Excellence in Historical Research and Analysis
Excellence in Historical Research and Analysis
OK, we have just set up a fire base in Syria: Marines-arrive-syria-artillery-support
An artillery battery from the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit has been deploying to Syria. Obviously a Marine battery and “support elements” will number “more than several hundred” as the article states. Added to the Army Rangers in Manbij and the 503 U.S. troops that were authorized, and we may already have over a thousand troops in Syria.
Following recent reports on social media that combat vehicles associated with the U.S. Army’s 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment were spotted moving from Iraqi Kurdistan toward the Syrian village of Manbij last weekend, The Washington Post is saying that U.S. Marine forces have now been deployed to Syria. The Marines are reportedly establishing a firebase from which they can support U.S.-sponsored Syrian Kurdish forces poised to attack the Daesh-held city of Raqaa.
Bloomberg is reporting that the U.S. forces deployed to Manbij are part of a coordinated effort with Russia to thwart a possible offensive by Turkish forces to take the town, which is held by Syrian Kurds. The Russians brokered a deal with the Syrian forces to establish a buffer zone around Manbij, which U.S. Army Rangers will help man. Turkish forces launched an attack in conjunction with the Free Syrian Army on Daesh fighters in northern Syria last August. The U.S.-Russian move is perceived as an attempt to prevent the Turks from attacking the Syrian Kurds, who the Turks believe are aligned with Turkish Kurdish groups waging an insurgency against the Turkish government.
U.S. Special Operations Forces elements have been operating on the ground in support of Syrian rebels since October 2015; these have been quietly supplemented by conventional U.S. Army and Marine detachments, according to previous reports The new U.S. ground force deployments have come with no public debate or forewarning by the Trump administration.
The fighting continues in Mosul as the Iraqi coalition slowly advances: iraqi-forces-see-off-counter-attack-mosul
On Tuesday they recaptured the provincial government headquarters, the central bank branch and a museum. The museum was completely empty of all artifacts according to an Iraqi Major General.
The general also noted that most of the fighters that fought around the governorate building were local. He stated that an order was issued for foreign fighters to withdraw.
Makes you wonder if we are nearing the end of this campaign.
Blog post update (around 11 AM EST this morning): leader-baghdadi-abandons-mosul-fight
ISIL appears to be using Mustard Gas filled mortar rounds: Iraqi-families-devastated-by-chemical-attacks-in-mosul
Early in the Syrian Civil War, the government of Syria used chemical weapons on its own population. I am one of these people who felt the U.S. and international community should have intervened in the first year of the war in response to Asad’s use of chemical weapons. We chose not to…..
Now things are getting interesting: pentagon-considering-recommending-combat-troops-in-syria
Hard to imagine that it would not be tens of thousands, as one has to provide a supply route and have enough force to engaged ISIL (which has been estimated to be at 20,000 or more guerillas). I gather the area of operations would cover half of Syria, parts of Northern Iraq (at least to Mosul) and the supply routes would be probably have to go through Turkey.
Of course, the Assad government in Syria has troops there, along with Hezbollah, Iranian volunteers, Kurdish volunteers and Russia. This could get very complicated.
Reports of the collapse of resistance by forces fighting the regime of Bashar Al Assad in Aleppo, Syria have overshadowed news of the recent recapture of Palmyra by Daesh fighters. While the conquest of Aleppo is a significant victory for Assad, the loss of Plamyra – which had been recaptured by the Syrian Army earlier in the year – clearly indicates that success will not be decisive in bringing the five-year old civil war to an end.
Despite major assistance from Russia and Iran, the Syrian Army lacks the combat power to defeat the various domestic and foreign rebel forces arrayed against it. The army, estimated to number over 300,000 before the conflict began, is now believed to total less than half of that as a result of casualties, desertions, and fatigue. It has become particularly weak in infantry. In an attempt to remedy this, the Syrians have raised religiously and politically indoctrinated National Defense Forces (NDF) militias with the help of Iranian advisors, although they are of uncertain quality. The Iranians Qods Force and Lebanese Hizbollah have contributed advisor and fighters, respectively, and the Russians have also contributed advisors and heavy artillery and air support.
Reliable estimates of force strengths for the various factions are hard to come by, and figures for the Syrian Army are particularly variable. The Syrian Kurds are currently aligned against Daesh and Jubhat Fateh al-Sham (the current name for al Qaeda fighters in Syria). They seek independence from the Assad regime but are not fighting against it at this time.
Even the most optimistic estimates based on back-of-the-envelope counts of the raw numbers do not credit the Assad regime and its patrons with enough of a force ratio advantage to overwhelm their opponents in the sort-term. If the pessimistic estimates are more accurate, despite local successes, the Syrian government may struggle simply to maintain the status quo.
During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to intensify U.S. efforts effort to defeat Daesh and to work with Russia to that end. Analysts believe, however, that Russia supports Assad’s calculated strategy to defeat Syrian Sunni rebels first to eliminate the political threat they pose to his regime, before seeking to defeat Daesh and al Qaeda. Precisely what the incoming Trump administration will do differently than currently and the extent of actual military cooperation with Assad and Russia remains to be seen.
OK…latest estimate from DOD is that they have killed over 50,000 ISIL fighters over the last two years: Body count = 50K+
Here is my post on the subject in August when the count was a mere 45,000: some-back-of-the-envelope-calculations
I don’t think I have much more to add to this without getting very sarcastic. Note that they refer to it as a “conservative estimate.” Something does not add up somewhere (either their loss estimates are way too high or their force size estimates have been way too low).
