It really doesn't compare. In the US military, there is a tendency to overplay combat experience and of course, that term in itself is relative.

I would argue that few in the US military have experienced the intensity of combat experienced by our Ukrainian counterparts. Perhaps the exception for me was the battle of Fallujah, but that is more because of my own childlike distaste for dark, closed spaces harboring people with ill-intent [that] frightened me more than anything that happened in the open.

Shouldering an anti-tank weapon against a column of T-72s knowing that you are well within the range of the enemy's weapons or sitting in the basement of a half-demolished house while Russian artillery pounds the ground above you waiting for the first Russian foot soldier to come down the steps so that you can kill him are experiences that few of us in the West have shared.

And yet, the Ukrainians are mostly humble enough to realize that experiences like that don't by themselves make proficient soldiers. Many of the Ukrainian infantry thrown into the defense of Kyiv had to learn on the job.

I spoke to one student who struggled to work the safety catch on his AK-47 (a pesky defect with that particular weapon) until his platoon commander simply handed him a bag of grenades and told him to use those instead. "So much easier!" exclaimed the novice soldier with a relief that was not intended to be ironic.

The US military is ill-prepared for other reasons too and these are cultural. The Ukrainian soldier understands the prominence of the "kill chain" in modern warfare, the need to establish sensing and shooting stand-off with your adversary, in a way that his US counterpart does not.