1 David didn't defeat Goliath in Chechnya -- but he delivered powerful and unexpected blows to the body, and especially to the ego.
2 What went wrong? Why did poorly equipped, inexperienced Chechen fighters hold off heavily armed Russian troops carrying the mantle of the old Soviet superpower for more than a month?
3 As Chechen separatists take their war for independence from Russia into the countryside, military analysts have been examining Moscow's poor performance in its first military encounter since the Cold War ended.
4 Some reasons for Russia's bungled invasion of Chechnya are clear.
5 Units that had never trained together were sent to fight together -- motorized rifle troops, airborne troops, naval infantry and Ministry of Interior soldiers.
6 Commanders used disastrous military tactics to try to take the Chechen capital of Grozny, sending in tanks that were destroyed by Chechen petrol bombs.
7 On top of that, the high command in Moscow was wracked with dissension about the merits of the war. Three deputy defense ministers were suspended for criticizing the operation.
8 Jonathan Eyal of the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies said the decision to fight was taken by the Security Council in Moscow, which is responsible only to President Boris Yeltsin, and never had real military support.
9 Behind the rush to invade Chechnya in the inhospitable winter, with little preparation time, was a bungled covert operation by Russia's security service to topple Chechen President Dzokhar Dudayev, Eyal said. After 20 captured Russian security agents were paraded on Chechen television, the security council decided in late December to invade.
10 'As far as the military is concerned, the entire urgency of the operation was to cover the backsides of the security services, to cover this bungled operation. Their hearts were not in it. They sent units not up to full strength -- kids with a few months of training,' Eyal said.
11 'But what was more humiliating was that the military fell into the same trap the United States and France and Britain fell into over the past 20 years -- which is essentially that all their strategies were designed to fight a world war and they were expected to fight a Third World War,' Eyal said in an interview.
12 Dr. Mark Galeotti, a lecturer in international history at the University of Keele, wrote in Jane's Intelligence Review that the first month of the Chechen invasion cost more Russian lives than the first six months of the Afghan war. He gave no figures but Russian officials have reported 1,200 servicemen dead.
13 The war highlighted four key problems in the new Russian army: disunity of the high command, lack of coordination between units and services, low morale and combat readiness, and a failure to apply Russia's new military doctrine that dwells on the need for rapid deployment forces, Galeotti wrote.
14 Col. Andrew Duncan, spokesman for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the Russian military faced 'very real challenges' in mounting the Chechnya operation because it is in a period of transition.
15 It is still trying to accommodate units withdrawn from Eastern Europe. A totally new budgetary concept has reduced funds for the armed forces. Its planned rapid reaction force isn't ready. It lost a large manpower pool when the central Asian republics became independent and has to cope with thousands of student deferments, Duncan said.
16 'Perhaps the guilt lies in not having foreseen that this military operation might have happened,' he said. 'The military might then have had some plans and maps.'
17 Eyal said the real impact of Chechnya is that Yeltsin is now more detested by the military than ever before.
18 'For the West, the real message is that whenever confronted by what is essentially a difficult constitutional problem, the first reaction of the Russian government is to resort to force. This is not the instinct of democracy that we expected,' he said. ------
19 EDITOR'S NOTE -- Edith M. Lederer, an international affairs reporter for the AP based in London, has covered military affairs in the former Soviet Union.

David didn ' t defeat Goliath in Chechnya - - but he delivered powerful and unexpected blows to the body , and especially to the ego .
unexpected
Why ere the blows unexpected?