Since Russia's rout of the Georgian armed forces in August, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has suggested that Washington secretly provoked the conflict. But the Americans wanted no such thing, according to Lt. Col. Robert Hamilton, who ran the U.S. military training program in Georgia until six weeks ago. (He's now on a year's fellowship at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.) "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. That's one reason Georgia's troops crumpled so fast-precisely because their training didn't cover conventional-warfare topics like tanks, artillery and helicopters.
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