A Question of Technique

Some aspects of the Cold War refuse to die. As Putin’s troops manoeuvre in Georgia it’s high-time to remember that the intense competition between different American and Russian styles of warfare, hardware or technology is still going on.

The Georgian Army has since the ‘Rose Revolution’ been receiving military-aid and crucial knowledge-sets from the 130 US military advisors based in the country. With Israel giving a helping hand, almost a quarter of Georgia’s functional land forces are said to be Western trained. Schooled in the experience of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Georgia’s own 2,000 strong commitment in Iraq they came face to face in South Ossetia with a very different kind of Army.

The new Russian army is a product of Putin’s first Caucasian war – In Chechnya. Here a completely different and utterly ruthless understanding of counter-insurgency and occupation was forged. The dust has yet to settle but the clash in Georgia seems to have been a decisive rout for Westpoint training. Reports of collective punishment in South Ossetia and Gori, including the burning of fields, indiscriminate bombing of civilians, Chechen irregulars and the excessive use of force showed where the Russian Officers had learnt their techniques. And in this confrontation it was the Western trained Georgian Army that came off far the worse. It’s tiny size only explains part of the story. It simply did not have the training to deal with this different style of warfare. It wasn’t even thinking in the right paradigm. American experts have spent the past twenty years confronting Iraqis, Serbs or Afghans – they forgot about the Russians and what way of waging war was emerging in Chechnya.

But Georgia is not the only place where American and Russian techniques are facing off today. In Iran Russian nuclear techniques are being used by the Ayatollahs to build their nuclear programme and if a US or Israeli attempt to stop them does come about in the near future, from this winter it will turn into a deadly duel between the top of the range Russian S-300 anti-aircraft system and the latest American bombers. This competition is spread right across the Middle East. Russian weaponry and training in Syria eyes the heavily Americanised IDF across the Golan Heights. In Lebanon these same techniques come to blows. Hezbollah are said to receive much of their training form the Syrian security forces, who in turn are rumoured to be trained on Russian soil and certainly have decades of Russian experience going back to their early Soviet mentors. And in 2006 the Hezbollah launched it’s war against the Jewish State by blowing up a tank with – Russian made weaponry, the potent RPG-29. Again, we need to worry about how our techniques are faring.

And in wider worlds of arms sales, Russia and America are head to head in competing to arm India and other developing nations. In the Far East, China’s rising Army is composed of either Russian developed, copied or sold military hard-ware. In the world of military technology the Cold War goes on, as a question not of ideology but of technique.