Georgian army may be tough nut for Russia to crack
By Stefan Korshak for Deutsche Presse-Agentur via Monsters and Critics
The war in the Caucasian province Ossetia may seem like an uneven contest between giant Russia and tiny Georgia – but on the battlefront things are a bit different.
Georgia’s President President Mikheil Saakashvili, coming to office in the 2003 pro-democracy Rose Revolution, has with some help from the United States built up the region’s toughest little military. Russia can destroy it, but it will be neither quick nor easy, regional observers say.
US Special Forces troops, and later US Marines replacing them, have for the last half decade been systematically training selected Georgian units to NATO standards. Gone are the Soviet traditions of soldiers’ never firing their weapons until the war breaks out, or tanks too valuable to drive out of the motor pool.
Using standard training plans familiar to the average US Army or Marine recruit, the US educators have focused on basics: teaching Georgian soldiers small unit tactics, marksmanship, and individual initiative.
The US trainers also took the Georgian officer corps to school, pushing lessons and buzz words learned by America in its recent wars.
Among these, are making the air force and army work together (inter-service cooperation), trying to surprise the opponent and possess lots of information about him (the information battle), getting beans and bullets to the troops (logistics), and enforcing the bog-standard rule that good officers lead from the front.
Saakashvili has backed up the American trainers full hilt: In high-unemployment Georgia, the best-paid job available to an active young Georgian man is within the ranks of the military.
Today, roughly one-quarter of Georgia’s functional land forces are US-trained. The backbone of the Georgian army is seven infantry battalions raised from scratch and brought by the US Green Berets from boot camp to something quite close to NATO-standard combat readiness over the years, a mass of some 5,000 men.
Georgia since 2003 has been among the US’ most enthusiastic supporters of international forces in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Iraq. Currently Georgia, once a minor Soviet republic of some 4.5 million inhabitants, fields the third-largest foreign force in Iraq, after the US and Britain.
Georgia’s government on Saturday called on those desert-hardened veterans, requesting the Pentagon release the elite 13th battalion to return home from the Middle East, to fight Russians in Ossetia.
Saakashvili’s Defence Ministry according to officials in Tbilisi spends some 930 million dollars a year on its military, a drop in the bucket compared to Russia, but a massive spike from 30 million dollars spent in 1991 when Georgia became independent.
Perhaps tellingly, a lion’s share of Georgia’s defence budget has gone to field training and soldier personal kit.
First-line Georgian soldiers wear NATO uniforms, kevlar helmets and body armour matching US issue, and carry the US-manufactured M-16 automatic rifle – a dramatic about turn from the way most former Soviet republics outfit troops, with a mix of Soviet-era hand-me- downs and more recent Russian or Chinese gear.
Georgia has to be sure not thrown out every last Kalashnikov, and most of Georgia’s reserves and second-line troops are less well kitted out, and trained marginally, similar to Russian reserves that might be sent to the region.
But Georgia at the same time has according to military observers spent its limited money on a few well-chosen big ticket items: modern Czech self-propelled howitzers and rocket launchers (of which some now are bombarding Tskhinvali), Turkish armored cars, and even a French missile boat.
The infantry force the Georgians have fielded in Ossetia, as a result, is by most accounts at least as competent as Russian army elements opposing it, and by some standards (combat experience and field training) possibly even superior, observers said.
In two days of intense combat the Georgian army fighting their Russian opponents suffered hundreds of casualties, and so far have retained discipline. Russian casualties are in the hundreds (??? VS) and Russian aircraft have been shot down – solid performance for a military that has existed for less than a generation.
Russia as a regional power enjoys, of course, overall superiority over the Georgians, in the short term with a much stronger air force, and in the longer term with the Kremlin’s potential ability to mobilize hundreds of thousands of troops and conquer Georgia – provided the men in the Kremlin have the will to take the losses needed to eliminate their doughty opponents.
A second and probably more critical question is, therefore, whether it is Saakashvili or the Kremlin that is more willing to spend soldier lives in what by all accounts promises to be more bloody fighting.
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Commentary: while this article is replete with the usual derogatory stuff about anything Russian, and while the author clearly has no idea of how an M-16 compares to an AK-74, there are plenty of interesting details here about how lavish the US support for Georgia has been over the past years.
What Mr. Korshak also seems to be oblivious to is that the performance of the Soviet military (conscripts) in Afghanistan has clearly been far superior by any measure to the rather dismal performance of the (Tadjik, Uzbek and Hazara -supported) professional US Army (and its NATO allies). Likewise, Mr. Korshak does not seem to realize that the Russian Army managed to defeat the Chechen guerillas not once, but *twice* and that the Chechen guerilla forces make US Special Forces and Marines look like cowardly kindergartners in comparison.
I predict that the Russian forces will have no problems whatsoever defeating these new US-trained “elite” Georgian forces on the ground. However, how exactly the Georgians managed to down several (anywhere from 2 to 6, depending on the sources) Russian aircraft though is still a mystery to me and something which is worth being closely investigated.
