President Saakashvili said on March 11, that the army training would now focus on defending peace, rather than on expeditionary capabilities.

“Today we are moving to a new stage of military cooperation with the world’s most successful armies. If previously that [cooperation] was only about training the Georgian forces for peacekeeping operations, in fact for policing functions, the Georgian army will now be trained with ten-fold increased pace to have peace in Georgia; [trained] not for war, but [will be trained] for not allowing anyone to try to wage the war… We will accomplish this task and by doing so our statehood will eventually be cemented,” he said while speaking at a ceremony of handing over houses to the families of soldiers, fallen in the August war.

Last month, Gen. Carter Ham, the commander of U.S. Army Europe, said that the U.S. Department of Defense, through its European Command, was looking into ways on how to help the Georgian army.

He said that in previous years the U.S. was providing the Georgian army with training focused on increasing expeditionary capabilities to conduct operations in Iraq. In this context, he said that assessment on how to change the “doctrine, our tactics to account for a changed mission” was underway.