"Some of the soldiers seemed really grateful for the things we taught them," said Barta, a 31-year-old from Columbus, Ohio, but he acknowledged it was not nearly enough.
Trainers start with the basics of infantry warfare — shooting, taking cover, advancing — then on to squad and platoon maneuvers, Barta said.
The Georgians do not lack "warrior spirit," he said, but added that they weren't ready for combat.
They inherited bad habits from the Red Army, whose soldiers wouldn't move without a direct order from a superior, and need to be taught to think on their own, Barta said. To make things more difficult, many soldiers "come from the hills of Georgia, and some of them sign for their paycheck with an X," he said.
The Georgian army has five regular infantry brigades, each with some 2,000 troops. Only one of them — the 1st, which was rushed home from Iraq by U.S. planes after fighting broke out — has been trained to a NATO level.
There are also units of poorly trained reservists, Georgian men who do 18 days of one-time military training and then eight days a year into their 40s. Officially, the government says it has 37,000 regular soldiers and 100,000 reservists.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, some of the American trainers spoke bluntly about problems with the Georgian troops, who one veteran sergeant said "got torn up real bad."
The Americans were training them to use the U.S. military's M-4 rifles, he said. But when fighting broke out, the Georgians went back to the Soviet AK-47, the only weapon they trusted. They appeared incapable of firing single shots, instead letting off bursts of automatic fire, which is wildly inaccurate and wastes ammunition, he said.
Another problem was communications: As soon as combat began, the army's communications network largely collapsed, he said, so troops conducted operations using regular cell phones. That left their communications easily accessible to Russian intelligence.
"Were they ready to go? The answer is no," the sergeant said."
As an aside, my very expensive Military Balance credits Georgia with two motor rifle regiments and a reserve motor rifle regiment. But now the Georgians have five active brigades (regiment-sized units)?
Yet one expert said that the Georgian army never really had the chance to go toe-to-toe with the Russians. The Georgian government halted fighting after the first units in battle were savaged by Russian air power:
One Georgian officer who returned from the front said the army succumbed not to one-on-one combat but to overwhelming Russian air power. The officer, who appeared shaken by what he saw, showed photographs of Georgian military jeeps destroyed from the air, the bodies of their occupants lying bloated on the road.
He would not give his name because he was not authorized to speak to journalists.
Barta, the Army captain, said of the company he was training: "I know specifically that Bravo Company, I'm sure, and I hope from what I did for them, that they're better off than they would have been if this happened four weeks ago."
An independent Georgian military expert, Koba Liklikadze, said the U.S. training was not a deciding factor, attributing the army's loss to bad decisions by the government. Georgia declared a cease-fire too soon, he said, which demoralized the troops before most of them had a chance to fight.
The Georgian deputy defense minister believes the trained Georgians did better than the ones who did not get Western training. I should hope so. I imagine the Georgians will want the training resumed soon.
And casualties for the Georgians range from 180 military and civilian dead the government admits, up to 440 dead and missing troops, which is what Liklikadze estimates. The latter would be six times the Russian losses, apparently.
The Georgian army may not have performed too badly despite training deficiencies if the losses really were inflicted by Russian air power without giving the Georgians a chance to defend against ground attacks. This fits the reports of fighting that seemed to focus on where the Russians were driving to unopposed.
So get back to training. But train them to fight Russian armor and not insurgents in Iraq. And for goodness sake, sell them portable anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons.
