A news article broken by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday reported that a Ukrainian drone unit participating in NATO training in Germany was pitted against a US Army tank brigade and that the outcome of that simulated engagement was a decisive Ukrainian victory with almost all the American armored vehicles “destroyed.” Kyiv Post researchers dug into the details of the exercise and the units involved. 1. Where, when and what was exactly going on in these exercises and why were Ukrainians there? The exercise was a two-week field wargame called Combined Resolve that took place in the second half of April 2026 and into the first days of May. The main unit doing the training was a US-based “heavy” unit – primarily armed with tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, artillery and helicopters – called the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team of 1st Cavalry Division, based in Fort Hood, Texas. The brigade was deployed in Europe as part of a US deterrence plan, now probably cancelled by the Trump administration, to field US ground combat brigades in East Europe. About 3,500 US soldiers participated in the exercise. Hohenfels is NATO’s largest training area for maneuver training. Force-on-force training at Hohenfels has been a standard NATO training evolution since the 1950s.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Since Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, Hohenfels has become NATO’s premier training site for practicing maneuver warfare against a peer adversary in conventional combat conditions. Weapons effects are simulated by using weapons loaded with blanks and lasers attached to the weapons that shoot when a blank is fired, and by fitting laser-sensitive sensors to soldiers and combat vehicles. Observation officers/judges use artillery simulators and lasers of their own to simulate artillery and some long-range systems. Although the training, amounting to a giant wargame using laser tag, can’t replicate the fear of war, most soldiers say force-on-force exercises at Hohenfels fairly accurately replicate how weapons work in simulated battles: intelligent tactics mostly work, and bad tactics almost always fail.