on planning

Sigh:

Just hours after the Georgians began their offensive, an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 Russian troops were on the main highway leading into Georgia. By 1:00 pm on August 8, there were reports of roads filled with hundreds of tanks, APCs, and cannon and rocket artillery, moving through the Roki Tunnel.

Given those numbers, that starts to look a lot like a motorized rifle division, moving from a standing start (maybe) in their laagers on the Russian side of the border. You don't "uncoil" a heavy division from it's assembly areas on a whim. There's a plan.

Have we really got so used to just blundering about that the existence of a plan – in this case the organisation of a response if attacked, the institutional capability to bring it about and the intelligence assets to get the timing right – in itself qualifies the Russians as aggressors?

Comments

[Tom]

It occured to me not long after the kick off that the question was not *whether* Putin had arranged matters that the Russians just happened to end up with large amounts of men and material inside Georgia, but *how*. The man is the nearest thing to Bismarck we've seen in a century*, and being able to plan comes with that territory (as well as being a cold, calculating bastard with an instinctive understanding of the power of espionage and propaganda).

In other words, he's what the neocons would like to be, if they weren't secretly ashamed of their weakness and incompetence. Putin doesn't bother writing columns for think tanks, if he wants you to be scared of him, he parks tanks on your lawn and tells you he's the only guy who can control those bloodthirsty mercenaries that are suddenly roaming around the place.

* Note the recent building of a railway into Abkhazia. Pure Bismarck stuff.

[ajay]

Actually, I think it's more the "sending their troops across an internationally recognised border into another country" that qualifies them as aggressors...

[Cian OConnor]

Well not really. Shevy had been telegraphing for a long time that he was going to do something, and given he had been building up his army and making various bellicose noises it doesn't so much demonstrate genius that Putin had his forces on the border, as basic competence.

I suppose when your opponent is the stupidest man alive this can look like genius, but it wasn't really.

[alle]

I don't think Georgian bellicosity was necessary to alert Putin to the fact that the Georgian border & breakaways was one of the hotspots where a standby force could come in handy. In fact, if I were Putin, most of my spare offensive units would be somewhere down in the Caucasus, what with Georgia, oil, pipelines, Chechnya, Dagestan, US bases and all of that.

[splinteredsunrise]

I thought contingency planning was what the military was supposed to do? I mean, the US military has contingency plans drawn up for invading Canada, but that doesn't mean they're going to do it any time soon. You might have thought that, for the Russian army, trouble in the Caucasus might have been a slightly less remote scenario.

[Chris Williams]

This one has got me thinking.

What do you pay yr motorised infantry division to do except for sitting around ready to move out? OK, there'll be exercises and re-equipping 'n stuff, but that's why it's good to have more than one of them. Can anyone provide any data points about how ready (say) BAOR's troops were to leave the barracks and take up their positions for Der Tag, back in the day?

Being _unusually_ ready to move out probably implies that you've had a couple of dress rehearsals in the recent past, to iron out the problems. Conversely (and annoyingly for us smoking-gun spotters) maintaining constant readiness to move out would imply a steady trickle of practice runs every so often.

Any superpower with a reasonably decent set of orbiting surveillance assets, and/or air assets the other side of nearby border, ought to be able to notice either of these (too big to hide), and would tell the relevant client-state, if it felt like it.

Perhaps both British and US commentators have got so attuned to the fact that militaries are for deploying in imperial shooting wars, that they've forgotten that up until recently, they were far more likely to be hanging out waiting for the other lot to try something.

[jamie]

The Russians were on exercise a couple of weeks before, but that's not evdience of intention. I mean, this wasn't maouvering around the German landmass to meet an attacking force coming from a number of points. There was one destination, a limited number of means to get to it, and close distances. Once the drill's established, it's basically a matter of parking the vehicles in echelon order by the camp gates, making sure the fuel and ammo's in stock, etc.

[Alex]

Can anyone provide any data points about how ready (say) BAOR's troops were to leave the barracks and take up their positions for Der Tag, back in the day?

Very much so. They regularly did surprise exercises (called Active Edge) which (I suppose) were notified to the USSR through usual channels.

[Chris Williams]

I little more post-holiday googling has exposed me to Paul Rogers' column in Open Democracy. The Peace Nerd's (and I mean that as a complement) main point is that the Russian military response was a bit ropey, relying as it did on elite units and instructors, and asserts that there's far less (if any) strength in depth than during the late unpleasantness.

Aviation Leak is carrying a report about heads rolling in the ru airforce, on the grounds that they neglected to suppress the Georgian air defence, with predictably attritional results. All this is pointing to cock-up rather than conspiracy.

[Chris Williams]

For 'I' above, read 'A'. I've sakced my proof-reader.