Will The U.S. Rebuild Georgia's Army?

Helping Hand: Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili (center right) with Vice President Dick Cheney

Russia’s Nervous Neighbors -- Newsweek

Since Russia's rout of the Georgian armed forces in August, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has suggested that Washington secretly provoked the conflict. But the Americans wanted no such thing, according to Lt. Col. Robert Hamilton, who ran the U.S. military training program in Georgia until six weeks ago. (He's now on a year's fellowship at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.) "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. That's one reason Georgia's troops crumpled so fast—precisely because their training didn't cover conventional-warfare topics like tanks, artillery and helicopters.

America's military involvement in Georgia began with a mission that was supposed to reduce Moscow's jitters. The Russians were complaining that Chechen rebels with suspected ties to Al Qaeda were holed up in Georgia's Pankesi Gorge. In 2002 the Pentagon stepped in, training and equipping Georgia's ragtag Army to clear out the unwelcome guests. After that mission ended in 2004, Georgia joined the Coalition in Iraq, and the training's focus shifted to counterinsurgency and peacekeeping duties.

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My Comment: Georgia will be rearmed .... but slowly. It's membership into NATO will not proceed for now, Nato's European partners are risk averse .... and Georgia is too much of a risk for them now.