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 was in Iraq. It wasn’t even in Georgia. So Georgia was only a two-third of the little strength that they had, and, as my coauthor points out, the training of the Georgian armed forces by the Americans was in counterinsurgency and not in territorial defense, not in strategic operations—none of them.

Moreover, after the war, we saw that the Obama administration refused to provide any kind of lethal weapons to Georgia and, later on, to Ukraine. The supply of Javelins to Ukraine that the Ukrainians were lobbying for very intensely didn’t start ’til 2017, and I think we saw now that antitank weapons played a key role in stopping the initial Russian mechanics.

I would put a blame on the doorstep of both the European decisionmakers and Washington, and I would apportion that blame probably 70 percent to the Europeans and 30 percent to Washington. Why this inequality of apportioning the blame? And that’s a blame both for allowing the Georgia war to happen and the Ukrainian war to happen in 2014 and, later on, in 2022.

Because, number one, if you do a mental exercise and imagine Georgia and Ukraine in NATO as the Bush administration asked back in 2008, you probably would have avoided both wars—or at least one of them, Ukraine. We warned in the monograph that Ukraine is the next target. We said it many times that the Crimea, in particular, where the Russians are giving out Russian citizenship like candy. The Donbas. There’s also areas outside of Ukraine, such as K’rts’anisi and Moldova—these are the candidates for Russian expansion and, possibly, annexation, as we saw in the Crimea and in Donbas. The West did not do anything about it—especially Germany, Italy, and France . . . typically resisted any kind of US attempts supported by Poland, Baltic states, and others to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO.

Also, we saw a bit of wishy-washy assessment of the Georgia war written by one of the EU officials. We saw (Nicolas) Sarkozy going to Moscow, begging Putin to stop the war, and tabling plans (Sarkozy) that Russia later on ignored. And we also see, at the same time, Putin’s threats, including the threat to dismember Ukraine if Ukraine joins NATO. So there’s a lot of consistency in Russian policy since 2008 until 2014. Leading to 2014, Russia got wind in its sail after the perceived success of the Georgian war. They said, “Yeah, there were shortcomings,” as Bob outlined, “but we focused on strategic objectives, and we pretty much achieved them.”

The Russians were encouraged by President (Mikheil) Saakashvili losing power in 2012. I’m saying in the monograph regime change, or at least significant weakening of Saakashvili, was the goal, and it was accomplished. And we saw that Ukraine is looking at the Georgia war and not doing anything since 2010, when President (Viktor) Yanukovych was elected and embarked on a policy of weakening Ukrainian military, which led to unsuccessful overall resistance; in 2014, losing to Crimea, pretty much without firing a shot; and losing parts of Donbas—losing, what, probably 15,000 people on each side. And that indecisive outcome of Donbas led to the war in 2022 and to continuation of Russian claims to rebalance the European security.

And as I repeatedly said and wrote, the war in Ukraine in 2022 is not about Ukraine. It’s about pushing NATO out of Eastern Europe, going back to NATO preexpansion (1997) and pushing the United States out of Europe and thus changing the global balance of power. And my question to my esteemed coauthor, Bob, is “Does the Russian performance in Ukraine suggest that they can accomplish the larger strategic goals of United States and our allies agreeing to exorbitant Russian demands to pull out of Europe for NATO—at least from Eastern Europe; to limit our deployments, our long-range weapons around Russian borders; to remove tactical nuclear weapons from Europe; et cetera, et cetera? I do not see that performance justifying these very inflated goals.

Hamilton

Thanks Ariel. So, short answer, I . . . I agree. No, Russia’s military performance in the war so far would not allow them to achieve the geostrategic or geopolitical goals that you just outlined.

I would caution, though, that it is still early . . . uh . . . that Russia has clearly switched tactics, has switched objectives, and is now fighting in a way that it’s more comfortable with. But let me go back a little bit to the four areas that we identified as specific military weaknesses in 2008 and then talk about how they’re performing so far in those areas in Ukraine in 2022.

The first was the personnel system. We talked about the use of conscripts in a combat role, despite the fact that it’s illegal under Russian law. We’re seeing the exact same thing happening in 2022. The interesting thing about that is, allegedly, Russia had undertaken a number of reforms of the military personnel system, getting rid of the cadre units, which are units that are really only staffed with the leadership, and then soldiers are supposed to fill in as they plus these units up in wartime; going to the battalion tactical group system . . . so all of these fundamental reforms in the personnel system. Yet, we fast forward 16—no, 14 years—sorry—from 2008 to 2022, and you’re seeing the exact same thing. So this personnel system is at least one area in which the reforms have not taken root.

