Quote Originally Posted by Ratzel View Post
I can't understand why the Georgians would try to fight Russia using tanks? The Georgian Army should be a Army of 6 man cells, with the best shoulder fired weapons money can buy. I didn't hear about one Russian tank being hit by an anti-tank weapon? Why?

I assume that Georgia needs some armour protection to fight Chechen Guerrillas or other various "rebels" in their country? But so far, I can't say I'm too impressed with the Georgians.

If I was a Baltic State or Ukraine military planner, I would make note of this. It seems like these countries (and Georgia) have developed their militaries to take on NATO/American missions, while not thinking about their own territorial defense?

It seems necessary to have deployable units for peacekeeping or COIN, and then have units of small independent cells for the nation's defense against the bigger Russia. For a small country like Georgia, it shouldn't really be that expensive to equip and train some units to specialize in hit and run tactics, and supply line disruption?
I not only concur but applaud your observation. It is exactly this point I tried to present to the Royal Thai Army. A couple of points are worth expanding.

a.) Tanks are fire support. They can achieve little in themselves, but you still need some. Tanks engender human emotion in a way I can never understand and I believe their generally unchanging form nearing the limit of its usefulness. No the tank is not obsolete. It merely needs to evolve.

b.) Beware the heroic little tank hunter teams. Context is everything, and the tide can very quickly turn against them. In order to be consistently successful they need large amounts of support and preparation. Even then they may suffer considerable attrition, unless they have the ability to very rapidly disengage.