Georgian Army, American Made.(World Affairs)(Vladimir Putin says America provoked Russia-Georgia conflict)

Byline: John Barry; With Owen Matthews In Tbilisi

U.S. officials tried to build a force that could not stand up to Russia, but now they may have to.

In the aftermath of Russia's swift victory over the Georgian Army, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has suggested that the United States secretly provoked the conflict--perhaps even prepared Georgia's forces for it. Lt. Col. Robert Hamilton, who ran the U.S. military training program in Georgia until six weeks ago, finds the charge ironic. "At no time did the U.S. attempt to train or equip the Georgian armed forces for a conflict with Russia," he says. "In fact, the U.S. deliberately avoided training capabilities that were seen as too provocative" to Russia. So the United States never trained the Georgians

how to use tanks, artillery or attack helicopters--precisely because those are the skills of all-out conventional warfare. Now the United States--with or without its European allies--is being pushed to build a Georgian Army that could face the Russians, next time.

U.S. military involvement in Georgia grew step by step. In a further irony, it began with a mission designed to placate Russia. The Russians, battling to crush the revolt in Chechnya, complained that Chechen fighters were holed up in a border area of Georgia, the Pankisi Gorge. Washington believed some had ties to Al Qaeda. Georgia's forces were too weak to oust the Chechens, so in 2002 the Pentagon stepped in, training and equipping three Georgian infantry battalions. "We had to give them everything, even uniforms and boots," one veteran of that effort recalls. Still, the raw units were good enough to clear the Pankisi area, removing, or so Washington hoped, an irritant in Russian-Georgian relations.

That program ended in spring 2004. Then Georgia, keen to foster its new military ties with the United States, proposed contributing some of those troops to the Coalition in Iraq. Since July 2005 the United States has trained an additional three Georgian brigades for Baghdad and equipped them with U.S. gear: armored Humvees, devices to detect roadside IEDs, radios and other basics. By Pentagon standards, it was a bare-bones effort: a training mission of about 130 troops, at a cost since 2002 of no more than $200 million. A French diplomat in Tbilisi says the United States gave the Georgians the equivalent of about a month of French basic training--nothing near what they would need to stand up to Russia.

Georgia did make its own efforts. As its economy boomed under President Mikheil Saakashvili, its defense budget grew from $30 million in 2003 to more than $750 million last year, but without U.S. support for the creation of heavy-combat forces, it bought old but serviceable Soviet T-72 tanks from Ukraine and howitzers from the Czech Republic. Georgia ran a heavy-arms exercise two summers ago, but it was a rerun of the carefully pre-scripted Soviet-style maneuvers of a generation past. When the Russians invaded last month, the performance of Georgia's Soviet-era tank and artillery was "primitive," according to a preliminary analysis by the U.S. Army.