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POLITICS
GEORGIA TODAY
JANUARY 21 - 27, 2022
Resistance as a National Defense Strategy
A Ukrainian territorial defense battalion, made up of civilian volunteers, trains at a base outside the city of Dnipro in 2015. Source: Nolan Peterson/Coffee or Die Magazine
BY MICHAEL GODWIN
A
s national defense strategies typically go, the unquestioned norm is a standing armed forces organization. This vast force is usually backed with various reserve and national guard or militia units behind it as a type of force multiplier for worst-case scenarios. Depending on the law and constitution of the country in question, the police can also be called into service in certain circumstances. The common citizenry are rarely if ever expected to bear the burden of armed conflict, but rather are protected at every opportunity. However, with some states being placed under threat from other far larger powers, many commanders have begun to look beyond the pale of conventional warfare. Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Estonia have all begun turning to the potential of resistance-based
warfare rather than outright battlefield victory as a means to maintain their sovereignty. Resistance takes many forms in the sphere of military strategy, particularly dependent on the observer's background and training. Historically, the more famous examples hail from the Second World War and such elements as the French Resistance, the Forest Brothers of the Baltic States, and the various “Partizan” groups that fought across Eastern Europe and Russia. In more recent conflicts, these include a wide range of units from the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s to the Ukrainian civilian and foreign volunteer irregular units struggling against the Russian invasion of 2014. What virtually all of these units throughout the 20th and 21st centuries share in common is several key attributes that have come to define a resistance unit in strategic terms. They are composed of local and native peoples that conduct active and passive, violent and nonviolent, military, political, social, and economic warfare against an occupying
aggressor. In terms of Georgia, this will be the next Russian invasion and occupation force. While the necessity of a standing regular army will never go away, the need for an irregular force of civilian volunteers is a newer necessity. This requirement is one that Ukraine found to be vital to its own national defense throughout the Russian invasion. This ad hoc “national guard” force was even evaluated by some analysts and experts to be the saving grace for the nation when Russian regulars entered the battlefield in the summer of 2014. For Georgia, the same type of force will have to be called upon. While the composition and organization of this force has already been covered in recent articles (see Citizen-Soldiers: Should Georgia Revive the Home Guard Model?), it is their formalization and implementation in a practical exercise and interoperability with NATO counterparts prior to, during, and after an invasion that need focus. Not unlike their regular army counterparts, resistance forces will require sig-
nificant operational literacy with NATO forces, particularly their Special Operations Forces (SOF) components. These components are tasked with the training, advising, assistance, and enabler missions that amplify the effectiveness of resistance units. Having these relationships between resistance leadership and SOF teams is essential to cultivating a healthy opposition to a Russian occupation. As the saying goes, an ounce of (pre-planned training) prevention is worth a pound of (diplomatic and military) cure. Ukraine, despite already being locked in a luke-warm conflict with Russia, is already implementing this strategy within its citizenry. A cursory search on sites such as YouTube will reveal numerous video reports of local defense and resistance units, termed Territorial Defense Forces, These men and women hail from all walks of life and have agreed to be a part of the underground movement to resist and combat what they see as the coming Russian occupation. With instructors from NATO as well as their own combat veteran volunteers from the Donbass front, their education goes beyond standard military training. As they are not expected to carry out offensive military operations, their courses focus on improvised forms of defense, asymmetrical warfare, and guerilla tactics. The primary objective is simple, but drawn out over the long term, as the
defenders are quite literally fighting in their home field. Each Territorial Defense volunteer aims to make the political and military positions of the enemy so untenable, so undesirable, and so utterly miserable, that they are forced to withdraw. As one might say, a thousand small cuts brings down even the mightiest of beasts. Involving allied SOF units in the resistance preparation movement is an essential ingredient not only in the command and control capability of the resistance units, but also in the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance for other NATO elements. This relationship was visible between the NATO SOF units and the Northern Alliance at the very early stages of the Afghanistan operation. Through this close cooperation, they had access to local ISR assets that would otherwise be outside the reach of conventional units. Unfortunately, this level of cohesion is difficult to attain outside of a national emergency. It’s unrealistic to have NATO SOF units working with civilian militias during times of relative peace. However, maintaining warm diplomatic relationships can go a long way. Types of asymmetric operations like these aforementioned examples should be firmly integrated into the national defense grand strategy. Georgia, like other smaller nations, is in a position that requires this approach to national security; resistance and underground opposition as a form of long term preservation of sovereignty.
