WINEP analysis of Syria

"... the corrosive processes at work on the Syrian military are accumulating and accelerating. If the army cannot address these challenges, it will likely collapse, though precisely when is difficult to determine. The end could come in a rush or, more likely, through gradual disintegration."  WINEP

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Jeff White is an old colleague.  This is good stuff.  His work is always of this quality, although I don't think he ever really understood the Battle of Sharpsburg. (He and I once team taught a staff ride course on the WBS.)

The big hole in this predicted outcome is the lack of any real vision on the part of NATO as to what the next government of Syria will be like.  Will it be tawhiid?  pl

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/mounting-pressure-on-the-syrian-army

Comments

[Alba Etie]

I guess we need to keep our attention regarding Syria -on what the next door neiighbor Turkey will do if it looks like the next rulers in Damascus will be the tawhiid ( thats radical wahabee takfiris yes ? ) .
And a another question what became if anything of the bilateral meeting between Foreign Minister of Russia Latorov ( spelling ? ) and Sec of State Clinton recently held in St Petersburg ? It was supposed to be about the Syria post Assad - at least thats what the BBC was reporting . I still wonder why we can't cut a deal on Syria with Leader Putin - safe havens for the minorities along the coast and Russian navy keeps the seaport ,,

[turcopolier]

"Is this wahabee whirlwind an existenial threat to the USA in any event ? Perhaps the biggest concern is still some Islamist terrorist network delivering a WMD attack here at home - and although horrible would not be a threat to our continuance as a Country ?"

It is not an existential threat to the US. To describe the developments in Syria and Egypt as a "wahhabee whirlwind" is hyperbole that helps nothing. Tthe US government needs to stop fostering revolution in the Islamic World. As for your fear of a WMD attack, what do you mean, a nuclear attack? I'll believe the jihadis can do this when Houston blows up. Civilians need to pull their socks up and develop some guts. Americans are afraid of their own shadows. Pathetic. pl

[turcopolier]

Toto

I accidentally deleted your ccomment, but, yes, you missed it totally about Tawhiid. Hanbali wahhabi types have always called themselves, "muwahidoon," i.e., monotheists.as opposed to all others. pl

[Mishkilji]

Pat--
We were on a team once at an event; I was an Army DATT/FAO in the Levant.
Jeff misses one key dynamic that mitigates the dangers he outlines. It is the regime's increasing reliance on militias. A careful read of Patrick Seale's book reveals Hafez Asad made the same calculations when he built the Defense Companies and Popular Committees.
Additionally , as the army becomes more stressed, the regime may not mourn a gradual decline in the regular army in favor of more reliable Alawi-based militias. A weakened army faces longer odds when making coup calculations, especially if the Republican Guard remains cohesive.
This drags on for years.

[FB Ali]

The ME policy initiated by the Bush administration appears to be alive and well. The instigators may have changed (the Wolfowitz’s replaced by the Rices) but the policy being pursued remains the same: smash established regimes so that they can be replaced by others ‘more suitable’. The results in all cases have been the same: strong governments replaced by anarchy, with fundamentalist Islamists well poised to ultimately take over. Syria is not likely to be any different.

All one can do is shake one’s head at the folly of it all. And marvel at the way in which a great power, with almost limitless intelligence and intellectual resources available to it, can so blindly screw up.

[Alba Etie]

Col Lang
I could not agree more - that we all need to pull up our socks . I was not describing events as a whirl wind - but others have,even recently here on this SST forum .I have long felt that the likes of Dick Cheney and the neoCons were and are a bigger threat to my civil libertiesand Our Nation then al Qaida. The illegal occupation of Iraq was one real good example of how the Cheney's of the world profit and we suffer from their "Master's of the Universe" ideology .
I remember reading in maybe of Steve Coll's books or columns - how Usama bin Laden could not believe that the Neo Cons would actually attempt to remake the ME via Baghdad. What little I understand of the ME realpolitiks is that Usama was a sworn enemy of Saddam .
Terrorism as best as understand is a tatic that diverse groups employ IRA, Irgun , Tamil Tigers( who pioneered the car bomb) . Short of some type of Saladin arising - the biggest threat I see coming from this is more misguided Wilsonian neo liberal , neocon misadventures.
Yes pulling up our collective socks is sound advice.

