Officials: U.S. Assistance to Focus More on Georgia’s Self-Defense Capabilities

In its security assistance programs with Georgia, as well as in NATO-Georgia relations, the U.S. will be making more focus in helping the country to increase its self-defense capabilities, Pentagon and State Department officials said at Senate foreign affairs committee hearing on June 7.
 
Michael Carpenter, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, said that over the past decade the U.S. training and assistance programs focused on preparing Georgian troops for overseas deployments, among them in Afghanistan, with trainings focusing more on counter-insurgency.

“Now we are starting to position ourselves to devote more attention to training Georgia’s troops for their self-defense capabilities,” said Carpenter, who visited Tbilisi last month when Georgia hosted joint military drills with the U.S. and UK troops, Noble Partner.

“We don’t plan to have permanent troops on the ground [in Georgia], but we do plan to increase tempo of our exercises and trainings with Georgia,” Carpenter said, adding that the U.S. has spent USD 480 million dollars on security assistance in Georgia since the August, 2008 war.

Asked at the same hearing by Republican senator David Perdue what lessons have been learnt from Russia’s 2008 invasion in Georgia that can be applicable to Ukraine now, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland responded that in security partnership with Georgia, the U.S. has focused over the last decade on “helping Georgian forces prepare for expeditionary deployments to Afghanistan and probably not enough focus [was made] on strengthening Georgia’s own homeland security.”

That is what “we are trying to correct not just in U.S.-Georgia relations but also in NATO-Georgia relations,” Nuland said and added that the other lesson is that “the best antidote to Russian pressure” is to build a successful, European, democratic state and that’s why many of State Department’s programs are designed on this priority, including to improve the justice system.

She reiterated the same position on making more focus in U.S-Georgia and NATO-Georgia relations on Georgia’s self-defense capabilities when responding a question about what Georgia should be expecting from the upcoming NATO Warsaw summit. Nuland also said that the summit is expected to reiterate what NATO declared back in 2008 at the Bucharest summit – at the time the Alliance said and it has been reiterating it since then that Georgia will become the member of the Alliance sometime in the future.

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