Day: November 12, 2023

Nov 6 (Reuters) – A large group of Russia’s former Wagner mercenaries has started training with special forces from the southern Russian region of Chechnya, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said on Monday.

Wagner played a prominent role in some of the fiercest fighting of Russia’s war in Ukraine, but its future was thrown into question when its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash in August, two months after leading a brief mutiny against the Russian defence establishment.

Kadyrov said in a message on Telegram that a big group of ex-Wagner fighters was undergoing intensive training with his own Akhmat special forces.

“I am glad that today the ranks of the famous (Akhmat) unit have been joined by fighters who have excellent combat experience and have proven themselves as brave and efficient warriors,” he said.

“I am confident that in the upcoming battles they will fully live up to their reputation.”

He published a video, accompanied by stirring music, showing soldiers in combat training, including some wearing Wagner insignia on their uniforms and masks over their faces. Kadyrov said the drills included shooting, field medicine and training for snipers, machine gunners, sappers and artillerymen.

It was not clear how many Wagner men were taking part or whether any of them would stay on with the Chechen forces after the training was over.

After Prigozhin’s death, the Kremlin rejected as an “absolute lie” suggestions that he had been killed on President Vladimir Putin’s orders to punish him for the June mutiny. Russia has yet to publish the results of an investigation into the fatal plane crash.

Putin subsequently moved to bring Wagner’s fighters under the control of the state, ordering them to sign an oath of allegiance, and the Kremlin has repeatedly said the group does not exist as a legal entity.

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The Iron Dome worked well when militants launched relatively few rockets, but it was less effective against the Hamas attack. When Hamas launched as many as 3,000 rockets into Israel in just 20 minutes, the system was overwhelmed and unable to respond. The quantity “was simply too much for Iron Dome to manage,” according to an analysis by the Modern War Institute at West Point.

In my view, the Hamas attack was not particularly sophisticated, nor particularly innovative. At its core, the attack was a textbook military operation involving ground, sea and air attacks launched by one group against another.

It’s my belief that this type of basic attack is something that the Israelis could have and should have anticipated — even if not on the scale it was executed. Given that the basic goal of Hamas is “destroy the State of Israel,” Israel could have developed a defense plan that was not reliant on intelligence that is inherently unreliable.

Ancient Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu stressed the importance of “knowing the enemy.”

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles,” he wrote in “The Art of War.”

The problem for the Israelis, and many modern militaries, is that they have become too reliant on intelligence instead of knowing the goals of their enemy and developing a deeper understanding of how they think and operate.

That understanding may not prevent the next surprise attack, but it can help prepare the military defense.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.