In August 2008, the Russian military fought Georgian troops in a brief five-day war. Russia defeated the Georgian forces, but the war revealed profound deficiencies in the Russian armed forces. Moscow was surprised by the poor performance of its air power, and more importantly the inability of different services to work together. It truly was the last war of a legacy force, inherited from the Soviet Union. The conflict uncovered glaring gaps in capability, problems with command and control, and poor intelligence. As Russia’s then-Chief of the General Staff Nikolai Makarov euphemistically put it, “it is impossible to not notice a certain gap between theory and practice.” In the aftermath, Russia went about the business of reforming and modernizing that military toolkit.
Since 2014, there has been a natural focus on Russian operations in Ukraine, and the Russian campaign in Syria, but the August War deserves another look in light of Russian military developments today. Much has changed since then in the Russian armed forces, but the war still offers valuable insights. Russia won, but the Russian military simply was not set up to fight a modern war, even against a smaller neighbor, much less a peer competitor. Having missed a generation in the evolution of capabilities and associated war-fighting concepts, Russia remained trapped by the Soviet equipment and operational concepts of the early 1980s. The whole was less than the sum of the parts.
