The Armenia-Azerbaijan military balance is getting a lot of scrutiny these days, and Jane's Intelligence Review has just published a good reported analysis (subscription required) by Emil Sanamyan that has a lot of interesting points. Among them:
-- "Upon closer inspection, Azerbaijan's purported 'military budget' incorporates not just the paramilitary forces outside the Ministry of Defence but also state prosecutors and even courts, with an apparent intention to inflate the overall figure for propaganda effect."
-- "The combined Armenian and Nagorno-Karabakh defence army total is estimated by Jane's to be around 300 T-72s, considerably larger than the 110 officially declared by Yerevan. Azerbaijan is thought to maintain around 350 to 400 T-72s... Baku has declared only 217 tanks, although it it likely that this figure was designed to appear under the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty ceiling of 220."
-- "[F]or now it is the Azerbaijani UAV capability that provides the most immediate potential for escalation. Armenian defence officials have confirmed that Azerbaijan has begun flying its UAVs close to the Line of Contact that separates the two sides, with several such flights reported since 2008. In mid-2010, two Armenian Su-25s were dispatched to try to intercept these UAV flights."
-- "Armenian officials also claim that Armenia has begun to domestically produce UAVs and that more than a dozen have already entered service, with the aim of co-ordinating artillery fire. These have yet to be seen publicly."
But he concluded that, in the short term at least, war was unlikely. That's because Azerbaijan's ability to strike Armenian targets from a distance -- either from the air or with artillery -- is still too weak to overwhelm Armenians' defenses. The Armenian/Karabakh air defense systems are relatively good (they have S-300s, including possibly in Karabakh) and Azerbaijan has a fairly small number of ground attack aircraft (according to Jane's, 19 Su-25s) which would quickly be depleted by the Armenians' air defense. Azerbaijan's artillery, which also might be used to take out air defenses, would be vulnerable to Armenian artillery counterattacks, as the two sides are somewhat evenly matched on that front. So at this point, Sanamyan says, it's too risky for Azerbaijan to attack. For now.
Joshua Kucera, a senior correspondent, is Eurasianet's former Turkey/Caucasus editor and has written for the site since 2007.
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