Saturday, September 6, 2014

Window on Eurasia: Ukraine Shows Russia Must Put Partisan War at Center of Its Strategy, Russian General Says


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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