By Yigal Levin
Trump blatantly lied when he claimed that the United States had received nothing from Ukraine.
I wrote about this last year, and I will have to repeat myself: the United States has not merely received "something" from Ukraine. It has received, and continues to receive, something absolutely priceless.
Something worth many times more than all the Patriots and HIMARS systems combined.
Real combat experience.
Let me remind you that today, there are effectively only two armies on the planet with real experience of a large-scale, prolonged, full-scale land war of this magnitude and intensity — army against army.
Such experience is more valuable than any rare earth minerals because it cannot be acquired anywhere else — not through military exercises or war games.
The only exceptional circumstance in which it can be gained is a real, large-scale war between opposing armies.
After the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Americans were so astonished by how the Israelis had managed to stop the steel avalanches of Soviet-made Syrian tanks — and not merely stop them, but also launch a counteroffensive — that they practically overwhelmed Jerusalem with requests to meet the officers who had been on the battlefield and made the decisions.
Eventually, in early 1974, American military specialists from the Pentagon arrived in Israel, where they met Israeli officers and questioned them about literally every detail.
What they had seen, what decisions they had made, why they had acted one way rather than another in combat, and so on.
This was vitally important to the Americans because they anticipated a massive Soviet offensive in Europe — the same kind of "steel avalanche" seen on the Golan Heights, which they expected to surge through the Fulda Gap.
NATO seriously feared that such an offensive could not be stopped without resorting to nuclear weapons, but the Israel Defense Forces had demonstrated in practice that it was possible to halt such an attack without nuclear weapons.
That is precisely why the Americans studied every last detail and every moment of that experience.
The Americans should be immensely grateful that Ukrainians are open with them and share their unique experience of large-scale modern warfare.
That one of the strongest armies on the planet — the Armed Forces of Ukraine — is willing to pass this invaluable experience on to the Pentagon.
This is a unique asset, and claiming that Ukraine has given the United States nothing is a blatant and utterly stupid lie.
