Russia’s incursion into Georgia is one of the most dangerous turning points in recent years. In my view, it could lead to far more serious consequences for the U.S. than anything like Iraq and Afghanistan.
President George Bush and his successor must make it absolutely plain to Vladimir Putin that such aggression won’t be tolerated. Negotiations are, of course, in order, but my view as a long-time Russia-watcher is that we must play the threat-of-force card since it seems to be the only thing some of them understand.
That said, I found it especially interesting just how obsolete Russian weapons were during the conflict.
First, some caveats. I know this is supposed to be a Virginia blog and that some fellow bloggers will take my head off for straying off topic. Virginia, however, is where the Pentagon and the CIA are located, plus many military and naval bases. Also, Virginia is the No.2 defense industry state. What happens next is of utmost importance to the Old Dominion.
Besides noting the vigor and recklessness of the Russian incursion, some observers have picked up that the Russia strikes in the Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and in Georgia proper raise big questions about their military equipment. That intrigues me since the Soviet/Russian defense industry was one thing I paid a lot of attention do when I was a BusinessWeek correspondent in Moscow from 1986-1989 and again from 1993 to 1996.
Aircraft, tanks and assault rifles were some of the few products they seemed to make well. I saw them up close and personal on several occasions, including the Uzbek border where I watched Soviet troops withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989. Four years later, much of the fighting during an anti-Yeltsin coup in Moscow happened just outside my office and apartment where my wife and two children huddled in a bathtub. I’ve waited at armed checkpoints in Azerbaijan and although I was never in Chechnya, I knew a lot of people who were.
On a lighter note, I was once invited to a weapons demonstration by Russian export companies in the city of Vladimir. After a lunch of vodka and heavy appetizers, we went to exhibits where pretty young Russian models displayed mortar tubes and rocket propelled grenades along with lots of leg and cleavage. Then we went out to a firing range and were allowed to shoot any weapon we wanted, including machine guns, despite our somewhat inebriated state. I chose an evil-looking submachine gun, called a “bez-shum” (without noise) because it had a long silencer on its barrel. It made flitting sounds as I squeezed the trigger.
Yet, according to observers such as the Moscow Times, Russian weaponery showed its age in Georgia. The tanks were old T-72s produced in the 1970s to counter NATO armor on the plains of Western Europe. The primary aircraft were close-support Sukhoi-25s, dubbed “Frogfoot” by NATO, which were first used 25 years ago in Afghanistan.
Georgia fielded some of the same weapons, but, according to the Moscow Times, they had been upgraded with night-vision capabilities, unlike the Russian ones. Presumably a bit of the technical upgrades came with help from U.S. and Israeli advisors in Georgia. The Georgians had help with electronic warfare and general training as well, presumably from the same Israeli and U.S. sources. “The Russian forces had to operate in an environment of technically inferiority,” the Moscow Times quoted Konstantin Makiyenko, deputy director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies as saying.
Despite the Georgian’s technical superiority, however, Russia prevailed through brute strength of numbers. Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili made a bad move by provoking the fight by sending 7,500 Georgia troops into the contested and heavily-Russian province of South Ossetia that has been fought over since the Soviet Union fell in 1991 and Georgia became independent. Unfortunately for the Georgians, the initiative failed and the Russians responded in force.
Despite Russia’s victory, the conflict revealed shortcomings in Russian tactics along with the aforementioned ones in weaponery. For example, Russian air forces could not prevent the shelling of a convoy and the wounding of a top commander, despite Georgia’s smaller forces, the Moscow Times says.
Old guns and tanks result, of course, from the economic mayhem that befell the Soviet Union after the 1991 breakup. The military and civilian economies had been merged in ways hard to imagine in the West. But Russia is now awash in oil money. One wonders if the poor showing in Georgia and Putin’s belligerence will spark a major arms buildup in Russia, not to mention more aggressive moves in spots around Russia’s border. If so, the U.S., and by extension, Virginia, had better be ready.
Peter Galuszka