I think clearly that the Russians were surprised at how the Georgians were able to use sites hosted in the Ukraine and elsewhere to disseminate their viewpoint, and how various reporters with Sat phones were able to do their own reporting.

While Russian cyberwar was effective in shutting down Georgian sites, they clearly did not anticipate nor were they willing to target sites hosted by other nations.

Russia was unwilling or unable to decide on measures against content routed elsewhere.

Which brings to mind the next issue — information networks are fairly robust. DoS attacks can be sustained for a while, but usually cooperative network engineers in hosting companies in the US or other Western nations can take steps against them. Even a compromised DNS server can be restored. Georgians could get their own version of events out through as noted sat phones, satellite uplink facilities, even ham radio.

But in some ways, Russia’s actions mirrored that of the US on “thunder runs” to Baghdad and Georgia mirrored Saddam’s forces: static, unable to communicate, fall-back their only option. Probably complete collapse was only avoided by US advisors preventing panic and conducting fighting retreats or those far in advance of being held vulnerable to Russian air cover, which was complete but not dominating. Russia probably could have collapsed Georgia’s forces had they more air assets. That they did not pursue this avenue suggests strongly that Russia’s Air Arms are the most limited.

That makes sense: it takes a LOT of time and money to train skilled pilots, Russia may have relatively few. I don’t think they lacked for aircraft.