Posted on 08/16/2008 10:31:53 AM PDT by 82ndABNOfficer
IGOETI, Georgia -- Russia and its allied forces today destroyed a key railway bridge linking war-weary Georgia's capital to the Black Sea coast, effectively severing all east-west transportation routes within the small country, the Georgian Foreign Ministry announced.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
ping.
Bastards are destroying the country.
Not sure why we can’t just send in some of our special forces.....
ping.
How often have they broken their umpteenth “ceasefire” already? The Russians are already lying when they lower their jaw one inch.
Russians Still Control Georgia: This Convoy is On Way to Tbilisi
Defiant Russia Advances Deeper Into George After Ceasefire
Russia: 'Forget' Georgian Territorial Integrity
The Pipeline War: Russian Bear Goes for West's Jugular
Click the photo and view more reports. Hundreds of news reports are linked . . .
FNC Steve Harrigan reporting Russian forces within 14 miles of capitol this afternoon and not moving.
Russian soldiers interviewed along the road between Russian-controlled Gori and Igoeti said their mission was to protect the road. They could be seen hiking up toward hilltop positions and setting up checkpoints and tank positions and conducting what appeared to be foot patrols.
Nearby villagers were in a panic.”
Well, so much for diplomacy. The only type of diplomacy these guys understand begins with the muzzle of a gun barrel. This is even more brazen than what I expected, I assumed they would at least claim that certain elements of the peace plan had been violated.
I also expect the people of those two provinces will hold referendums and demand independence. Sadly, because of Clinton's sick precedent in Kosovo, and then Bush foolishly (IMHO) recognizing Kosovo, there will be little we can do to keep that from happening.
At least Bush, here late in the game, has seen how Putin has used him and abused his trust, and he (Bush) is now responding appropriately.
What we can do, is arm the Georgians with much more modern weaponry, train them, accept them into NATO, and then establish a couple of bases for either NATO, the US, or one of each, on each side of the country to act as a deterrent to more Russian agression.
I hope we will. The Georgians deserve it.
Don’t worry. I’ve been on Code Pink’s web site and A.N.S.W.E.R.’s site and they are all over this...........................
Well, don’t worry, both the EU and NATO will step in and face them down......................................
Oh, that’s right. The Georgians are screwed unless WE have the stones to help them.
I am starting to think that its time to hand Iraq the keys
and for us to refocus on this next rogue state.
This cannot be allowed to continue and Russia must be made
to pay. Somehow this needs to happen without touching
off WWIII.
Too bad that GWB let himself be played by that monster.
I hope he gave Putin an earful at the Olympics
Will my good wife fetch me my boots and powder whilst I sharpen my bayonet, WAR is in the offing.
It doesn’t look like they plan on leaving, but will probably continue to sign ceasefires and agreements saying they will...liars, thugs & thieves.
Having pulled back from Ossetia and Abkhazia, the Georgians can now regroup and re-equip. They are in desperate need of two things: weapons to kill tanks, and weapons to kill or deter aircraft and helicopters. We can supply both. The Stinger missile, the bane of Russian Frontal Aviation in Afghanistan, is still the most potent shoulder-fired weapon around. It will cause Russian close support aircraft to keep their distance, or to attack from higher altitude. Providing Georgia with medium-range surface-to-air missiles which can be deployed from Georgian territory proper will further push back their high-altitude aircraft (e.g., Tu-22M Backfires). Freed from aerial observation and the threat of air attack, Georgian forces could move dismounted over the mountains more readily than Russian mechanized forces can move along the roads. Which means that the Georgians would be free to set up ambushes to block further Russian advances and to interdict their lines of communication. We can provide the wherewithal for them to do this. First, we need to give the Georgians anti-tank mines, and not just any kind, but our latest "smart" off-route mines like the XM93 Wide Area Mine (WAM). These don't have to be placed directly on the roads, but can be put off to the side, where built-in sensors can detect armored vehicles and launch explosive formed penetrator (RFP) warheads at them. Second, we need to give them our best anti-tank guided missile, the FGM-148 Javelin. This is a "fire and forget" weapon: once the operator lines up the target in his sights and locks on, he can fire the missile and get away, while the missile will fly autonomously to the target. With a range of about two kilometers, the Javelin also uses a "top attack" profile, diving down onto the roof of the tank where the armor is thinnest. In action in Operation Iraqi Freedom, javelins were devastating against Russian-designed tanks. Knocking out a few tanks or other armored vehicles on a narrow mountain road creates a barrier to movement behind which all traffic piles up, immobile and vulnerable to attack.Most of that traffic will consist of trucks and other "soft" vehicles. It's a waste to go after them with expensive missiles, but cheap mortars work pretty well. Even better would be long-range, highly accurate heavy sniper rifles, such as the 12.7mm (.50-caliber) Barrett, much favored by U.S. special forces. Georgian special forces are reputed to be well trained and highly motivated. They would probably be even more motivated fighting Russians on their own soil than they were fighting al Qaeda back in Iraq.
