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What I mean by the Georgia model is the road to disaster followed by President Mikheil Saakashvili in the run-up to his country’s stomping by Putin in Georgia’s brief, painful war with Russia in August 2008. This is especially relevant because Saakashvili, a strategic illiterate, thought he was following the Croatian model of the 1990’s when, in fact, he did the opposite.
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From the time he became president in 2004, Saakashvili didn’t just transform his military to “NATO-ize” it, he actively courted favor with the Pentagon and the George W. Bush administration, sending troops to Iraq to help battle the rising insurgency there. The Georgian army was reduced to five brigades, nearly all light infantry, ditching practically all its armor and artillery in favor of a counterterrorism and counterinsurgency approach to warfare, which of course was what U.S. military trainers working with the Georgians encouraged.
Most consequentially, as explained in the excellent book on the 2008 war written by the late Ron Asmus, Saakashvili had a chat in 2006 with Stipe Mesiæ, Croatia’s president, who knew that his country would soon join NATO, which was the Holy Grail for Tbilisi. Helpfully, Mesiæ told his Georgian counterpart that what he needed to do was reassert control over all their territory or they would never get into NATO — which was good advice — and to do that Georgia needed its own Operation STORM … which turned out to be deadly advice.
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Wholly ignorant of military affairs, yet brimming with confidence, Saaksahvili became obsessed with the idea that Georgia could pull off its own Operation STORM and thereby humiliate Russia, achieving glory and entry to NATO. He did not dwell on the fact that Georgia’s military was totally incapable of anything like what Croatia achieved in 1995, nor that Russia is not Serbia.
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Which happened in the summer of 2008, when months of Russian provocations in South Ossetia presented an opportunity that Saakashvili stumbled blindly towards, not understanding the consequences. It only took a few days in August for Putin’s forces to lay waste to Georgia’s unready forces. The only brigade of the Georgia Army that was battle-ready was not on hand since it was — you guessed it — serving with U.S. forces in Baghdad, while the other four maneuver brigades were in various stages of disrepair. They were, in the words of an American liaison officer, “beginning to walk, but by no means were they running … If that was a U.S. brigade it would not have gone into combat.”