Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

Dear legacy media: you are not here to influence outcomes and policies you find desirable.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

People are complicated. Love is not.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

We are learning that “working class” means “white” for way too many people.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

Fucking consultants! (of the political variety)

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

In after Baud. Damn.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

You are here: Home / Absent Friends / President Obama & His Administration Did Indeed Have a Strategy for Syria: It is Not President Obama’s Fault if You Don’t Understand It and It is Not an Excuse for What the President Did Last Week

President Obama & His Administration Did Indeed Have a Strategy for Syria: It is Not President Obama’s Fault if You Don’t Understand It and It is Not an Excuse for What the President Did Last Week

by | 88 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , , , ,

(Figure 1: Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve Campaign Design)

Since the President’s horrendous decision to pull US Special Forces, as well as the US Marine Corps artillery batteries supporting them out of Syria, a cottage industry has sprung up among the President’s supporters and defenders that this is really the fault of President Obama because President Obama and his administration either had no Syria strategy or they had a bad one. And that this is the ultimate driver of the President’s betrayal of our Syrian Kurdish and Arab partners in the Syrian Democratic Forces that has enabled Erdogan to begin a campaign that will likely include an attempted ethnocide of Syria’s Kurds.

Some of these defenders would not know, let alone understand, low intensity warfare and/or strategy and policy if it walked up and bit them. Some actually know better. But all of them are actually grappling with a strawman. President Obama and his administration had two different, but related strategies regarding Syria. The first was to quite simply not get sucked into the Syrian Civil War. Humanitarian assistance would be provided to refugees seeking shelter in adjacent states, internally displaced Syrians that made it to where the US was operating along the Syrian-Iraqi border or within Syria would be provided for and protected, but the US would not get pulled into the Syrian Civil War, and the underlying proxy wars by regional powers that had been partially driving it, and risk escalating that conflict as it would have regional consequences. Frankly, from a semi-informed observer as this was playing out, this drove a number of President Obama’s actual advisors and senior national security officials nuts as several of them wanted the US to intervene because of the humanitarian crisis being created by the Syrian Civil War. Instead President Obama opted for what was, essentially, a containment strategy of trying to keep the Syrian Civil War and the proxy wars being fought by Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran under its cover contained within Syria so as not to destabilize the rest of the region.

This strategy was really an assumption of risk strategy in order to buy time. The US, as the leader and largest and most militarily powerful member of the multinational coalition operating in the area, would assume the risk that the Syrian Civil War and the proxy wars for regional hegemony subsumed within it, would and could be kept within Syria. That they would not spill out and over its borders and negatively impact Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel. And that they wouldn’t negatively effect the two sets of high level diplomatic negotiations being undertaken in the region: the Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative of 2014 and what we now know were the JCPOA+5 negotiations with Iran regarding its nuclear energy and weapons programs. President Obama had decided to play for time. To assume the risk that either the Syrian Civil War, the proxy wars for regional hegemony taking place within it, or both wouldn’t blow up into a larger conflagration, spill over Syria’s borders, and engulf the entire region.

It is also important to remember that in 2013, when Bashar Assad’s chemical attack on his own citizenry crossed the red line that President Obama had unequivocally stated, there were calls for both a retaliatory strike to punish and deter Assad and for Congress to weigh in before any action was taken, President Obama did, in fact, seek Congressional approval for such a strike. The majority Republican House of Representatives refused to provide President Obama with the authorization to make that strike and enforce the red line he had set. Congressman Paul Ryan, the chair of House Budget Committee at the time, went so far as to assert that the called for strikes would not achieve US strategic objectives and that they would be “feckless show of force” that would “only damage our credibility”. A New York real estate developer and reality TV star named Donald Trump tweeted that “The only reason President Obama wants to attack Syria is to save face over his very dumb RED LINE statement. Do NOT attack Syria, fix U.S.A.” As a result of Congress denying him explicit military authorization to engage Syrian military targets outside of the Authorization for Military Force for the global war on terror, President Obama did not order a strike.

The Obama administrations’s second Syria strategy was for pursuing the campaign against ISIS. Specifically to apply low intensity and unconventional warfare doctrine to reduce ISIS’s physical caliphate that spanned Iraq and Syria’s shared border, and, ultimately, to reduce ISIS. This is the “by, with, and through” strategy that I’ve referenced here before and that you may have seen mentioned or referred to in news reports and other analyses. Simply put the “by, with, and through” strategy focuses on finding reliable host country partners who are willing to fight on their own behalf and then sending the US’s unconventional warfare specialists, the Green Berets (Special Forces) to embed with them in a train, advise, and assist mission. This is a very, very light footprint strategy. Small teams of US Special Forces known as Operational Detachments Alpha (ODAs), with specific enablers from other elements of US Special Operations Forces and, most likely some of the CIA’s paramilitary operators at the outset, as well as a small support element were sent into Syria to identify, recruit, and vet local Syrians that would then be trained, advised, and assisted with operations against ISIS. Eventually a small contingent of US Marine artillery were also moved into the US led Coalition’s theater of operations in Syria to provide fire support for the ODAs and their host country partners they were embedded with.

Train, advise, and assist has a very specific meaning here. Training means that the Soldiers on the ODAs would teach the Syrian Kurds and Arabs that are known as the Syrian Democratic Forces how to fight more effectively against ISIS. These host country fighters didn’t need to be taught how to fight, both the Syrian Kurds and Arabs have their own ways of war. What the Special Forces Soldiers on the ODAs did do was to teach them to fight more effectively at the tactical and operational levels against the specific type of enemy that is ISIS within the theater strategy that was established based on the US’s national strategy against ISIS. Training blends into advising and assisting, especially in regard to logistics and planning. As the Syrian Democratic Forces became a more effective host country fighting force, especially within the context of the type of campaign that had been designed to reduce ISIS’s physical caliphate, defeat them, and then retard their ability to continue to terrorize and destabilize the region*, the US Special Forces would do less assisting in the actual combat operations. Part of the assistance was also air support. The US led Coalition flew sorties day and night as necessary to degrade ISIS targets on the ground.  Here is the link to the continually updated list of these sorties and strikes.

The US and its coalition partners had been trying to successfully adapt and implement a “by, with, and through” strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan since GEN (ret) Petraues’s revised Counterinsurgency Manual, FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency, arrived to great fanfare in the mid aughts. The key idea behind a “by, with, and through” strategy is to empower the lowest societal level you can work with, ie the population layer/element, work from that level up (work from the bottom up), and then reconcile the tactical and operations gains made with the state to state strategic efforts, such as diplomatic initiatives and the use of economic and information power, being made at the top end. This never really worked during Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom (OIF and OEF) because we didn’t actually institute a true “by, with, and through” strategy. Rather, we had US Conventional Forces and our Coalition partners, also usually Conventional Forces, trying to implement and realize something that is the specialty of US Special Forces. I’m not knocking the efforts put in or the actual tactical and operational successes achieved, as there were and are many, just that the size of Iraq and Afghanistan and the need to have Conventional Forces work outside their expertise by undertaking an unconventional warfare strategy, did not lead to theater strategic success. Often because of failures at the national and theater strategic levels and despite the tactical and operational successes.

The size, scope, and scale of OIF and OEF made it impossible to let Special Forces take the lead as we simply do not have enough Green Berets to work one entire theater the size of Iraq, let alone two with the second theater being the size of Afghanistan. Even if we pulled in all the other US Special Operations Forces – SEALs, Operational Detachment Delta/Delta Force, Rangers, Air Commandos, Recon Marines, the Intelligence Support Activity (Gray Fox/Field Operating Group), Civil Affairs, and PSYOPers – and had them pick up the slack while ignoring their own missions and mission specialty areas, we still wouldn’t have had enough Special Operations Forces to do the job. There is a reason that Marines and Special Operations Forces fight battles and conventional Armies fight campaigns and wars in the Land Domain; because the former do not have the capacity to scale to the latter.

The campaign against ISIS in Syria, however, was different. The theater of operations was limited in size. We had been able to identify, recruit, vet, and then train reliable host country partners that we and our Coalition allies could work “by, with, and through”. A limited number of Operational Detachment Alphas, plussed up with personnel from other SOF elements, with a small support element and a small amount of Marine artillery batteries for fire support were tremendously successful! Perhaps beyond anyone’s legitimate expectations based on the mixed results from trying to apply the “by, with, and through” strategy during the latter portions of Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. And that success carried over to maintaining the peace in the area of operations once ISIS’s physical caliphate had been reduced. About 1,000 US Special Forces and Special Operating Forces, working with the SDF, had been able to reduce ISIS’s physical caliphate to nothing because the SDF, as the host country partners, did the hard, dangerous, and deadly work. Which is why the SDF suffered over 10,000 killed in action and the US Special Forces partnering with them suffered zero KIA in this campaign.

What the President has thrown away with his rash and ill considered pull out and betrayal of our Syrian Kurdish and Arab allies, and what his defenders and supporters don’t understand in their rush to defend him by blaming all of this on President Obama and his administration, is just how successful this campaign against ISIS has been. How much reward we reaped in exchange for the amount of blood and treasure wagered and risk assumed. And how well it was working to maintain the peace in this area of Syria by preventing ISIS from reestablishing a stable physical ground base of operations from which to try to reestablish the physical caliphate.

There wasn’t one single Obama administration strategy for Syria, there were two distinct and specific strategies. The first was to assume risk by not intervening in the Syrian Civil War in order to buy time for what were considered to be other regional priorities – the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations and the JCPOA+5 negotiations and the reduction of ISIS. The second was an unconventional warfare strategy to degrade and reduce ISIS’s physical caliphate and reduce ISIS’s capacity to continue to terrorize and destabilize the region. While the first strategy’s efficacy is debatable, the second strategy to counter ISIS has been successful beyond all possible expectations. And the President has thrown away all of that success and by doing so betrayed our Syrian Kurdish and Arab partners, weakened and diminished the United States power and ability to project power, and degraded our moral standing. He has further destabilized the region. He has handed the Russians, the Syrians, the Iranians, and the Turks a victory without them having to actually contest for it. And he has most likely set the conditions for Erdogan to try to finally solve his Kurdish problem.

Open thread!

This post is dedicated to the late Sergeant First Class (ret) Terry Caldwell. Terry was my Area Specialty Officer (ASO) and taught me everything I know about small team operations and the practical realities of asymmetric, irregular, and unconventional warfare. Rest well Old Man!

* Interestingly enough the chart at the previous link is based on the four phases of conventional warfare, not the seven phases of unconventional warfare used by US Special Forces, which is the result of the commend element of CJTF-OIR being a conventional 3 star Corps headquarters. There is also a full description of the campaign at that link.

Disclosure: In May 2015 I was on site to present the kickoff and keynote briefing of XVIII Airborne Corps’ strategic assessment week and was on site throughout the week as the cultural subject matter expert/cultural advisor as their preparation for assuming command of Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve. The briefing focused on the regional strategic and geo-strategic considerations of the Levantine problem set and the campaign against ISIS. It was specifically prepared for the Commanding General, Command Group, senior staff, as much of their staff as could be jammed into the auditorium, and a variety of attendees by secure videoteleconference at a number of outstations. Also in attendance were several senior leaders (general officers) from our Coalition partners who were on the Coalition senior staff. In the weeks after the briefing I prepared a strategic assessment on how to leverage the campaign against ISIS to set the conditions in the theater of operations to secure the peace after the termination of military operations. My work for XVIII Airborne Corps was as a private consultant being paid on contract. I was asked to do this work by the then Corps’ G5 (Officer in Charge of Plans), who I’d both previously worked with at III Corps and who was a student at USAWC when I was the cultural advisor at both. My civilian mobilization/appointment as a senior civil servant at both USAWC and the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Security Dialogue assigned to US Army Europe were not political appointments. I was not then, nor have a I ever been, part of President Obama’s appointed foreign policy, national security, and/or defense policy team, though I did provide significant support to a number of those appointees during my civilian mobilization from 2010 through 2014.

