Friends!

I want to tell you something very interesting. Have you ever heard about thr secret intelligence unit in the IDF? It is called 9900, and is engaged to the exploration of electronic data. But its feature is different. There are people who have autism.

Thanks to some violation of the nervous system this soldiers work with the information several times faster, specific opportunities help them to cope with extremely large data sets, and notice that the average human eye may miss. These skills have saved hundreds of lives.

First recruits with autism were taken in 2013. The idea arose suddenly. In one family of Israeli military man died a son, also a soldier, who served at the border with Gaza. To his funeral came some father’s Army friends. One shared problem, he told about his two sons, who are still alive, but seemingly not - because they got autism and no one wants to get in touch with them. A retired spy heard it. Later the idea came to his mind, he understood, that unique skills of autistic people have to be used. The idea was supported by the director of foreign spy intelligence service "Mossad" Tamir Pardo. He worked out a plan of action, developed a program to train new recruits, which includes even the course of socialization, so they could easily work with commanders and colleagues.

It took 3 years and this unit became one of the most elite. And this is not the limit. Now the Israeli army launched a project "Roim rehok" («We see it far"). This is the three-month specialized training, after which the soldiers with features of mental development can gain wider knowledge that will help them to switch to any other squad of IDF.

Thus, the Israeli military didn’t only solve the problem of the employment of autistic people and their further socialization, but also once again raised the IDF to a new level, because the ability of new soldiers helped to carry out the necessary work better and faster.

I am sure the Ukrainian army is still at the stage of its development, the decades without funding and improving the material base did not pass by. So Ukrainian Army has to borrow these ideas. We must not be afraid of dramatic and sometimes risky decisions that may fundamentally change the army and bring it to the next level.