Pretty soon, Russian forces will be taking serious casualties. They will have to inject more troops to protect their lines of communication. They will have to get out of their troop carriers and climb up into the mountains, where they will take more casualties from an agile and elusive enemy. They can't even resort to the time honored tactic of butchering the local population of Ossetia and Abkhazia, since these are now "Russian citizens," having been granted passports by the Russian government (thereby doing Hitler one better: there actually were Germans in the Sudetenland, but Putin had to invent his downtrodden "Russian" minority in Georgia).
As Russian forces start to bleed, it will be impossible, even in the controlled media of Putin's Russia, to hide the casualties from the Russian people. They will probably respond to this as they did to the bloodletting in both Afghanistan and Chechnya. Worse, for the Russian government, a prolonged and bloody war will require a massive increase in the Russian military budget, which has been run on a shoestring for most of the Putin era. That would mean making painful choices between the military and other priorities, precisely at the same time that oil prices have begun to come down, cutting into Russian revenues. In addition, the Russian military will begin to worry about the derailing of its abortive transformation plan: as the U.S. military recently discovered, you can fight a war, or you can transform yourself, but it's almost impossible to do both at once. Warfighting will eat into the already thin training, procurement, and research & development budgets, and soon the Russian staff will be howling, too.
So what will Russia do, in such a circumstance? They could escalate, but they might find more palatable a face-saving withdrawal, turning over Ossetia and Abkhazia to an international peacekeeping force, and leaving Georgian territory free of Russian troops. Georgia would then have to make its own peace with the separatists, but with a buffer between itself and the Russian army, the Georgians may have more leverage over its intransigent minorities.
Two things are needed to make this happen: political will on the part of the U.S. to provide the Georgian army with the necessary equipment and training (our Special Forces already have a close relationship with the Georgian army), and more important, political will on the part of the Georgian government to continue fighting until the Russians are off their soil. Whether the Georgians would want to fight what would certainly prove a long and difficult war is hard to say; it would surely depend in large measure on whether they believe we would stand with them to the end. Guerrilla wars are always messy, and without a sponsor, the guerrillas usually lose. But it is premature and more than a little defeatist to write off the Georgians' chances of bloodying the nose of the resurgent Russian bear.
The question our president must consider is whether saving Georgia is worth war with Russia, possibly nuclear. Thank goodness we have a president who understands these things. The Russian imperative in keeping a military threat from its back door is the same as ours was in October, 1962. We were willing to risk nuclear destruction to protect that imperative, as the Russians are now. We Americans are too often guilty of thinking of wars as events that we participate in in foreign countries, but we have to consider the reality of fighting the next one in our own front yard.
Send some humanitarian aid in the form of night vision equipment, anti-tank weapons and MANPAD anti-aircraft missiles to the Georgians, then watch the Bear try to get his clumsy paw out of the bear trap.
Hehe. I like the analogy.
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