Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 6 – Events in
Ukraine and earlier in Georgia show that Moscow must draw more heavily on the
experience of partisan war to fulfill the tasks Moscow may set it in the future
and also in order to be better able to defend strategic infrastructure on
Russian territory, according to Anatoly Zaytsev, a Russian colonel general who
served in Abkhazia.
In an article in the influential “Voyenno-Promyshlenny
kur’yer” this week, Anatoly Zaytsev says that “the main task of the army of any
country is to prepare for the war of the future,” something he says “everyone
knows except those generals who are accustomed to fighting the last one over” (vpk-news.ru/articles/21649).
Meanwhile,
he continues, many military theorists act as if future wars can be ones without
contact, but this ignores the reality that the goal of war “is always occupation
with annexation following or the forcing of an opponent to peace on conditions
favorable to the victor.” Technology, however much many believe, doesn’t change
that.
His
own experience in Georgia in August 2008 proved that, the Russian general says.
Good planning and careful execution limited losses but “no one would call” that
conflict one “without contact.” Military
planners should never forget that because if they do, their militaries and
peoples will pay for their mistake.
According
to Zaytsev, “an analysis of local and regional armed conflicts of the last
decade, including the battles in the south-east of Ukraine provide a basis for
predicting certain characteristics of future wars of low and mid-intensity”
both with regard to offensive and defensive operations.
Any
offensive operation requires a period of preparation, but new technologies make
this far more difficult than in the past. NATO, for example, had real time information
from its spy satellites about the formation and dislocation of Russian military
units on the border with Ukraine.
That technology,
Zaytsev continues, also limited the utility of masking operations because those
simply called attention to what Moscow was planning. Thus such efforts “can
turn out to be not only useless but even harmful since they will help the enemy
guess one’s intensions in a timely fashion.”
The Russian
operation in Crimea represented an exception to this because “the deception
measures were unexpected for the opponent, original in their intention and simplicity
of execution and with regard to how long they had to be engaged in,” something
that helped to “disinform” Russia’s opponent.
Russian forces
maintained radio silence, they used as much as possible the Sevastopol base and
the Black Sea Fleet for the dislocation of forces, and they gained advantage by
the speed with which they carried out the operation, including the early use of
“well-armed ‘polite people’ without identification badges.”
But what
happened in Crimea, the general says, is best understood not as a typical
military advance but as “a typical special operation in a certain sense
resembling textbook peacekeeping ones.” It is nonetheless a useful object for
study because of its rapid blocking of possible resistance points and its use
of partisan-style conflict.
Indeed, Zaytsev
says, the use of partisan approaches is becoming “one of the main components of
offensive operations in future wars of low and medium intensity.”
Partisan war, as
the Soviet Union learned during World War II, is different than ordinary
conflict. It “practically eliminates the distinction between the actions of
diversionary groups, the regular army and partisan units,” and as events in
Ukraine show, it can be extraordinarily effective against opponents who rely
only on regular units.
“Despite the
fact that the forces of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics are conducting
primarily defensive battles, they are broadly applying diversionary and partisan
tactics for attacks,” relying on their high level of maneuverability as
compared to Kyiv’s forces which are heavier and slower.
What Donetsk and
Luhansk are doing, Zaytsev says, is something that NATO countries and “above
all the US” have long advocated. Indeed, he continues, his forces seized
information from Georgian units in 2008 showing that this is exactly what Western
advisors had been suggesting to Tbilisi.
In wars now and
in the future, he argues, Russia’s opponents will use diversionary and partisan
methods as “an important if not the most important” means of achieving its
goals. To blunt that, the Russian general continues, Moscow must develop a
similar doctrine and a similar capability.
Zaytsev
concludes his article by pointing to another implication of his argument.
Russia needs to come up with a plan to defend strategic objects located where a
partisan war is going on over a relatively large area. To date, Moscow has
focused on protecting individual objects, but the task of protecting a large
number in such an area is different. He says it must be addressed.
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