[Cal]

"Americans are afraid of their own shadows. Pathetic. pl "

I agree, a good many of them are...I am sick of hearing their whinning ''protect me, protect me,me,me!"...all the time. Disgusting.

[Kunuri]

Tesekkurler Albayim, very informative report, lines up with what I have been gleaning.

This guy, Joseph Holliday has been putting out very detailed articles on Syrian opposition, resembling intelligince analysis of an intelligence officer in an HQ, not that I have seen an original one.

http://www.understandingwar.org/report/syrias-maturing-insurgency

and this article, very insightful and informative as well...

http://www.understandingwar.org/publications/commentaries/disorganized-fox

So, thusly informed, I am slowly coming to the conclusion that insurgents will defeat the Syrian regular Army on their own without external intervention. Also, the wahhabi types will not find the fertile ground they are hoping in a post Assad Syria. Syrians have been secular for a very long time and very close to the west geographically.

[Basilisk]

I think it is not merely a "lack of guts," there are other factors in the game. In 2004 and 2005 when the Bush Administration was flacking for the "Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO), there were some amazing stories about the "terrorist capability" to attack a US city with an "improvised nuclear weapon."

When it was pointed out to these PR types that "improvised" and "nuclear weapon" just don't go together the response was "shut up, this has already been decided at the highest levels."

DNDO has not proven to be a great success, unless you believe that snapping one's fingers keeps the elephants away, but it has become a sinecure and a wonderful cash cow, and therefore from now until forever there will be a "nuclear threat to America's cities."

The basic story is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_Nuclear_Detection_Office, but the theme music that surrounded the birth of this office is missing.

[turcopolier]

Basilisk

Yes, but you know there is precious little in the way of guts in the general public. The suitcase bomb fantasy that Kurt Weldon (?) used to push was delightful in its idiocy. He showed me his "mock up" bomb once. It was a small suitcase with foam cut out lining into which a tube fit for the "gun" type uranium bomb. There was also a bettery and switches etc. I asked him how much it would weigh. He just stared at me. It was all BS. pl

[turcopolier]

FB Ali

Yes, the neo-Wilsonianism of the BHO administration seems indistinguishable from the passion of the neocons. pl

[Basilisk]

Weldon was fantasizing about an old Soviet weapon that once existed—and has long since ceased to exist. These "man pack nuclear weapons" were once a reality. You may have heard of SADM and MADM and the long-ago missions for the SF against dams, bridges and so forth. Our weapons were so heavy that a superhuman was required to deliver them. They came in huge, heavy backpacks with a two man team.

The Soviet weapons were much the same. I read the specs and talked to the minister responsible for Soviet weapons. They had no PALs and they were considered dangerous even by the Soviets, thus their dismantlement.

Weldon got hold of reporting by a nominal "defector," and all-around crackpot who told the story of these "suitcase nukes" being cached in the US for strategic missions by KGB Spetsnaz in time of war. They say you can't bulls--t a bullish--ter, but in that case it was not true. Weldon may actually have believed. In any case the story suited his predilections, but it was really crap.

These were all uranium weapons with explosive triggers and no boosters, so no radiation danger.

[turcopolier]

Basilisk

I was trained to emplace and activate the smaller of the two garbage can sized munitions. You could jump with this thing slung beneath your reserve parachute like a PAE bag and lower it on a line before you landed. Getting out of the airplane was a "trick." You waddled up to the door with the crew chief and jumpmaster taking the weight off the bomb and then just toppled out. Any thought of jumping up and out was not possible. So, you bumped down the side of the aircraft until you were past the tail. The idea was to jump these things in behind the advancig GSFG first echelon to blow key bridges along with our trusty patriot guerrilla allies. I had a strange "childhood." DOL. pl

[Babak Makkinejad]

Let us, for the sake of argument, assume that the Alawite-dominated state in Syria disintegrates. In the absence of the state, there will be various armed factions controlling this or thatpart of Syira; different parts of different cities will be controlled by ethnic militia - like Beirut.

Next, I should think, will be another struggle for the control of the state - or its reconstruction - that pits various ethno-religious groups and their foreign supporters against one another.

This is not new; it has happened before when Chinese Imperial state disintegrated, it happened in Yugoslavia, in Lebanon, in Somalia, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq.

I imagine that under such a scenario, a war of all against all will last for several decades in the territory of Syria until a combination of war exhaustion and lack of interest by foreign powers end the civil war.

Even if the civil war ends - alomst certainly inconclusively - the Syrian state may not be revivable for decades more.

