The Significance of a Small War

The Russian invasion and short conflict is a good example of wide ranging international ramifications of small wars in contemporary conflict. Although the Russians fared badly in the information war during the Chechnya conflict, did they improve over that performance during the invasion of Georgia? Some observers and analysts do not think so.

Since the Cold War period there has been a high degree of political magnification as conflicts and proxy conflicts became rapidly intertwined in Super-Power rivalry and ideological conflict. Small wars became wars by proxy as nations were prevented from engaging in overt and outright conflict.

The Soviet Union did not until very late in history need to confront the challenge and questions of developing a sophisticated counterinsurgency doctrine. Its only real serious confrontation as a counterinsurgent began in 1979 with its invasion of Afghanistan. This then began the process of changing Soviet Army doctrine away from a maneuver war on the European Central plains. In fact, the initial invasion of Afghanistan resembled the best doctrine of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968; military interventions designed to stem the tide of internal process of democracy that was slowly eroding communist regimes and moving more towards a pluralistic political model. Increasingly, Soviet strategy in Afghanistan was a strategy of economic destruction and this is clearly evident in how it executed its wars in both Chechnya and more recently in Georgia.

Reversing the “Rose Revolution” was one of the main goals of the invasion of Georgia. The Russian’s chose to avoid a strategy of overt regime change in Georgia by stopping 20 kilometers short of the capital and doing as much damage as possible to the Georgian military; Setting back any feasibility of joining NATO.

Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic had gained admission to NATO and the EU; did this put Russia increasingly on an Ideological defensive?

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