Georgia Bulldogs, Not Paper Tigers

Given the fog of war, the American press is doing a fairly decent job sorting out the nonsense and reporting the action in Georgia. The only problem they face is the constantly conflicting reports that make it difficult to truly evaluate what is legitimate. This is not easily done, the expected loser here is Georgia, so reporters are hanging out with the expected winner Russia. Both states are controlling information and are consistently reporting both accurate and inaccurate information. This is a real challenge for US media, indeed we read foreign language press and often the reporting is much worse.

For good mostly English blog sources of unfolding events, we recommend a few blogs that are doing some translation for English speakers.

The Vineyard of the Saker
Russia Blog < -- Russian slant, but good for perspective Armenia and the South Caucasus

We will keep looking for other blogs that do translation, but tonight we thought we would update some of our observations.

The internet is still on in Georgia. Russian cyber attacks have been disruptive, but have not been able to keep Georgia from leveraging the internet as an intelligence tool. Russia appears to have targeted the .ge domain for specific government websites, and are pounding the Georgian military networks, but other websites in Georgia in org, net, and other domains are still up, sporadically. This tends to imply Russia is using a targeted attack on government but is not targeting the country as a whole. We note Russia has not been able to eliminate bandwidth, but are jamming a lot of satellite, again sporadicly. Some news sites are still up, but we note mirror updating for other sites is sporadic at best.

We note in particular Russia has a serious intelligence problem with its Black Sea Naval base in the Ukraine. Whoever these guys in the Ukraine are they might as well set up a web cam, because there are some Ukrainian sources giving updates almost every 2-3 hours on activities there. I don't know much about this naval base, but apparently one can look down into the naval base and watch the activity? Is that right?

For the most part, the Ukrainians have strong feelings both ways on this. A lot of pro-Russia, a lot of anti-Russia. In general when talking about Georgia we haven't observed much passion, the passion is for or against Russia.

The map to the right is a tactical that popped up mid day EST on Saturday. Expect it to already be outdated, but good for an early point in time reference.

It would appear the rumor Georgia is a paper tiger would be inaccurate, these guys are more like the Georgia bulldogs. As of the last few hours of this posting, there is quite a bit of action being reported around Tskhinvali, but conventional Russian military forces have apparently not entered the city. Snipers rule the streets, and vehicles on both sides take a pounding when visible. Russia does not appear to have sufficient infantry yet.

Both Interfax and independent sources have noted NATO style vehicles heading north. The Interfax report ran at 14:19 GMT. Anyone have any guesses?

Based on the piecemeal reporting we are finding, it appears the tactic sounds a bit like the way Bing West described the Marine assault on Fallujah. Essentially Russia is working to surround the city with armor and mechanized forces and intends to bring up the infantry (might be the paratroopers that were flown in) to enter the city to support the mechanized units already there. The 58th Army has been blooded, by some reports badly, it appears Georgia is having some success with a combination of irregular and conventional military forces. Both Georgia and Russia have used artillery on Tskhinvali and have blasted the city to hell. The civilian death toll there may be much higher than reported. Multiple sources confirm both sides are using heavy artillery on the city.

Over The Loons Nest also pulled the map below from Warfare.ru and gave some commentary.

According to this website there's a troop level of 185'000 Air Force troops and 322'000 Ground troops, plus some more logistics and other the Black Sea fleet in the North Caucasus Military District. Most divisions have taken part in the Chechen wars.

It is hard to tell how old this map is, but Google Earth does confirm troops in most of these locations as of the last satellite updates. For those who want to match with Google Earth and verify, turn the map of Georgia in Google Earth so that the Caspian Sea is straight up and down on the right side. It will like up and you can find most of the unit locations.

Finally we note that on late Saturday night there were still news reports that the Georgian air force is still flying sorties. We find that incredible! Georgia has a tiny air force, apparently Russia was not aware of all the locations where Georgia was launching its planes, and is reacting on day 3 to watching SU-25s bleed their ground forces.

Update: More on the cyber attacks here and here. We are treating this as confirmation and sourcing for the attacks for our data posted above.