This scenario, in my opinion, is a threat to Turkey, to Lebanon, to Jordan, and to Israel.

[The Twisted Genius]

Basilisk,

The best way to describe the SADM I was familiar with is a pony keg, about the same dimensions and weight. All our jumps out of the MC-130s were off the ramp so no one had to worry about kissing the aircraft fuselage on the way out. The trick was dropping the rucksack on the lowering line before you hit the ground. Landing with the rucksack was a pretty good way of breaking a femur. The MC-130 crews told us they popped up to 800 feet before giving us the green light. I thought they were full of shit. The sequence was" count to four thousand fast, immediately drop your ruck and land. The reserve chute was a useless accouterment. You would never have time to deploy it.

[turcopolier]

TTG

Our "keg" was bigger, about the size of a 55 gallon pail. I asked once what we would do after we blew the bridge. "Become Polish" was the answer. pl

[The Twisted Genius]

PL,

My team sergeant's theory was that there really was no delay timer on the SADM. That was just a story told to convince the SF team to pull the trigger. He reasoned that there was no way the powers that be would leave an unguarded SADM in place while the team made its way to safety.

On "becoming Polish," that was our plan. We were supposed to take out the command post of the Northern Group of Forces and the SAM belts in southwestern Poland before leading the Polish guerrillas to final victory over the bolshevik devils. Ah, the starry eyed optimism of youth.

[turcopolier]

TTG

Since we were bred from the same bitch wolf as your team there was some discussion of how we would get the Poles to set the trigger. pl

[Basilisk]

TTG,
This is giving me a huge case of nostalgia. As any level above terrain masking was likely to be full of flying SA-8's, those aircrews probably had a discussion:
"What altitude shall we tell 'em?"
"How 'bout a hundred feet?"
"Nah, you gotta give the snake eaters some hope, tell 'em 800 AGL."
"Yeah, right."

[Basilisk]

I'm sure glad we never got to find out whether any of this stuff would have worked.

[turcopolier]

Basilisk

I've jumped at 450 feet. You swing once. I've heard from tje ancients that a few C-47s in Overlord were left a present by the jumpmaster after he looked out the door. pl

[The Twisted Genius]

Basilisk,

Me, too. The most probable outcome would have been an anonymous death in the Polish mud... but I would have taken some bolshies with me.

[confidential]

Perhaps the U.S. should consider fostering a revolution in the Wahabi heartland and bring down the house of Saud? Give Arabia back to its people - they may just break the religious police's sticks over their heads and confine Wahabism to the dustbin of history?

I'm in Aleppo, where the booms and bangs of artillery, mortars and rockets fired at the surrounding villages no longer keeps me up at night. While there are certainly all sorts of religious dudes, local and imported, wanting to fight the government, they are simply a part of the ongoing chaos. I know of instances where they have been put in their place by determined, armed locals who have no desire to see their neighborhoods become battlegrounds. 30 somethings with children to protect are stronger than 20 somethings full of hot air. By the same token, adults who have lost loved ones and defected soldiers are the backbone of the rebellion. Here's hoping they aren't fooled by the sugar daddies of the Gulf, particularly as many of them have fought without any real help from anyone....

[Alba Etie]

I cannot prove it but I believe that the Bush administration with its think tank cohorts and allied Congresscritters re Kurt Weldon mounted an active propaganda program on We the People- after the 9/11 attack . I believe further it was done for Profit and Political Power - ( How blind was the Cheney KBR trust ?)What sticks in my craw is images of Attorney General Ashcroft reporting from a darkened Russsian studio about the 'dirty radioactive bomb plot " or some other nonsense made up to scare the Sheeple . This was - what is the milspeak term -a 'psyops (?) ' that culminated with Powell at the UN waving around that vial of white powder.
We were had by the Wolfowitz's and it still continues with Rice et al .It was all done and still being done for Profit & Political Power,
Ok go ahead and cue up the Oliver Stone theme music ..

[Basilisk]

I can't forget the (possibly apocryphal) story of the Gurkha paratroops being told they were to jump from 500 feet. The Command Sergeant Major argued they should jump from 100 instead. He was very insistent. Finally the OIC said, "Sergeant Major, your parachutes won't have time to open from 100 feet.

The Gurkha said, "Oh! Are we to have parachutes?"

You know my predilections, it is hard to imagine jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.