

That is true for Ukraine, even in an existential conflict. It’s true in Russia as well, despite the fact that it isn’t a democracy but an autocratic regime. And it’s also likely to be true, or it is true, because Western armed forces can’t really recruit very well. It’s also true in the rest of Europe. So, in a way, this is a very positive thing that people don’t like war [and] don’t want to get involved. Now, [the] problem with that is that it opens the door to people who do manage to mobilize significant forces and do dastardly things, but still, it’s a positive thing. I would want to emphasize that.

And the other two points are that what you, Tony, bring out is the gulf between government and population, where on the one hand, it ties into Ilmari’s earlier point about the trinity of Clausewitz with government, people, [and] armed forces, is that government—or the government in Ukraine—did not really trust its population to be loyal and to get mobilized.

And, that is a fairly, as we tried to explain very briefly in the article, a historically common phenomenon. Regimes tend to be, on the whole, always unsure. Look, before the First World War. Regimes, whether they’re democratic, totalitarian, [or] autocratic, don’t know to what extent they can trust their peoples to come to their aid in a war. But on the other hand, what you also see in Ukraine is that the population as a whole not only didn’t like to go to war, didn’t want to really to fight, it also very much distrusted the regime. It distrusted the state. And that reinforced [the low] degree of mobilization and made it very difficult for the state to create massive armed forces. If you then look at Western Europe, the regimes, their trust of populations, it’s a bit of an open question. Do people overwhelmingly trust their states? I hope it is higher than Ukraine. We’ve got less corruption. But again, I think that certainly the absurdly incertitude of the governments as to their reliability to the population is just as strong in the West as it is in Ukraine.

Echevarria

Ilmari, anything to add?

Käihkö

Yeah, there’s an interesting puzzle here because the 2014, the Donbas war, we got this notion that it was the society that saved Ukraine through these volunteer battalions. But we don’t see the society being harnessed militarily before 2022. If now the society was so successful in 2014, why wasn’t this done during the eight years after, before the large-scale invasion?

And there are, of course, several reasons for this. One is, obviously, that the military in 2014 was very hollow, and this kind of massive reform would be very difficult. There was also not that much money reserved for this kind of project. So, Ukraine lost half of its GDP (gross domestic product) in 2014. So, even by doubling the defense expenditure they actually did not have more money in real terms to do this.

There was also the lull in terms of the war in Donbas that kept distracting from major reforms. But perhaps most importantly, there were these, both foreign and domestic, military preferences for this kind of professional force. But the problem was that this kind of force, it was much too expensive for Ukraine but also, it wasn’t supported by the population. They didn’t really want to be part of it, or at least when it comes to the alternative—the universal conscription.

So, there [were these] foreign and domestic military preferences that the government thought they [could] make the military more politically reliable through it. And then foreigners—the RAND Corporation—was invited to the country in 2015. They all recommended this kind of professionalization of the force. But as noted, Ukraine couldn’t afford it. The alternative then, was this kind of universal conscription. But this wasn’t supported by the population. In order to understand why, one can go back to the Soviet legacy of the conscription where people, even from military families, didn’t want to go to the military. When I did interviews of volunteer battalion fighters, some of them told me that their parents, [who] belonged to the military, bribed doctors to make sure that their sons were exempted from the service.

Well, funnily enough, in 2014, they’d then have to bribe new doctors to make them eligible for military service when they wanted to go to serve because the conscription was selective and you could bribe your way out of it. Because the conscripts were really poorly, poorly treated [and] they didn’t get proper training, they just didn’t see it worthwhile. Then what happened after 2022 was that there was this interesting phenomenon that if you look at the most trusted institution in Ukraine, it is the armed forces. So, in some polls it gets 95 percent support of the population. The only problem here is this kind of cognitive dissonance that this doesn’t mean that these people who in polls say that they trust the military that they actually want to serve in it, and this is a bit of a problem for a country involved in a major war.

But all this then ensured that, first of all, the Ukrainian military would be limited before 2022. Also, that it would face troubles growing after the Russian invasion. When it grew, it would be, first of all, just kind of more ideological volunteers that would rush into it, including literally all of my volunteer battalion informants that I had worked with. And it also meant that the society would still influence who the government could and would start to forcefully mobilize into the war when that became necessary. And this is why the average age of soldiers is at least 43 years, according to several sources. It could now be a lot older as well. And all these things have influenced Ukraine’s possibilities when it comes to force generation in this war.

Echevarria

On that note, to what extent do you think had the Russian attack come later, after a national identity had been able to formulate and become stronger, would timing of the offensive had affected your results had it come later, for instance, had they waited for some of these things that you’ve been discussing to perhaps grow stronger [like] more willingness to serve in the military in some ways or, certainly, a more stronger identification with the state itself—the government, head of state? Would that have made a difference?

