Georgian Army, American Made

In the aftermath of Russia's swift victory over the Georgian Army, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has suggested that the United States secretly provoked the conflict—perhaps even prepared Georgia's forces for it. Lt. Col. Robert Hamilton, who ran the U.S. military training program in Georgia until six weeks ago, finds the charge ironic. "At no time did the U.S. attempt to train or equip the Georgian armed forces for a conflict with Russia," he says. "In fact, the U.S. deliberately avoided training capabilities that were seen as too provocative" to Russia. So the United States never trained the Georgians how to use tanks, artillery or attack helicopters—precisely because those are the skills of all-out conventional warfare. Now the United States—with or without its European allies—is being pushed to build a Georgian Army that could face the Russians, next time.

U.S. military involvement in Georgia grew step by step. In a further irony, it began with a mission designed to placate Russia. The Russians, battling to crush the revolt in Chechnya, complained that Chechen fighters were holed up in a border area of Georgia, the Pankisi Gorge. Washington believed some had ties to Al Qaeda. Georgia's forces were too weak to oust the Chechens, so in 2002 the Pentagon stepped in, training and equipping three Georgian infantry battalions. "We had to give them everything, even uniforms and boots," one veteran of that effort recalls. Still, the raw units were good enough to clear the Pankisi area, removing, or so Washington hoped, an irritant in Russian-Georgian relations.

That program ended in spring 2004. Then Georgia, keen to foster its new military ties with the United States, proposed contributing some of those troops to the Coalition in Iraq. Since July 2005 the United States has trained an additional three Georgian brigades for Baghdad and equipped them with U.S. gear: armored Humvees, devices to detect roadside IEDs, radios and other basics. By Pentagon standards, it was a bare-bones effort: a training mission of about 130 troops, at a cost since 2002 of no more than $200 million. A French diplomat in Tbilisi says the United States gave the Georgians the equivalent of about a month of French basic training—nothing near what they would need to stand up to Russia.

Georgia did make its own efforts. As its economy boomed under President Mikheil Saakashvili, its defense budget grew from $30 million in 2003 to more than $750 million last year, but without U.S. support for the creation of heavy-combat forces, it bought old but serviceable Soviet T-72 tanks from Ukraine and howitzers from the Czech Republic. Georgia ran a heavy-arms exercise two summers ago, but it was a rerun of the carefully pre-scripted Soviet-style maneuvers of a generation past. When the Russians invaded last month, the performance of Georgia's Soviet-era tank and artillery was "primitive," according to a preliminary analysis by the U.S. Army.

Now Georgians are already talking of building a newer, better, bigger military to protect themselves from Russian aggression. They say this should be a concerted Western effort, and senior U.S. military officials affirm they are prepared to discuss with Georgia how its military might be rebuilt. But in Tbilisi last week, Vice President Dick Cheney promised that "America will help Georgia to rebuild and regain its position as one of the world's fastest growing economies," while remaining carefully unspecific about military aid.

Georgia's military reconstruction raises tough questions. Technically, it would be reasonably straightforward to equip Georgia's forces in a fashion that was clearly for defensive purposes only. Hamilton has sketched how in a brief paper just published by the Center for Strategic & International Studies: "The capabilities required include secure command and control systems, an integrated air-defense … system, a robust maritime defense capability, counterartillery radar systems and a highly-lethal anti-armor capability." Weapons, in other words, to exact a toll on any tanks, warships, aircraft or artillery advancing on Georgia—but not the heavy weaponry enabling a Georgian advance on its neighbors.