We are not a news site or current affairs site (because it takes too much time)……but…a few things of note in the middle east:
The odd claim is the one made in the second article of this link, where Russia Foreign Minister Lavrov claims about the taking of Palmyra by ISIL that: “…it has been staged to give a respite to bandits in eastern Aleppo.” Of course, one person’s freedom fighters is another person’s bandits.
To take a quote from the first article from Lt. General Townsend: “‘At the start of the campaign, we estimated somewhere between at the low end 3,500, at the high end, about 6,000. By our calculations we think we have killed or badly wounded over 2,000. So if you do the math, that’s still 3,000-5,000’ militants remaining in Mosul, Townsend said.”
We assume he is talking 2,000 killed or seriously enough injured to no be able to return to action in the next couple of months….so, maybe 1,000 killed and 1,000 seriously wounded (kind of grabbing numbers out of thin air here). So, total losses are 4,000 – 6,000 if you count all wounded? That is kind of the entire opposing force.
Then there is the estimates that coalition has lost 14,000 killed and wounded since the start of the offensive (see our post at: Casualties in Iraq (November)). Does that mean that trained conventional counterinsurgency forces are losing something like 2.3-to-1 fighting the insurgents. That would be significant if that was the case.
Something if off somewhere in these various numbers. I not sure which number not to believe (although the estimate of insurgent strength has traditionally always been way too low).
There was an article just published in the blog War is Boring by Andrew Bacevich called “American Generals Have Forgotten How to Win Wars”: american-generals-have-forgotten-how-to-win-wars
It is a long article with three completely different sections. The first section is that somehow or the other, all we have in Iraq and Afghanistan is generals who don’t know how to win. Really? Was that the problem in Korea when General MacArthur was in command and got driven out back from the Yalu and out of North Korea by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA)? His replacement was Matthew Ridgeway, who in World War II was commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps. He did not win in Korea either. Same for the next commander in Korea: Mark Wayne Clark.
Was that the problem with Vietnam, where a succession of generals, Harkins, Westmoreland, Abrams and finally Weyand, commanded? Was Abrams, who relieved Bastogne in World War II and had a tank named after him, one of these generals that did not know how to win? We did win the Gulf War in 1991, we were able to conquer Afghanistan in 2002 with few forces, and we were able to conquer Iraq in 2003. So, since World War II, we have been able to win under the right situation. I don’t think the issue is a “winning” versus a “non-winning” general. Bacevich gives a listing of the 17 commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan since they started. Of the 17 commanders listed, not a single one is a “winning general”? What are the odds of that being the case?
The second part of the article, starting with “Draining which swamp?”, actually makes a lot more sense and it would have been a better article without the first part. It is the nature of the war that is the problem. Napoleon, probably the winning-est general in history (over 60 battles fought), could never figure out how to solve the Spanish ulcer. That ulcer generated a new word: guerilla. It is the nature of guerilla wars and insurgencies that they generate a lack of clear wins.
The British seem to have a reputation as being counterinsurgency experts. They won in Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s. Yet, when it came to Northern Ireland, the conflict went on for over 30 years and was resolved by a settlement that included the political arm of the provisional IRA as a legitimate political party. Would we consider an arrangement in Afghanistan that included the Taliban as part of the government as a victory? Would we consider including ISIL or Al-Qaeda in a future Iraqi or Syrian government? It is kind of the same thing.
Anyhow, a clear win is sometimes elusive in guerilla wars, even for the British. Not only did they fight for over 30 years in Northern Ireland, but their victory in Malaya included giving the country independence. Seven years after they defeated the Mau Mau in Kenya, they also gave that country independence.  Their results in Palestine in the late 1940s, Cyprus in the 1950s and Aden in the 1960s were even less successful. In the case of Cyprus, the guerilla force leader also became the head of a Cypriot political party. So, the British appear to have a winning problem also.
In our original work on insurgencies, part of what the Center for Army Analysis (CAA) wanted us to do was analyze different tactics and approaches and see what worked and what did not. This become difficult to do analytically, for eventually in almost every single extended guerilla war, most of the counterinsurgents ended up developing over the course of years of fighting many of the same answers, whether they were British, American, French, Portuguese, Soviets, Rhodesians, etc. We could not connect the tactics to the outcomes. The end result we ended up looking at the bigger issue questions, like grand strategies and size of forces involved. This was where we could get an analytical result (marketing alert: See my book America Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam).
Bacevich picks up some of these questions in the second part of his article, where he states “The truth is that some wars aren’t winnable and no one should fight them in the first place.” He then concludes “In sum, a Trump administration seems unlikely to reexamine the conviction that the problems roiling the Greater Middle East will someday, somehow yield to a U.S.-imposed military solution.”
Not sure I agree with that conclusion, but I would strongly argue that understanding and defeating an insurgency is much more complicated than just changing a general. We have certainly changed enough generals in Iraq and Afghanistan that by happenstance one should have won, if it was possible. Some argue that Patreaus did win in Iraq (but he clearly did not in Afghanistan). Did Patreaus forget how to win when he went from one war to the next?
Anyhow, to win these wars requires a combination of proper professional approaches, proper resources, and proper engagement times. Our continued attempts to win these wars on the cheap, or shorten the commitment to them, or to find some magic trick (like a surge) that will win it…..have not really worked out. It is time to get serious.
[Map deleted at the request of AFP]
A brief update from AFP. Mainly posted because I like the map of Mosul: Status-main-battle-fronts-Iraq-Syria
Highlights: