Why the New Syrian Army Failed: Washington and Unconventional Warfare
The Obama administration did not allow the U.S. military to conduct a proper unconventional warfare campaign, making the failure of Washington's favored Syrian rebels inevitable.
All public signs point to failure in a key U.S. effort to turn the tide of the brutal Syrian civil war — the training and fielding of a vetted and politically palatable Syrian force to fight the Islamic State. As Nancy Youssef reveals in The Daily Beast, exasperated U.S. officials are trying to adapt in the wake of disastrous setbacks for the Syrian forces back by the United States, including the New Syrian Army and Division 30. An initial contingent was beaten up badly by rival groups, including al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, not long after it was introduced back into the wild. Washington’s favored Syrians are now in disarray and in a public spat with the Pentagon over its mission.
This should lead us to ask, why can’t the United States conduct effective unconventional warfare any longer?
What is unconventional warfare? The Department of Defense defines it as “activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power through and with an underground, auxiliary, or guerrilla force in a denied area.”
Recent examples of successful UW campaigns and supporting operations include Afghanistan in 2001 and Northern Iraq in 2003, in which the 5th and 10th Special Forces Groups conducted operations built on a foundation of long established relationships either through the intelligence community (Afghanistan) or directly between Special Forces and indigenous Kurdish elements (in Iraq dating back to 1991 and Operation Provide Comfort).
In the case of Syria, the Obama administration failed to allow strategists and planners to develop and conduct a comprehensive, integrated, and holistic unconventional and political warfare campaign. How do we know this? The terms President Obama used to describe this effort tell the story. Instead of a campaign to support a strategy, the White House directed the military to implement a “program.” Instead of unconventional warfare, the White House chose to call the program “train and equip” and severely limited U.S. personnel from conducting the necessary tasks of an unconventional warfare campaign . This is evidenced by the sole focus on train and equip without ground assessments and direct advising of indigenous forces, as well as the lack of authorities necessary to develop an underground and auxiliary — fundamental elements of any unconventional warfare campaign. It is also troubling that there are two “train and equip programs,” one being conducted by the military and the other by the CIA, according to media reports. Most egregious is that the Obama administration started much too late. The right time to start an unconventional warfare campaign against the Assad regime was years ago when it was actually a feasible, acceptable, and suitable course of action. Had an unconventional warfare campaign been effectively executed it may have resulted in the overthrow of Assad through an organized resistance with significant support from the Syrian population. It is true that we cannot know what the outcome might have been, but the situation would likely be better than the one we now face.
As Eliot Cohen and John Gooch wrote in their seminal work, Military Misfortunes, all military failures can be attributed to three causes: failure to learn, failure to adapt, and failure to anticipate. Our military and government agencies have done a lot of learning and adapting over the last fourteen years, particularly in the areas of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. However, the future may require better anticipation of threats and opportunities in the area of unconventional and political warfare. The United States must to be able to both support resistance movements through unconventional warfare campaigns and counter other state and non-state actors conducting their own unique forms of unconventional warfare, including ISIL, Al Qaeda, Russia, Iran, and even the Chinese.
U.S. leaders failed to anticipate three to four years ago the potential for unconventional warfare in Syria to topple Assad and failed to anticipate the rise of the Islamic State. While indecision may be the key to flexibility, American indecisiveness also leads to growing threats and the belief among our adversaries that the United States has ceded the battle space, largely due to a lack of will.
U.S. leaders failed to anticipate Russia’s “new generation warfare” in Ukraine despite having seen evidence of it years ago in Georgia. The same leaders also failed to anticipate what would happen when the United States chose to not enforce President Obama’s stated red line in Syria on chemical weapons and then failed to provide air support when the Syrian resistance had the best chance to achieve an outcome favorable to U.S. interests.
The state of the current train and equip program is yet another chapter in this record of failure and an example of the misuse of special operations methods. Resistance organizations fight for their causes, not for ours. Washington’s demands that its allies and proxies fight U.S.-designated enemies (rather than the enemies a group has determined to be its real, immediate, and existential threats) will hinder future American foreign policy efforts.
Many U.S. policymakers, government officials, and even some senior military leaders are wary of unconventional and political warfare because it is messy, unpredictable, difficult to evaluate and control, potentially violates international law, and has a history fraught with blowback. On the other hand, there are some in the U.S. government who think unconventional warfare can be a silver bullet, but have only sought to employ elements of it in isolation and without a larger strategy.
The fundamental problem with the sorry state of American strategic thought can be summed up by the recent comments of a senior U.S. military leader at an event I attended. This leader discarded unconventional warfare as a potential strategic option because it offers no immediate solutions to today’s security threats. Unconventional warfare and the use of irregular, indigenous forces take presence, patience, and persistence. It is really another form of a war of exhaustion, as Lawrence Freedman alluded to in his recent article, something for which the United States seems to have little or no patience.
Counterterrorism and counterinsurgency are critically important in today’s security environment but they are not enough to support our national security strategy. We have to be able to operate in the unconventional and political warfare space. A place to begin for thinking about how to operate in this space is the U.S. Army Special Operations Command’s SOF Support to Political Warfare White Paper that outlines how the U.S. government should consider conducting traditional unconventional warfare, counter-unconventional warfare, and proactive-fashion unconventional warfare. Our enemies are effectively conducting unconventional warfare and we need to as well.
Since there is little hope of those in the White House grasping the importance of unconventional and political warfare in the remaining months of this term, here are three questions for policymakers in the next administration to consider as we try to anticipate the future threat environment:
- Are we going to get comfortable operating in the space between peace and war that is described by unconventional and political warfare?
- Are we willing to “dostrategy” in that space to achieve our policy objectives?
- Are we willing to inform national decision-makers that we have the will and capability to operate in the space between peace and war and conduct our own form of unconventional and political warfare to support our national security strategy or will we cede the initiative for operations in this space to our adversaries?
The answers to these questions will determine if the United States will execute effective national security policies and strategy. If Washington is going to continue to try simply conducting train and equip programs instead of unconventional and political warfare, we are unlikely to achieve our objectives.
David S. Maxwell is the Associate Director of the Center for Security Studies in the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University. He is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel.
Photo credit: Freedom House
joe 
Tom 
Alan 
David;
Yes, the key words, terms, and phrases that were used, and the ones that were not used, reveal a great deal of information. That’s why a meta-analyses of literature generates such strong evidence. Just like a meta-analysis of U.S. documents pertaining to Irregular Warfare.
Continuing along with your thesis, one is propelled to ask; what about Department of State? Why would Dept. of State fail to integrate, decide to ignore, and or disavow the Irregular Warfare Operating Concept? The term “comprehensive” is a Dept. of State term. It was intended to describe a set of coordinated, synchronized, holistic actions and activities that were conducted separately and or together. With an intentional lack of Dept. of State involvement, a comprehensive plan would turn into mostly a DOD effort. And we all know that the DOD domain is the domain of the military sciences; i.e. militarily related safety and security issues; military Info/Intel activities, military connected training/education and so on. Comprehensive means, cross domain not singular domain. How was it that DOD ended up doing so much stability and development; governance and government; financial administration; and other non DOD domain tasks and activities? Who was responsible for that bailey-wig? Much of those tasks were and still are within, yes, Dept. of State areas of responsibility.
Maybe Dept. of State sees the flaws in the stability operations construct and understands the assessment and operational flaws. And maybe that’s why, a few select, NGOs have been allowed to grow and grow, under the auspices of Dept. of State. Right-now, today that is, it looks like the plan is for those select NGOs to fill the void, on a global scale. I mean if the IW Operating Concept failed or only partially worked, who or what would fill that gap? Obviously NGOs, right? But then the question becomes; who from the U.S. Government is providing over watch for those NGOs? Just to ensure that no laws or ethical standards were violated and that a showdown government or patronage organization was established. Private and public organizations do have their own agendas sometime. Maybe the FBI? Obama did appoint the FBI Director. Maybe the Dept. of State, Office of the Inspector General? Or might that be a conflict of interest? The IC Office of the Inspector General, oh wait there isn’t one. Give me a moment, I’ll keep thinking.
Sir; very good article.
https://www.clintonfoundation.org/about/frequently-asked-questions
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-inside-story-of-how-the-clintons-built-a-2-billion-global-empire/2015/06/02/b6eab638-0957-11e5-a7ad-b430fc1d3f5c_story.html
Take care.
Joe C.
I have several concerns with Colonel Maxwell’s piece:
First and foremost: we need to stop using this nonsensical phrase, “political warfare”. All warfare is political, that’s the whole point. Linguistic precision is critical if we are to discuss issues such as these in a productive and coherent manner.
Second: the author conveniently omits the spectacularly failed UW campaigns in Libya and Yemen, which utterly failed to produce satisfactory strategic results in either case, the former of which likely influenced the Obama Administration’s reticence to intervene. Conversely, the author’s examples of supposed UW victories are deeply flawed: the successful UW operation that spearheaded OEF failed to produce long-term strategic success; and throughout OIF, Iraqi Kurdistan never played host to the sort of robust insurgency that Baghdad, Anbar, or Basra did. Had the White House “anticipated the potential for unconventional warfare in Syria to topple Assad”, what then? Another disaster like the one that NATO left behind in Libya? A massive American peacekeeping force trying to intervene in the inevitable Syrian civil war? Wouldn’t that have been the strategically illiterate post-invasion plan in Iraq all over again? As critical as I tend to be of the Obama Administration, and as supportive as I was of the campaigns to oust Saddam Hussein, Moammar Qaddhafi, and Mullah Omar, Americans have had quite enough of ousting Middle Eastern dictators with no plan to stabilize the battlespace after that initial objective is completed. I’m personally of the mind that the Iraq War was entirely winnable, but that many mistakes were made by both civilian and military leaders that hamstrung troops efforts to succeed; while the sitting administration deserves plenty of criticism for its inaction on Syria and subsequently the ISIS fiasco, the President at least deserves credit for not repeating the mistakes that caused so much unnecessary death, destruction, and national anxiety over Iraq. While UW certainly offers operational utility in many circumstances, the author’s portrayal of UW as some sort of magical strategic panacea is simply not in historical evidence.
