Germany's Operation Barbarossa followed the same route towards Moscow that was taken by the Poles in 1612 and the French in 1812 and ran into similar problems with time and space. Despite the Wehrmacht's reputation for mechanized Blitzkrieg warfare, the Wehrmacht in 1941 was almost as dependent on horses as Napoleon. The German armored forces speed ahead to rapidly surround and capture over 2 million Red Army soldiers in five massive encirclements. Unfortunately for the Germans, they forgot to consider the time and space factor in conquering the vast area of European Russia. As the German panzer units stormed ahead, the German infantry was trudging along on foot no faster than Napoleon's infantry. Their supply lines became extended and the panzers had to stop to wait for the infantry to catch up. STAVKA understood something that Hitler did not during the Fall of 1941 - the Germans were running out of time to conquer Moscow. The Germans thought that the Russians had no more strategic reserves left, and had lost their will to fight. But, Russians had an ace up their sleeves: their slow retreat towards Moscow was leading the Germans into a trap. STAVKA had made a decision to defend Moscow at all cost, and was bringing in reserves that Germans did not even know existed. The Germans never understood the nature of the enemy they were fighting, nor its history of retreating and then suddenly springing a trap. Saakashvili's attack on S. Ossetia in August of 2008, also failed because he too did not understand that nature of the enemy. Neither the Georgians, nor their American advisors, had the slightest idea that the Russian 58th Army was poised to launch a counter blow as soon as the American trained troops entered Tskhinvali. The Russians learned their feint and trap lessons from the Mongols.