Quote Originally Posted by Rank amateur View Post
Not to contradict a rising star such as yourself, but my take is that when there are only a handful of roads, you know the lines long before the war starts and you can also place EFPs long before the war starts. Maybe it wouldn't have worked in S. Ossetia, but the Russians didn't stop there.

Relevant, because there are only a handful of roads through the mountains between Iraq and Iran. Also, I believe Hezbollah was able to take out some tanks with EFPS/deep buried IEDS placed before the war started/ (From memory; I could be wrong.)
The bottlenecks were all north of T town. South of T town were almost Ukraine-like lowlands agricultural areas.
Seriosu mountaineering could have been avoided by helicopter insertion from the rear slope.

The firing position choice for ATGM teams would have been delicate, though.
Forward slope would have been suicidal.
The ridges were apparently mostly without concealment, probably too easily dominated by helicopters. And rear slope is not for Javelin employment, at best for waiting.

I believe it comes down to quite the same success factors as in comparably slow lowlands warfare;
- keep enemy air power away and
- keep enemy artillery suppressed or at least seriously hindered by counterfire.
Some LRRPs could have guaranteed effective artillery fire without much high-tech for the Georgians, but I guess that's just like a raid on the tunnel something that the Georgians simply forgot to do.