Ukrainian GoPro Combat Footage Serves an Important Purpose

First-person fighting in 4K has an emotional and visceral effect on the viewer.

In 2008, a YouTube channel emerged that showed combat footage from American forces deployed to Afghanistan.

But unlike combat correspondents, whose job was to capture the realities of war for structured news programming, this footage was uploaded by an American soldier wearing a helmet-mounted GoPro video camera.

Here’s an example:

For people who had never been in the middle of a gunfight, the footage is both captivating and visceral.

In 2023, that same YouTube channel has nearly 2.3 million subscribers. Most of the videos are uploaded from action cameras that have, perhaps unsurprisingly, made the jump from extreme sports to the military.

Ironically, GoPro’s motto is “Be a Hero” which is the absolute last thing you want a soldier to be in a war zone.

In the mid-2000s, the US Army prohibited filming combat operations or detainees through General Order Number 1C — although this was more a reaction to the Abu Ghraib prison fiasco where US soldiers were taking humiliating photos of captured Iraqis.

Today, there doesn’t seem to be any broad prohibition by the US government — only specific rules of engagement for specific deployments; for instance, a flight crew on a C-5 Galaxy might be briefed that photos and video are fine, but cargo is off limits, metadata should be turned off, and footage shouldn’t be posted for 14 days after the end of the mission.

Now, footage is emerging from Ukraine from helmet-mounted GoPros that show both the mundane and the terrifying in equal measure.

I served in the infantry with the 101st Airborne. Now you too can experience the life of a combat infantryman: hours of sheer boredom punctuated by seconds of terror.

In the war in Ukraine, there is almost no footage from Russian soldiers — we get to see, exclusively, the Ukrainian infantryman’s perspective.

In one such video purportedly filmed near Bakhmut, Ukrainian International Legion fighters…