Honig

I would say that if they’d had more time to build up their armed forces, it might have made a difference. But things like forging a national identity and really creating a population that is reliable is one of those big projects that nobody really, I don’t think, understands very well how that works and to what extent it really produces a society that stands shoulder to shoulder.

And a point I earlier mentioned about regimes independent of regime types, in the end, always tending to distrust or not fully trust the population is quite common. So, the question of where the population stands, where the people stand, is one that has really been a sort of red thread in military history, where people have been consistently quite surprised, and we don’t have to think back very long, [for example the] 2003 invasion of Iraq. We didn’t quite understand where the Iraqi people stood, but in the end, it turned out it wasn’t quite with us. [If] you go back through conflict to conflict, you find consistently that you don’t quite know where the population is going to move, but you don’t also understand how you can convince the population to be really with you or to minimize the degree to which an enemy population is against you.

So, I don’t know whether giving Ukraine more time to forge a national identity would really have worked.

Käihkö

It’s good to remember that what happened in 2014 was that Ukraine lost some of its most pro-Russian parts, and this is something that made a very divided, politically divided, country less divided. But many of these divisions still existed in Ukraine.

Another thing to think about is that many of these ideological volunteers from the Donbas war didn’t actually serve in the military because the kind of military they saw wasn’t the kind of military they would like to belong to themselves. And this has been an issue even after 2022. So, even if almost all of these volunteer battalions were pretty quickly integrated into the armed forces, many of the most ideologically minded volunteers just left the military.

And, hence, this kind of suspicion between these volunteers and the military remained. And these were, of course, then, the people that were the first to take to arms after the Russian invasion in February 2022.

Echevarria

On the question of military professionalization, I wonder if you could speak a little bit about the divided culture that the Ukrainian armed forces found themselves confronting at the beginning of the war. They had legacy Soviet ways of doing things, and NATO began to take over more and more of the training for Ukrainian recruits. NATO tried to impose its own particular way of training and fighting and so on, some of which were absorbed by some of the younger soldiers in Ukrainian armed forces. And it wasn’t [an] entirely even split between ranks, for instance, or even ages. But with training the Ukrainians according to what NATO knew, as far as trying to develop junior leadership and initiative and trusting subordinates and those sorts of things, can you speak to anything you might have found in your research on professionalization and whether or not these factors had anything to do with the larger public trust in its military but still that reticence to actually want to serve and put yourself on the frontline [and] in danger and so on?

Honig

One should not, we think, exaggerate the difference between the Soviet model of doing military operations and the Western model of operations. It is quite dangerous to sort of ascribe to them a particular mindset that makes them operate in a way, and that has proven to be not so effective because this war has turned into a sort of quite simple, brutal conflict.

What you see is that there is indeed [a] certain model of professional warfare, which the Ukrainian armed forces found difficult to pull off because the manpower wasn’t really available and trained in the same way as they would have liked. And, they were lucky that they found that there was a reservoir of volunteers who found a way of dealing with the immediate tactical problems they found on the battlefield, which translated into a major strategic success of stopping the Russian attack.

What you see, I think, with the training that we’ve offered to the Ukrainians, my reading of it is that it isn’t as popular and successful with what you could call the rank and file or the volunteer element of the Ukrainian armed forces. They have found themselves in a conflict in which they, on the whole, [are] well-educated [and] have been able to adapt [and] improvise to what the battlefields seem to require of them.

And, well, a number of things which our military tried to teach them fitted in with that, but other elements were new. The drone thing was not something that our armed forces offered as part of the training package, and many of our armed forces were quite unwilling to accept that as part of the training package. There was quite a bit of resentment and surprise on the part of the Ukrainian recruits that were being trained that the Western trainers didn’t really want to engage with what they saw as the realities of war and were offering a package that fitted a particular type of war that they were not fighting and that was not fit for [their] purpose.

I think that the challenge is that, just like the Soviet Russian armed forces may have had a particular concept of warfare, concept of modern warfare, which neither the Ukrainian regular military nor the Russian military were able to pull off, we also have a particular idea of what war should look like, and we find it very difficult to be flexible about that. And we may want to talk about that a little bit later, but we have created what I would call a one-trick pony, [meaning] that if the war doesn’t fit our preconceived notions of what modern warfare should be like, then we may not be very good at adapting to the situation on the ground and have our armed forces fight in a different way, as could be evidenced by [the fact that] we haven’t won a war for a long time, with our Western armed forces, which should be something of a warning about how flexible are we?

And to assume that we know better than the Ukrainians, or we know better than the Soviet Russian armed forces, is a little bit presumptuous. We have to be careful.

