Opinion
Barry Artiste. Now Public Contributor
Certainly a quandary when Russians find out their hardware may not be up to snuff when engaging in battle.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/600/42/369809.htm
(Photo inset) Irakli Gedenidze / Reuters A Georgian T-72 tank driving toward Tskhinvali last week. The country’s Soviet-era arsenal has been upgraded.
Irakli Gedenidze / Reuters, A Russian Sukhoi fighter dropping bombs on Georgian positions last week.
Conflict Exposes Obsolete Hardware
15 August 2008
By Simon Saradzhyan / Staff Writer
The brief but intensive armed conflict in South Ossetia has signaled Russia’s willingness and ability to fight and win conflicts beyond its borders after years of focusing its war machine on nuclear deterrence and the suppression of internal security threats.
But while the conflict has demonstrated that Russia can and will coerce its post-Soviet neighbors with force if the West doesn’t intervene, it has exposed the technical backwardness of its military.
The technical sophistication of the Russian forces turned out to be inferior in comparison with the Georgian military.
While Georgia’s armed forces operated Soviet-era T-72 tanks and Su-25 attack planes, both were upgraded with equipment such as night-vision systems to make them technologically superior to similar models operated by the Russian Ground Forces, said Konstantin Makiyenko, deputy director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.
“The Russian forces had to operate in an environment of technical inferiority,” Makiyenko said.
Another area where the Russian military appeared to have lagged behind the Georgian armed forces was in electronic warfare, said Anatoly Tsyganok, a retired army commando and independent military expert.
The Georgian forces were also well-trained, with many of them drilled by U.S. and Israeli advisers.
These factors helped the Georgian military easily take the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, located in a basin, after more than 10 hours of intensive air strikes and artillery fire on Aug. 7.
The shelling of the city was probably carried out with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for targeting — a capability that Russia’s armed forces have yet to acquire.
The attack came as a surprise to Russian peacekeepers stationed in South Ossetia, and the conflict represents a major intelligence failure, former Defense Minister Pavel Grachev said in an interview published in Nezavisimaya Gazeta this week. But Stratfor, a private U.S.-based intelligence agency, said Russian commanders were aware of a strong possibility that Georgian forces might attack and had amassed equipment close to the Russian-Georgian border but refrained from crossing over so as not to jump the gun.
“Given the posture of Russian troops, how could intelligence analysts have missed the possibility that the Russians had laid a trap, hoping for a Georgian invasion to justify its own counterattack?
” Stratfor said in an analysis. Whether or not the attack came as a surprise, the Georgian side timed it well, with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Beijing for the Olympics and both President Dmitry Medvedev and the commander of the 58th Army, which is closest to South Ossetia, on vacation, Tsyganok said.
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