Conversations on Strategy Podcast – Ep 6 – Dr. Ariel Cohen and Dr. Robert Hamilton – The Russian Military and the Georgia War - Lessons and Implications

How does the war in Georgia in 2008 relate to the war in Ukraine in 2022? Join Dr. Ariel Cohen and Dr. Robert Hamilton for an in-depth discussion, using their 2011 monograph, The Russian Military and the Georgia War: Lessons and Implications, as a launching point.

Click here to read the review and reply to the monograph: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/576/

Keywords: Russia, Ukraine, Statecraft, Military Strategy and Policy, War and Society, Military Change and Transformation

Episode Transcript:

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy—a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs.

Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Ariel Cohen and Dr. Robert Hamilton, authors of The Russian Military and the Georgia War: Lessons and Implications, published by the US Army War College Press in 2011.

Dr. Ariel Cohen is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Eurasia Center and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (Council on Foreign Relations). He’s a recognized authority on international security and energy policy and leading expert in Russia, Eurasia, and the Middle East. For more than 20 years, Dr. Cohen served as a senior research fellow on Russian and Eurasian studies and international energy policy at the Heritage Foundation.

Dr. Robert E. Hamilton is a research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College, specializing in strategic competition and rivalry. Hamilton is a retired US Army Eurasian foreign area officer whose assignments included US advisor to the Ministry of Defence of Georgia, the chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation in (the US Embassy in) Georgia, (Department of Defense or) DoD Russia policy advisor to the International Syria Support Group in Geneva, the chief of assessments for the NATO Special Operations Component Command – Afghanistan, and the chief of the Russian De-Confliction Cell at Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve.

In your 2011 monograph, The Russian Military and the Georgia War: Lessons and Implications, you cover the August 2008 conflict between Georgia and Russia. The war demonstrated Russia’s military needed significant reforms, and it indicated which of those reforms were being implemented. I look forward to hearing about this—but first, thank you both for joining me today.

Ariel Cohen

It’s a pleasure. This is Ariel Cohen.

Host

Ariel, please start us off and give us some background on the Georgia war of 2008.

Cohen

Let’s start with the causes of the Georgian war. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a large part of the military security and intellectual establishment of the Soviet Union did not accept the outcome of the Cold War. They did not accept that, in fact, the Soviet Union failed in that competition. They also did not accept the fact that the Soviet empire, the incarnation of the Russian empire that predated the Soviet Union, collapsed, and they wanted to rebuild it.

I saw the writing on the wall when I was traveling to Moscow in 1990s. There was a whole body of people who said that (Boris) Yeltsin; the last Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze—well, he was one before last, before (Alexander) Bessmertnykh; and Alexander Yakovlev, who led the anti-Stalin campaign—they considered these people traitors, as they did Mikhail Gorbachev, and the idea of reassembling the Soviet and Russian empire of the primarily Russian-speaking territories (but not only) . . . it percolated initially in the 90s and then got a much stronger impetus in the (Vladimir) Putin era.

And I think when the alarm really should have sounded for the West was the Putin speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. We also saw such initiatives as then-President Dmitry Medvedev idea of new European security . . . I think this was already after the Georgian war. But in the run-up to the war, we saw the Russians implanting their people, ethnic Russians and people from the security services in South Ossetia that was de facto secessionists from Georgia, and the government in Moscow supported it. In Abkhazia and also the government in Moscow supported it and was developing the military infrastructure, including (what was very clear to me that there’s going to be a war) rebuilding a railroad in the months leading to the hostility that broke out on August 7th.

In my analysis, the Russians were preparing for the war. There were programs. There were plans. The 58th Army was concentrated in North Caucasus, and then it had to pour down into South Ossetia and other elements that were mobilized to fight. When I was reviewing the monograph, that I think withstood the test of time extremely well, I found the mention of the rocket cruiser Moskva that was the flagship of the Black Sea. And that’s one of the fundamental differences between the Georgia war that went very badly for the Georgians: The Georgian military essentially sued for capitulation after losing 100 to 200 soldiers. What a difference between the Georgians and the Ukrainians that now we’re reporting it after 100 days of fears, warfare.

But I think this is a very good segue way to what Colonel Hamilton is going to be talking about.

Robert Hamilton

Thank you, Ariel. What I’d like to do is sort of break it down into a couple of areas: those areas in which our monograph was fairly complimentary toward Russia or at least acknowledge some Russian successes, and then the areas in which we pointed out Russian shortcomings or failures.

We believe that Russia was fairly successful in linking of the political and military objectives of its strategy. This war didn’t come out of nowhere. There was a long period of sort of geopolitical, geostrategic preparation in the Kremlin for the reestablishment of Russian hegemony or control over many of the lands of the former Soviet Union, and this was the first military step in that process. But we did find that the Russian government was fairly effective in linking the political and military objectives in its strategy. It was also effective in finding and exploiting a gap between strategic objectives of the West and strategic objectives of Georgia in the war, with the West sort of, in the run-up to the war, consistently counseling the Georgians, “Don’t allow yourself to be provoked. If you get yourselves into a war with the Russian Federation, we could not and would not assist you, and it’s a war you can’t win,” and the Georgian government saying consistently, “What’s happening is a process of creeping annexation that will eventually end in Russia being in control whether or not we react.”

The Russians understood that the West and Georgia had very different strategic pictures. They found and exploited that gap. We found that they resourced the strategy and their operational plan fairly well. Again, as Ariel said, there was a long period of preparation in the Kremlin and in Russian General Staff and the 58th Army for this war. But, as the war started on the night of 7th of August, the Russians had already positioned enough forces to have that three-to-one advantage, attacker to defender, that all militaries strive for if you’re the attacker—preferably in every major system, not just in personnel.

So the Russians did have that in this war, and they had a massive advantage in airpower and artillery which came into play and really was decisive in the war. We also found that performance of the ground maneuver forces, especially the airborne and special forces, was a relative Russian strength in this war. Areas that we were more critical: the personnel system—especially, the use of conscripted soldiers in war, despite the fact that it was illegal under Russian law. The Russians used a large number of conscripts; at least 30 percent of the forces in the war were conscripts in 2008. Amazing that we’re having the same discussions about the war in Ukraine in 2022.

We were critical of the maintenance and logistical system of the Russian Armed Forces. We were critical of their inability to really conduct joint air ground operations. And we were especially critical of the air force operations, particularly in three areas: what we call “SEAD” or suppression of enemy air defenses—we found that the Russian Air Force was unable to suppress even the fairly tiny and rudimentary Georgian air defense network; we found that they were lacking in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; and they were lacking in strategic attack. So these are areas where we found the Russian Air Force really underperformed, and, after 2008, you’ll see a massive Russian rearmament program that initially focuses on the air force and focuses largely on these areas. And then, when we get into 2022, we can ask how they performed in those areas.

Host

You note that aggression against Georgia also sent a strong signal to Ukraine and to the European states along Russia’s border; also, that the short war fought between Russia and Georgia in August 2008 had implications reaching far beyond where it was fought. Please speak to the current situation in Ukraine from your monograph’s perspective.

Cohen

As we say repeatedly in the monograph, the Georgians, including some of the key decisionmakers that I interviewed for the monograph, went to the Europeans and to the Americans repeatedly saying that the Russian war is coming, the Russian invasion is being prepared. And in the meantime, one of the three brigades that Georgia had...