This last weekend, Georgia and Russia went to war over a piece of land called South Ossetia. If you're just becoming aware of this situation now, the BBC has an excellent
Q&A article on this war. I'm not going to go in-depth by regurgitating the news, but I'm going to make some observations.
First, I'd like to note how poor the American media coverage over this event has been. For in-depth coverage, I've been relying on the
BBC and the
Times Online. These news outlets gave some really good analysis and information about the conflict, and background in it.
The other point I wanted to note was how seemingly useless the United Nations is in these kinds of circumstances. The Europeans and Americans wanted to use the UN to protest Russia's disproportionate use of force against Georgia; however, that never came to being because Russia is a permanent member of the UN, and is able to veto any statements. So, there's a bit of a conflict of interest there, and the UN can hardly be treated as a neutral broker in this case.
Another sad note is how impotent Europe and America seems in this whole situation. Their ally, Georgia, needed help, and all the Americans could do was give their soldiers a ride back home from Iraq. (Georgia had 2,000 soldiers fighting in Iraq, and they needed to withdraw them to help fight the Russians). It was said that Europe couldn't do much against Russia either, since Russia supplies 20% of Europe's oil and gas. It's situations like these where I think energy independence really makes sense, because it allows you to not be bullied around by the bad guy.
In terms of the actual fighting, it's interesting how warfare has evolved. There were reports that the Russians were attacking Georgia's websites; this is known as cyberwarfre. Wired is running an article entitled, "
Estonia, Google Help 'Cyberlocked' Georgia.
Civil.ge, the Georgian news site, is "under permanent [cyber] attack." So they've switched their operations to one of Google's Blogspot domains, to keep the information flowing about what's going on in their country.
The attacks against Civil.ge are part of a larger set of online assaults, originating in Russia, against Georgian websites.
"In a sense," notes Jim Stogdill, "they must be saying 'we can't keep our sites up, but we don't think [Russian hackers] can take down Blogspot, given Google's much better infrastructure and ability to defend it.'"
It's quite interesting that they decided to move key sites onto the Google network. If there's anyone in the world that could survive a cyberwar, it'd probably be Google. What would be even more interesting is if Russia decided to attack Google, and Google retaliated. I'm thinking Google could probably send Russia's internet back to the digital stone age. Anyway, I think in any modern conflict now, going after information infrastructure is just as important as taking on military targets. I've seen reports of Russia attacking Georgian cellphone towers, radars, and phone exchanges.
One lingering question I have is, after this conflict, is Georgia more or less likely to be given the chance to join NATO. Georgia is obviously fairly screwed if they're not friends with a superpower, as Russia could easily crush them. However, would NATO let Georgia in, given that it could increase the chances of war between NATO and Russia, since an attack on a NATO country considered is an attack on all NATO countries. I know the Americans have been pushing to let Georgia into the alliance, but Germany and France has been opposing it. It's also interesting that other ex-Soviet Republics like Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, etc. have come out in support of Georgia, because they probably are all being bullied by Russia as well, and they can relate.
The last thing I wanted to point out is how short-sighted some military planners have been. There's a saying that, in peace, you need to prepare for the next war. The general thinking right now in the military is that future conflicts will be like Iraq war, where you're fighting an asymmetrical threat. ie, you're going to be fighting irregular forces which aren't your conventional armies with armor units, and an airforce. Therefore, militaries have been transforming their forces to be more agile, and lighter to counter this threat. However, these agile lighter forces are extremely inappropriate against an enemy like Russia, who still has a traditional military.
An example of a military moving towards a more agile and light military force is Canada. A couple of years ago,
we decided to get rid of our Leopard tanks in favour of Strykers. Leopards were heavily armoured battle tanks, while Strykers are lightly armoured vehicles.
in 1998, Department of National Defence researchers examined how an eight-wheeled vehicle equipped with a 105-millimetre gun would perform during wartime. During a simulated battle, units equipped with such an armoured combat vehicle, or ACV, suffered up to three times the casualties of those outfitted with U.S.-made M1A2 tanks.
"Being aware of the ACV's limitations and deliberately purchasing it as an alternative to the MBT (main battle tank) in warfighting would be morally and ethically wrong and courts defeat," the research team warned.
"What is illustrated is that the firepower and protection limitation of the ACV resulted in much heavier Canadian losses," they added.
The study recommended against replacing the tank with such a lighter vehicle.
Translation, these lightly armoured vehicles get absolutely slaughtered when fighting a main battle tank.
Anyway, perhaps it's time to rethink how future wars will be fought. We shouldn't neglect the threat that traditional militaries still pose. We still have plenty of commies to fight!
