Ok, keep politics out of this thread as much as possible please. If you really have to share your political views with everyone, there’s a perfectly good thread about this in the General Discussion section of the forum:
http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/showthread.php?t=83347
Anyway, here’s a thought to get things started:
Everybody seems convinced Russia was ready for this and I can kinda see where they are coming from but:
It seems to me that the kit the Russian army has at its disposal is, generally, less advanced than its Georgian counterparts (see, for e.g., the MBTs employed by the two sides). Also, the Russians can’t have been sure, going into this, that their troops would be better trained or more motivated than the Georgian troops. On top of all that, the numbers, at least initially, did not inspire confidence of a Russian victory.
So, my question is this, when the balloon went up, what made the Russians sure enough that this would be enough of a cake-walk to make it worthwhile going in without a Desert Storm style build-up?
Were they going to rely on air-power? That would be a sketchy thing to base the campaign on, especially considering the backward use of air-power applied thus far (i.e. essentially WWII style tactics, no PGMs etc.).
What do you guys think?
Sign In
August 11, 2008 at 5:34 pm