Subject: RE: Ossetian War article/ JRL#159 item #24.
Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2008
From: "Bob Hamilton" <BHamilton@csis.org>
This is an interesting article. Although the pressure to be the first to publish something on this war is certainly intense, it doesn't necessarily contribute to accurate or reasoned analysis. There are three big problems with this article:
1. Its assessment of Georgia's military capabilities is - while not completely inaccurate - certainly uneven. For instance:
- Georgia had nine Su-25s, not 20 or more as the author maintains.
- The U.S. did not deliver 15 HMMWVs to Georgia; these had been ordered but delivery is not expected until spring of 2009.
- The French did not give Georgia 4 Mirage aircraft, or if they did they have long since stopped flying. Other than the Su-25s the only fixed wing aircraft in the Georgian Air Force inventory are some L-39 trainers.
- There are not 15 Blackhawks "on tap" - the Georgians cancelled that purchase in early 2008. These are just the inaccuracies that I personally can verify from having been on the ground in Georgia for the last two years. There are certainly others in the article.
2. Its assessment of the U.S. capacity-building effort with the Georgian military is uninformed: "One only wonders what all those American and British (and Ukrainian, and Turkish...) advisors were doing all this time." What they were doing is preparing the Georgian Armed Forces to deploy to and fight alongside U.S. and other Coalition forces in Iraq. The USG made a conscious decision not to train armor, artillery or attack aviation forces, for the reason that this may be seen as too provocative vis-a-vis the separatist conflicts. This meant the Georgian military was well-trained in counter-insurgency/counter-terrorism but not well-trained in mid to high-intensity maneuver warfare of the type the Russians unleashed on it.
The numbers it cites for U.S. military trainers and advisors (95 advisors and 130 "civilian contractors") are also false. There were somewhere between 100-130 U.S. military trainers working with the brigade getting ready to deploy to Iraq, plus a team of about 15 contractors from Cubic Corporation who were helping reform the MOD and Joint Staff along NATO lines and were helping train brigade and battalion staffs for deployment to Iraq.
If the US makes the decision to continue and even expand its capacity-building efforts with the Georgians, it would not be too difficult a task to build the types of capabilities (air defense, maritime security, C4ISR and mobile, lethal anti-armor) required for Georgia to bloody the Russian Army if it decides to invade Georgia again.
3. Its assessment of the Georgian operational plan assumes a long-term, deliberate Georgian effort to retake S.O. via military force. This is simply not the case. The truth is that there was a pattern of Russian provocations in Abkhazia and South Ossetia beginning this spring designed to either: - provoke Georgia into a conflict, which would result in the defeat of the Georgian Army and Russia's annexation of these territories, or; - result in the de facto annexation of both territories if Georgia failed to respond to the provocations.
For review, here's a quick rundown of some of these Russian or Russian-sponsored actions:
- lifting the military and economic embargo on Abkhazia;
- dealing directly with the separatist authorities instead of using the Georgian government as an interlocutor;
- deploying an additional battalion of Russian troops there under the auspices of increasing its peacekeeping contingent;
- deploying railroad troops to repair the railway line between the Russian border and a major port - ostensibly for humanitarian purposes but later used to transport Russian military equipment;
- shooting down an unarmed Georgian reconnaissance drone;
- an assassination attempt against the head of the Georgian-backed administration in South Ossetia;
- an order of general mobilization by the South Ossetian de facto government - over a dozen of whose members are Russian officials;
- violations of Georgian airspace by Russian aircraft;
- bomb explosions in Georgian-controlled territory in South Ossetia that wounded five Georgian policemen.
As the tension mounted, the Georgian government repeatedly made the case for greater involvement by the international community in these conflicts, arguing that the Russians had become parties to the conflicts and were therefore illegitimate as peacekeepers or impartial arbiters. After these requests failed to produce any sort of concerted action and the violence in South Ossetia continued to escalate, the Georgians likely made the decision to prepare for a military operation in South Ossetia.
However, that operation was hastily-conceived and executed. The best evidence for this is that of the two Georgian brigades in a position to militarily influence South Ossetia, one had the bulk of its forces in Iraq and the other was in training to go to Iraq until the morning of 7 August (that is when they pulled out of their Iraq train-up).
So instead of a U.S.-trained Georgian Army that hatched a deliberate, long-term plan to retake South Ossetia and Abkhazia by force, what you had on 8 August was a Georgian Army proficient in counter-insurgency but largely untrained in maneuver warfare thrown hastily into a war with a much-superior foe that had set the conditions to bring this war about on his terms.
We can certainly argue that the decision to use force in South Ossetia was an unwise one by the Georgian government, but if we do so we need to be mindful of the background of Russian provocations and international impotence that the Georgian government believed it was facing when it made that decision.
LTC Robert E. Hamilton
U.S. Army Fellow
Center for Strategic and International Studies
(202) 775-3288
bhamilton@csis.org
robert.e.hamilton@us.army.mil.