Käihkö

Yeah, the training aspect is very interesting because what we say in the article is that this is a pretty primitive war in some aspects. And what has contributed or led to this primitivization is that both in Ukraine and Russia, the training establishments were, decimated early in the war.

So, basically what happened was that it was very difficult to continue training new forces, to generate new forces, when you didn’t have trainers anymore. And, this is one reason why the Ukrainians have been so dependent on external support, external training support, which then hasn’t necessarily always been what Ukrainians have wished for. We have also heard about these reports that the Ukrainians and Russians have had difficulties in coordinating operations by units bigger than companies [and] that this is, even in this sense, a primitive, primitive kind of fighting.

This set very early on what was lauded, on the Ukrainian side, especially, and contrasted with this kind of Soviet Russian rigidity [that] was the initiative and these kind of notions of missile command on the Ukrainian side. But this is, of course, because you did have small units of volunteers who were not very well attuned to military expectations, fighting on their own terrain against these lumbering Russian forces.

We lauded all this, but then the question is that where are all these now and this kind of very positional and attritional fighting that we have seen? These qualities that we thought were brilliant in spring of 2022 may not be that much appreciated, even by the Ukrainian high command at this time. And in places like the coast, where they can actually become liabilities.

And this is, of course, connected now to these volunteer notions of special treatment and negotiation.

Echevarria

By way of closing, can I ask you two to offer the key insight you would like our NATO leaders to take away from your research, your article?

Honig

The first thing is to remain critical of our own conception of warfare [and] to think carefully about the possible shortcomings of a professional, high-technology type of armed force where you have invested so much money in very few weapons that you can’t really sustain a conflict. But at the same time, you need to be aware of the possible risk that you cannot fall back or cannot fall back in time [and expect] society to come out in support and save the day.

We’re faced with a very big challenge of how, on the one hand, you prepare your armed forces in a way that sort of withstands the first possible onslaught but offers you the possibility, the need, of sustaining the conflict later on. That doesn’t mean, necessarily, that you can mobilize all of society, but you need to be looking towards models of at least preparing for that bomb part, [which] would be that you invest significant amounts of money and effort into simple weaponry, that the war in Ukraine is basically fought by handheld arms, simple artillery, as well as supported by drones.

It doesn’t get that much more complicated. We don’t talk those weapons in serious numbers at all. Those are a first. They should be a major priority and then try and get the population used to the idea that they might, at some point have to do some military service. Don’t rely, however, too much on volunteerism because volunteers only represent part of society, and those are not necessarily from the part of society that you want to sort of dominate the political discourse, not only during the war but after the war.

The volunteers in Ukraine tend to be from more conservative sides of the political spectrum. So, you do want to have some kind of model that spreads the burden of defenses [as] equally as possible over society, that the whole of society, in a way, is seen to have some kind of stake in it.

The problem with it is that you can’t really do too much in peacetime, so you’ve got to leave it to a moment when the conflict is beginning to intensify [so] that it becomes easier to get people interested in it. It’s a very difficult tightrope to walk. At the same time, we should remember that the Russians—Putin—doesn’t have overwhelming support of his population. He’s stuck in Ukraine. He can’t really do too much elsewhere. So, his options are, in a way, more limited than our options, [we might believe] that we’ve got time to build up a defensive capability in an era when we still don’t round up much risk, despite all the talk from Brussels.

Käihkö

What we are facing most immediately is deterrence and deterrence against an opponent that is obviously willing to pay high costs. Now, I [am] speaking about Russia, which has maybe lost the value crispix—just over a million—well, about 1.1 million casualties, [which] might be 250,000 deaths in this war. How can we build an effective deterrence against this kind of opponent? Well, our militaries often highlight these kind of different technological solutions—that we have a high technology where you can operate a war—this kind of war that is happening in Ukraine.

We don’t need to go into this war of attrition if we compete with Russians with technology. I would be skeptical, or at least critical, about these kind of notions because their opponent also has a say in these things. This didn’t work in Ukraine. I’m not sure that they would work in our case either. And if they don’t work and this is what we, of course, need to then prepare for, is that then we need to have a greater societal involvement.

And this is what we need to think about. Well, if we can have this as a societal involvement, we can have this, perhaps not that well trained, but [we can] create reserves. This is a great deterrence against Russia, but this also requires quite a bit from our military establishments when it comes to their command style and training methods, for instance.

And also, if you try to have a whole-of-society approach, the militaries also need to be more attuned to what the society feels and thinks. And this is something that often gets lost in the discussion.

Echevarria

Thank you very much, gentlemen, this has been great. Over to you, Stephanie.

Host

I echo Dr. Echevarria. Thank you very much for making time for this today.

Listeners, I encourage you to read the genesis article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 55, issue 1. For more Army War College podcasts, check out Conversations on Strategy, SSI Live, CLSC Dialogues, and A Better Peace.