Maintenance and logistical system for ground forces—again, we pointed that out as a weakness in 2008. It is a massive weakness in Ukraine. We are seeing the exact same things. A quote from the book that I pulled out was broken vehicles “jammed a single road into South Ossetia and hampered the movement of Russian equipment into the area of operations. Indeed, the Russian maintenance problem is evident even to the Georgians, with the senior Georgian official claiming that over the course of the war, 60–70 percent of Russian tanks and armored vehicles broke down.” We’re seeing—and I don’t know what the percentages are in Ukraine, but—you know, the pictures of abandoned Russian vehicles, broken Russian vehicles, strewn along the sides of Ukrainian roads is exactly the same type of picture that we saw in . . .

Cohen

How . . . however, the Ukrainians are using antitank missiles much more effectively. The Georgians just didn’t have enough and didn’t have enough training.

Hamilton

Right—the Georgians of 2008 did not have any of the types of antitank guided missiles the Ukrainians are using now. They didn’t have anything that could reliably defeat a tank—or, at least, in large numbers.

Joint air ground operations were another thing that we pointed out as a weakness, and I would just say that in 2022, we’re seeing the same thing. We’re seeing many, many instances where the Russians are just unable . . . and it’s not only joint operations, which are famously difficult for militaries to conduct, right? Among the domains of conflict—ground, air, maritime—we’re even seeing the Russians having problems doing what we call just combined arms maneuver. Integrating ground maneuver forces with indirect—with ground artillery, with ground reconnaissance. We’re seeing them have serious problems—or, at least, we did in the beginning of the conflict—in just combined arms maneuver, not even to speak of joint operation.

Then, finally, air force operations. We identified the suppression of enemy air defenses as a serious problem. It shocked me, to be honest, at the beginning of this war in 2022, that there was no what we call a SEAD campaign—suppression of enemy air defense campaign. In most Western militaries, the preliminary phase of a conflict is designed to cripple the enemy’s air force and air defenses so that when ground forces do move into a decisive phase, they don’t always have to be looking up in fear. They’re confident that their air forces have command of the air.

The Russians moved in without so much as a SEAD campaign, and they’ve been unable . . . unwilling or unable, I think mostly unable, to conduct one since. So, Russian forces now—well over 100 days into the war—they’re still losing forces to Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles. They’re losing forces to the Ukrainian Air Force, which still continues to fly. Yes, it’s certainly taken losses, but the Ukrainian air defense system and the air force still continue to have an effect. It’s sort of stunning to me that there was no SEAD campaign, that there’s not been an effective SEAD campaign, especially since the air force was one of the priority areas of development—the Russian Aerospace Defence Forces were—for all of this military modernization and reform that has taken place since 2008.

Now I’d like to sort of sum up by asking, “Why is this? Why are we seeing Russia having problems in the same areas it was having by 2008?” I think there’s several possibilities. First of all, as I mentioned or alluded to earlier, the comparison—Georgia, Ukraine, and Ariel, you mentioned this as well—not only is it not exact, it’s not even a fair comparison, right? Ukraine is almost 10 times the size in terms of area and more than 10 times the population of Georgia. Georgia is a very small country which has a very small military. It’s a largely a professional military and was as well in 2008, but there’s no way Georgian armed forces could stand up to the Russians.

The next is it appears to me this time there was more direct Kremlin—probably when I say “Kremlin,” I should say “Putin”—influence on the military plan. I refuse to believe if you locked the Russian General Staff in a room and said, “Write a plan for an invasion of Ukraine,” this was the best they could come up with. And so I do believe there was a large influence of the Kremlin, the security services, and Putin personally on the military plan. And I would add that Putin 2022 and Putin 2008 are different actors. They’re different people, different entities. He’s older, he’s much more isolated, I believe that the authoritarianism in Russia has grown to the point where you have that problem that all authoritarian regimes have where no one wants to tell Putin an uncomfortable truth. And so it’s very likely that in the run-up to the war in Ukraine, he was told that everything would be fine. He was told that this was a wonderful plan, and he was probably surprised at how poorly it went in the early phase.