Third: Understandably, given his background, the author focuses much of his concern on the White House’s treatment of unconventional warfare. The problem is bigger: no one in the Administration appears to have any concept of strategy beyond any given policy’s effects might have on electoral politics. Foreign policy heavyweights such as General Jones quickly left the Administration, and the hope that foreign policy would improve by way of President Obama simply not being President Bush were quickly dashed by a cold dose of reality. Subsequently, most of the White House’s policies have been reactive, not proactive. In 2013, Robert Scales wrote that American military leaders were “embarrassed to be associated with the amateurism of the Obama administration’s attempts to craft a plan that makes strategic sense. None of the White House staff has any experience in war or understands it.” Two weeks ago, in an article entitled “How the Obama White House runs foreign policy”, the Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung described the sheer mass and inefficiency of the current incarnation of the National Security Council. The White House isn’t doing particularly well with its application of unconventional warfare, but this is a symptom of a more broad failure to apply all of the instruments of foreign policy, not a root cause in and of itself. (It’s possible that President Obama’s foreign policy will be celebrated as prescient in fifty years, but I’m skeptical.)
Tom,
I agree with all of your points, and would add that the author’s premise of advocating UW as a solution to Syria is wrong. The aim was never to overthrow Assad (which the author claims is the goal), therefore by definition UW is not a solution to his stated problem. ISIS is the main problem, which is where the confusion begins. If we define ISIS as an insurgency, then how do you conduct COIN without also supporting Assad? If we want to be bold and call ISIS the “state” they claim to be, then maybe UW works but once again, who replaces them? Assad? However, if we call ISIS a terrorist organization, then this is a CT fight. But find me an agreed upon definition of “terrorist” before we continue down that road.
I agree with the author that the current “strategy” is merely a lose piecemeal of tactics (and maybe operations) by unsynchronized organizations with vastly different authorities. However, let’s not just suggest UW because that’s what we learned in the Q-course and aspects of it worked in scenarios that are not comparable to the one in Syria.
I can accept the argument that the U.S., across all elements of DIME, has struggled in both its understanding and application of UW. However, it’s critical we keep 2 things in mind:
1) ALL war is political. To say that war is not political is to say that war has no point. And if war has no point, other than to kill, then we should apply maximum destructive force indiscriminately, whenever and wherever possible. However, as Clausewitz reasoned, such a state of mankind does not represent reality. War must have a policy objective in mind; otherwise, violence would always tend toward the maximum extreme, until a state of annihilation is reached. I realize I am conflating “war” and “warfare” here, but I am doing so deliberately to make a point. “War” denotes a state of political relations between two or more actors, whereas “warfare” is a generic term to mean the waging of organized fighting. Whatever adjective we throw in front of the word warfare is meant to describe its particular style or modality (i.e. Cyber-, Special-, Naval-, Air-, Land-, Unconventional-, Asymmetric, Psychological-, etc.). Consequently, I would caution against chasing down too many rabbit holes on the idea of “political warfare” as something distinct and different from any other kind of warfare. This leads me to the second point.
2) Within an American historical context, keep in mind that we have only engaged in 5 conflicts in which Congress has passed a resolution declaring a formal state of war. Yet, we have engaged in hundreds of small wars and “low-intensity” conflicts around the world throughout the country’s history. Again, within an American context, this refers to any warfare conducted along the continuum between zero violence and total/unlimited war. Consequently, I would argue the opposite is the case; namely, it is conventional warfare that we are uncomfortable with, rather than unconventional warfare.
The strategic debates that could spin of this are obviously many. But, I would conclude here that the current dissatisfaction over the outcomes of our unconventional warfare efforts is somewhat misplaced, because UW is inherently indecisive when it comes to achieving national policy objectives. Put another way, the fact that we employ UW is the tip-off that we are pursuing limited (versus unlimited) objectives. Within military planning parlance, the problem space we are concerned with is the suitability relationship between Ways and Ends, and a practioner of UW would be well justified in trying to maximize the number of options and COAs available to achieve the ends. But again, I think one could argue that UW is a reflection of policy, just as easily as he could that UW is a way of achieving it. Perhaps the discussion we should really be having concerns the Ends, despite the risks of getting into that murky territory where strategy starts driving policy.
I am curious.
With all the hoopla, controversy, and debate surrounding hybrid, low-intensity, and asymmetric threats, what do you the author of this story want to know, preciously? Can you explain your interest in as few sentences as possible?
And you the reader of this article saw the title, were interested in the topic, and proceeded to read it or review it. What do you want to know more about? Exactly?
Please let me know: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/irregular-threats-mitigation-techniques-where-do-we-begin-campbell?trk=prof-post
Joe C.