Why Did Gerogia's Armed Forces Fail So Badly?

By MARTIN SIEFF, UPI Senior News Analyst
Published: Aug. 13, 2008 at 10:30 AM
Courtesy Of United Press International


WASHINGTON, Aug. 13 (UPI) -- Why did Georgia's armed forces do so badly against the Russian army, when they were, in theory, quite well equipped?

Writing for the Russian RIA Novosti news agency last week, military analyst Ilya Kramnik estimated the strength of the Georgian armed forces as comprising "more than 30,000 men, including 20,000 ground forces. They are equipped with more than 200 tanks, including 40 Soviet-built T-55 Main Battle Tanks and 165 more modern T-72 Main Battle Tanks, which currently are being upgraded."

Georgian infantry and armored forces, Kramnik continued, "can receive artillery support from 120 artillery pieces of 122mm- to 152mm caliber, 40 multiple-launch rocket systems and 180 mortars."

Also, the Georgians should have been mobile in their small country, thanks to their possession of "200 combat armored vehicles, including about 180 infantry combat vehicles and armored personnel carriers," he wrote.

In theory, the Georgian air force also could count on "five Soviet-era Sukhoi Su-25 -- NATO designation Frogfoot -- close support aircraft, 15 L-29 and L-39 combat training aircraft, which can be used as light assault planes, and 30 helicopters, including eight MI-24 attack helicopters," Kramnik wrote.

In the past few years, NATO and the U.S. armed forces had been busily building up Georgia's military forces, too. A Russian Defense Ministry statement reported by the Interfax news agency on Aug. 7 stated, "Georgia has received 206 tanks, of which 175 units were supplied by NATO states, 186 armored vehicles (126 from NATO) , 79 guns (67 from NATO) , 25 helicopters (12 from NATO), 70 mortars, 10 surface-to-air missile systems, eight Israeli-made unmanned aircraft, and other weapons."

It may, of course, be that the Russians exaggerated or overestimated the amount of advanced weapons systems the Georgians had. But it is certainly the case that U.S. military advisers had been working energetically to upgrade the Georgian armed forces to NATO standards. And it is certainly the case that, with the exception of their ground-based anti-aircraft defense systems, which worked quite well during the past week's conflict, the rest of Georgia's rapidly growing and proud little armed forces were swept aside easily by the Russian army.

There are many reasons why that happened: First, however impressive the expanded Georgian armed forces looked on paper, they were no match for any major military land power, which Russia certainly is. And however impressive the numbers of armored personnel carriers, tanks and artillery pieces looked on paper, in practice they were strung out around a small country and were not concentrated to withstand, let alone counterattack, serious armored forces backed by real concentrations of artillery.

It should be noted that equipping infantry with good hand-held anti-tank weapons has been a
recurring and historical weakness of the U.S. armed forces going back to World War II and the Korean War.

The U.S. Army's heavy artillery is and has been since World War II among the very finest in the world, but Georgia had nothing comparable. Therefore, the concentrated artillery fire of the Russian army, which has always emphasized excellence and mass concentration of firepower in this crucial arm, proved devastating and took Georgian combat units by surprise.

The Georgian air force had been configured and designed for limited operations against Abkhaz and South Ossetian forces. Neither U.S. nor Georgian planners ever appear to have contemplated the possibility that Russia would indirectly enter any such conflict, and so the meager Georgian air combat forces were immediately swept from the sky.

Ultimately, the Georgians learned the hard way what the Polish army with its scores of thousands of proud cavalry riders learned the hard way at the hands of the Nazi German Wehrmacht in September 1939: In modern war, tiny countries like Georgia or medium-sized but unindustrialized ones such as Poland was in 1939 do not stand a chance against attack by a serious military force equipped and dispatched by a modern industrialized state.

Also, despite all the current global passion for counterinsurgency techniques and much fashionable talk about how war has "evolved" beyond clashes of tanks, heavy guns and mobile infantry, those are still the forces that can consume entire countries at a single gulp, unless forces of comparable size, firepower and sophistication can be deployed rapidly to stop them. The Georgians have just learned that lesson the hard way.

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