Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus.

• Author: Ricks, Thomas E.

Talking about what sort of wars the U.S. is likely to face in the coming decades, Gen. Charles Krulak, the commandant of the Marine Corps, likes to ask, "Are we going to have Son of Desert Storm or the Stepchild of Chechnya?" His answer. "I feel it will be Stepchild of Chechnya."

That grim prediction is one reason this journalistic history of the recent Chechen war has been attracting attention from the U.S. military even before being published in the U.S. (In fact, it was recommended to me by a smart Marine colonel who read the British edition that appeared last year.) If Gen. Krulak is correct and we face encounters like the Chechen War, the US military is in for a rough time. One example: At one point in this book, a group of Chechen fighters moving through a dark sewer en route to an ambush run smack into a group of Russian commandos. "A furious gun battle lit up the pitch-black tunnel as half a dozen rifles opened up," sending bullets ricocheting along the walls and ceiling of the sewer.

As Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, the two young British reporters who co-authored this account, tell it, "The conflict in Chechnya started imperceptibly." Chechnya declared independence in 1991. Russia disputed that claim, but President Bons Yeltsin at first said there would be no military response, and in fact Russian troops were withdrawn from the area in 1992.

Then Moscow began supplying the pro-Russian opposition with arms. Escalating its involvement as it grew more exasperated with the breakaway republic, Russia in the fall of 1994 sent 40,000 troops to the Chechen border -- a move that provoked the interesting charge from Jokhar Dudayev, the Soviet general turned president of Chechnya, that Moscow did indeed head "the evil empire."

President Yeltsin is the villain of this book. Seeking a quick resolution through intimidation, he sent a tank brigade and attack jets into the Chechen capital of Grozny in an ill-considered show of force that actually permitted the Chechens to display their own guerrilla-like military prowess. By day the tank column was swarmed by civilian protesters; that night it was smashed by the rocket-propelled grenades of Chechen fighters. It was spirit, not numbers, that counted: The authors estimate that at first the Chechens were able to counter the 40,000-strong Russian invasion force with only about 1,000 fighters. Purposely permitted by the Chechens to penetrate to the center of the city, the Russian Maikop Brigade was...