The Clinton administration has proclaimed a strategy to engage and enlarge the democratic community of states. By virtue of their strategic location adjacent to Russia, the Middle East, and Europe s periphery, and their large-scale oil and natural gas deposits, Transcaucasia and Central Asia have become important testing grounds of this strategy. The U.S. goal of irrevocably integrating these states into the Western state system economically, politically, and militarily has made them an intensifying focus of international rivalry with Russia. Moscow still perceives these areas as part of its sphere of interest and deeply resents U.S. engagement there. Furthermore, Moscow's current war with the breakaway province of Chechnya demonstrates its willingness to contest expanding U.S. interests forcefully. Moreover, in this region many factors exist that could cause other conflicts. Accordingly, it is a sensitive place to test the strategic rationale of the engagement strategy and its military corollary, a strategy whose goal is to shape the emerging environment in directions that we wish to see. This monograph contributes to the debate that has just begun and which undoubtedly will last for a long time over what our strategy for the new states should be and how it should be carried out.

[Includes 12 maps and 4 tables] In recent years, the U.S. Army has paid increasing attention to the conduct of unconventional warfare. However, the base of historical experience available for study has been largely American and overwhelmingly Western. In Russian-Soviet Unconventional Wars in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, Dr. Robert F. Baumann makes a significant contribution to the expansion of that base with a well-researched analysis of four important episodes from the Russian-Soviet experience with unconventional wars. Primarily employing Russian sources, including important archival documents only recently declassified and made available to Western scholars, Dr. Baumann provides an insightful look at the Russian conquest of the Caucasian mountaineers (1801-59), the subjugation of Central Asia (1839-81), the reconquest of Central Asia by the Red Army (1918-33), and the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979-89). The history of these wars—especially as it relates to the battle tactics, force structure, and strategy employed in them—offers important new perspectives on elements of continuity and change in combat over two centuries. This is the first study to provide an in-depth examination of the evolution of the Russian and Soviet unconventional experience on the predominantly Muslim southern periphery of the former empire. There, the Russians encountered fierce resistance by peoples whose cultures and views of war differed sharply from their own. Consequently, this Leavenworth Paper addresses not only issues germane to combat but to a wide spectrum of civic and propaganda operations as well.

Since September 11, 2001, the United States has fought two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In these wars, the United States has accomplished or more precisely revealed a strategic revolution. Most notably, U.S.-led coalitions sustained forces in Central Asia and the Caucasus over an extended period by sea and air for the rst time in history. Thus, American leaders and commanders revealed that the new military capabilities hitherto associated with the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) could be deployed anywhere in the world, that U.S. forces would and could be optimized for global power projection capabilities, and that new theaters like Central Asia were of considerable strategic importance to Washington. Their actions rejected a parallel to the ongoing Revolution in Strategic Affairs (RSA) that reaformed the importance of that area as a potential theater of strategic operations (a term taken originally from Soviet military thought).

This book discusses and provides examples of Russia’s need to reshape its security and military policies in order to meet the global challenges of fighting terrorism and counterinsurgency. It addresses some of the problems facing Russia’s national security and military power, including: military reform US-Russian relations the political economy of Russian security policy Russian policy regarding the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction the chances for US-Russian cooperation in ballistic missile defence. Russia's Security and the War on Terror provides a insight into Russian military policies and its changing relationship with NATO throughout the 1990s. This book was previously published as a special issue of The Journal of Slavic Military Studies