Not ready for war? Lukashenka orders to improve Belarus military personnel training system

The system of training military personnel in Belarus needs to be improved, president Alyaksandr Lukashenka said during the revision of professional skills and competence of Belarusian army officers at Abuz-Lyasnouski training ground on Wednesday.

“I am not going to dispute the notion that the system exists but it’s a fact that we haven’t ‘shaken’ it up for a long time and haven’t adjusted it to modern warfare. We have problems with training time, curricula and instructors. We need to recruit highly skilled personnel from regular army units so that they could teach the rest what is needed during a war,” Lukashenka’s press service quotes him as saying.

According to the president, military personnel training practices have to be constantly adjusted to modern reality. The instruction applies not only to educational institutions dedicated solely to training military specialists and officers but also to military departments in civil universities.

“The State Secretariat needs to set up a group of specialists to analyze everything, weed out the unnecessary things from the curricula, optimize training times, and take a look at part-time education in order to evaluate whether we need it or not. Officers have been known to criticize it,” he noted.

In his opinion, the most dreadful thing is ‘formalism’.

“We don’t want to return to the state of affairs we had in the Soviet times. I want skills of officers tested. I don’t want prodigies but I myself spent time running, jumping, doing chin-ups, and training with soldiers. I know what officers should be like,” the Belarusian leader added.