Next thing I would say: corruption, corruption, corruption, right? We’re seeing it. We’re seeing the effects of it throughout the Russian Armed Forces, the Russian defense industry, the Russian defense enterprise. It’s clear that a lot of the resources that were dedicated to reform were misused or stolen. It’s clear that a lot of resources that were supposed to be dedicated to the upkeep of platformed vehicles and aircraft were misused or stolen. We’re seeing that, I think, contribute to the logistical maintenance problems they’re having.

Finally, I would say Georgia obscured many of the Russian flaws that Ukraine has exposed. For example, the war ended in 2008 after only five days, before the Russian logistical shortcomings could play a decisive role. Ariel and I identified logistics as a problem, but my sense is that it’s always been. Had that war gone on for weeks or months . . . the Russians stopped at a little place called Igoet’i, which is just outside of Gori on the road to Tbilisi. I’ve thought since the time, they stopped not out of any magnanimity or any desire not to topple the Saakashvili regime. They stopped largely because they probably had reached the end of their logistical lines of communications and couldn’t go much further. And Ukraine has exposed all those flaws. Ukraine was always going to be a war of logistics for the Russians because of its physical size—just the amount of terrain the Russian Army had to cover to conquer the country—and the size of its military, meaning the Russians were going to have to expend a lot more ammunition than they did in Georgia.

So I’ll leave it there. And I think the reasons . . . So, what we found looking at this war is that many of the same Russian flaws that we pointed out in 2008 are still there and, in fact, in some ways, are more serious. And the reasons are, again, political, Kremlin influence on the plan, I think; corruption; and the fact that these are just very different wars that the Russians are fighting.

I would finally say we should guard against overcorrection. Not only are Georgia and Ukraine different wars, but the type of operation Russia conducted in the first phase of this war required capabilities that are weaknesses. Combined armed maneuver, joint operations, agile commanding control, dynamic targeting—all these things that . . . that the Russians aren’t good at. They’ve now rediscovered the concept of mass in the way they’re fighting in Ukraine. They’ve massed their forces in eastern Ukraine. They’re using massed artillery to pummel Ukrainian forces, hoping to use mass maneuver forces to create a breakthrough. So, they’re now fighting in a way that they’re more comfortable with. The Russian Army fights best when it fights as an engine of indiscriminate destruction, and that’s essentially what it’s doing in eastern Ukraine.

Host

Our time is running out. I don’t know if you can . . . in 30 seconds or so, going forward, what do we need to consider?

Cohen

We need to consider the political will. We need to consider that we ignored the warning signs of Russian imperial ambition that was translated into war, almost like we saw it in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century, and the pushback that needed to be done before and during . . . after Georgia war needs to be done now in terms of support of Ukraine, supply of the arms, and bringing Ukraine war to the point where Russia learns the lesson that aggression and expansion against its neighbors—and against Europe, in particular—is no longer tolerable for Russia.

We need to incur the irreparable damage to that regime so that either the regime learns the lessons for the foreseeable future or there is a regime change in Russia going forward because they screwed up so badly. Kind of, you can say, like the Russians lost the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. Is this going to happen? I do not know. At this point, it looks like it may end along the lines of the Winter War in 1939–1940, where Finland lost some territory but preserved independence. But, as Bob said, there’s a fog of war. It’s too early to tell. We’re in the early stages. But the threat of Russian militarized imperialism is there for all to see.

Hamilton

And, if I could add from the military perspective, I think we need to search as we assess the Russian military’s performance in this war. And what does it mean for us? We need to search for what the Russians call the zolotaya seredina, right? The golden middle. Guard against the prewar assessment of the Russian military: 10 feet tall and bulletproof that’s going to roll through Ukraine like a knife through hot butter, right? To be fair, that was not the assessment of everybody, but many analysts of the Russian military sort of tended toward that assessment. And now, I think we’ve, in many cases, overcorrected, and we shrug our shoulders and say, “Well, clearly, the Russians are no military threat to anybody.” I would say, in the right context and used properly, the Russian military is still a formidable military instrument, so we need to find that golden middle, and we need to approach Russia’s military capabilities that way and not as either an existential threat in all context or not something we have to deal with at all.

Host

Thank you both so much. I’m sorry we don’t have more time.

Cohen

Thanks a lot—appreciate it.

Hamilton

Thank you, Stephanie.

Host

Thank you.

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About the authors:

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 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.