A US Army Special Forces weapons sergeant observes a Niger Army soldier during marksmanship training as part of Exercise Flintlock 2017 in Diffa, Niger, February 28, 2017. Photo by US Army/SFC Christopher Klutts/AFRICOM
Between a Territorial and Liberal Empire ANALYSIS BY EMIL AVDALIANI
T
he multipolar world, the pivot to China, the freeing of Russia from a Eurocentric foreign policy, the building of a liberal empire – these are the major foreign policy developments that have characterized Russia’s foreign policy for more than a decade. But contrary to the views of many observers, these grand geopolitical scenarios did not originate in the 2010s. Rather, each of these geopolitical notions was in preparation even well before the 2000s, the product of the collapse of the Soviet order and the ensuing chaos, the rise of China, and an inherent resentment, one that has always existed within the Russian political classes,– toward the Western world order. Let’s start with multipolarism, which is often cited by the Russian political elite as a solution to the problems where the US has enjoyed primacy over the oceans and the periphery of the Eurasian landmass since the end of the Cold War. The Russian world of the 1990s was shaken to its foundations and submerged in turmoil. Borders diminished, and so did Moscow’s geopolitical influence across Eurasia. NATO/the EU and the US began expanding their military, economic, and technological power across Eastern Europe, gradually moving into Ukraine and the South Caucasus. In many ways, Russia’s first foreign policy initiatives of a multipolar world,
an order in which several powers act simultaneously as global decision makers, evolved as a natural reaction to the challenges Russia faced at the time. Instrumental to the development of the multipolar world concept was a man often disregarded in geopolitical books on modern Russia: Evgeny Primakov, Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs under Boris Yeltsin. Primakov’s reaction to Russia’s inability to hold off the West’s power was to look for powers to balance the West. Thus was born the phrase “strategic triangle”, which consisted of Russia, China, and India. There was no formal agreement coordinating the triangle’s respective strategic views on Eurasia or anything else, but its creation was nevertheless an indicator of a coalescence around different, mostly angry, views about the West-led world order. It was only a matter of time (perhaps even decades) until Moscow pressed to further deepen cooperation with the Asian states to challenge the US. This is the background to Moscow’s response to tensions with the West. Partly out of necessity and partly out of inevitability, Moscow once again looked east. Putin’s pivot to China is essentially an intensification of what was in place in the 1990s. The pivot to Asia is inextricably woven into another myth of recent Russian diplomacy: Moscow’s attempts to shake off its Eurocentric approach to foreign affairs. Though this too has been attributed to Putin, it has been evolving since at least the 1990s, when signs of resentment toward successful and wealthy
Flags of the Eurasian Economic Union. Image Source: vestnikkavkaza.net
westerners were visible among the increasingly disillusioned Russian political class. In fact, one can see Russian attempts to “de-Europeanize” their foreign policy even further back than that. The Soviets, with all their ideological approaches to the world, tried to do it, and the Romanovs too, particularly after the Crimean War of 1853-1856, but the latter did not have enough resources and strong Asian countries with which to partner. Moscow’s present “de-Europeanization” of foreign policy should thus be seen as a recurrence of a grand historical cycle of Russian thought. All these foreign policy moves, old or (as some think) new, are contingent upon
the way Russia wants to position itself in Eurasia. A clear decision on the creation of a territorial empire has not been taken, but it is evident that the Russian political elite has not abandoned the idea of empire either. There was a growing push in Russian foreign policy from the late 2000s through the early 2010s to try to build an economic empire that preferably would not involve the military takeover of territory. While the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) took place in 2015, the idea behind the project can be traced back to the 1990s, when the Russian political elites, angry at their poor position vis-à-vis westerners, and fearing the loss of neighboring states to
NATO/the EU, discussed ways to reassemble the lost empire. Building a liberal (i.e., non-military) order in the former Soviet space, but one that is nevertheless strongly attached to the Russian heartland, could only happen through economic means: buying up railways, pipelines, gas, water, and electricity distribution systems in Ukraine, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia, and becoming a primary investor in and trade partner of those states. In a way, the EEU project is a product of those discussions, a seemingly golden mean between a military solution and the complete abandonment of the idea of empire. Moscow’s envisioned liberal empire would be much looser than the Soviet Union was, but would nevertheless be tightly controlled insofar as Moscow would not allow neighboring states to decide on their own which military or economic bloc to choose. In other words, Russia pursues a concept of “limited sovereignty” for its neighborhood. While many still think that under the present Russian leadership, fundamentally new developments have taken shape in Russia’s foreign policy, there are strong indications that “multipolarism”, the pivot to Asia, the building of a liberal empire, and the end of Russia’s Eurocentric foreign policy, can be traced back at least as far as the 1990s. Putin was the facilitator of geopolitical developments that were developing over decades. Emil Avdaliani is a professor at European University and the Director of Middle East Studies at Georgian think-tank, Geocase.