 

Reader Interactions

88Comments

  1. 1.

    TS (the original)

    I would hazard a guess that most members of congress – let alone anyone else in the US or the world – do not understand the techniques and actions of modern warfare as has been played out in this region for the past 30+ years. You can probably correct me & tell me when it all started – no doubt earlier than my memories.

    Thanks Adam. I did not understand President Obama’s strategy at the time and the media certainly didn’t explain it in any supportive way.

  2. 2.

    Patricia Kayden

    If we keep in mind that Trump is Putin’s puppet, everything he’s doing makes sense.

  5. 5.

    Mary G

    They don’t have much to work with, so they blame the black guy.

    It was a surprise just how few boots we had on the ground, and the credit for the victory over ISIS that the president reversed goes to the Kurds. All of the shenanigans today is moving their plight out of the news, which is also shameful.

  8. 8.

    Jeffro

    @Patricia Kayden: THIS. “Ok, he’s not a Russian puppet. But if he WERE…what exactly would be different?” – question to be asked of every Republican ever from now until the heat death of the universe.

  9. 9.

    Adam L Silverman

    I’ve got to go run a quick errand. There are ribeye steaks on sale! I’ll be back in 30 or so.

  10. 10.

    Jeffro

    Adam, great post and thank you.

    It’s almost like the previous President had a complex, and well-thought, out strategy for dealing with a number of incredibly difficult problems – to at least secure the least-bad outcome – and the current president* just sort of picked up the phone and fucked all that up.

    We may have to reflect upon that, going forward, in terms of governance models. My preference is to ban the Republican Party from any office, period, but I’m open to suggestions.

  11. 11.

    Mary G

    Nancy SMASH has picture of her Trump tweeted into her Twitter banner, and this is probably what set him off:

    Per Dem aide:
    Schumer to Trump: "Is your plan to rely on the Syrians and the Turks?"
    Trump: "Our plan is to keep the American people safe."
    Pelosi: "That's not a plan. That's a goal."—

    Karen Tumulty (@ktumulty) October 16, 2019

  12. 12.

    japa21

    Adam, Trump defeated ISIS all on his own. He did it. Nobody helped. I know that because he said so today.

    More seriously, thanks for explaining Obama’s strategies, and the efficacy, or not, of both.

    Curious. What changes, if any, did Trump make to Obama’s plan, other than throw everything in the crapper with this latest move?

  13. 13.

    Yutsano

    @Jeffro: Personally I’m going for the Big Rip.

    And I want this albatross to hang on every Republican for at least three generations. Yes I’m being kind.

  14. 14.

    Cheryl Rofer

    Very helpful, Adam. Thanks.

    The problem is that it doesn’t easily boil down to something like “red line –> bomb them!”

    Reading this, it becomes even more obvious why Obama took the Russian/Syrian offer of giving up Syria’s chemical weapons over a bombing campaign that would have taken out only a small fraction of them. That calculation of relative benefits has always seemed sufficient to me, but it’s also consistent with Obama’s strategy as you describe it – don’t get sucked into the war.

    This has continued to annoy me – so many people of all political persuasions think it’s more important to do the macho thing of hitting back over a red line than to get greater benefits.

  15. 15.

    Mary G

    Only the best people, per WaPo: Amid impeachment probe, Gordon Sondland is overseeing a renovation of his residence that has cost $1 million in taxpayer money.

    BRUSSELS — Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union and a central figure in the House impeachment inquiry of President Trump, is overseeing a nearly $1 million renovation of his government-provided residence, paid for with taxpayer money, that current and former officials have criticized as extravagant and unnecessary.

    The work on the ambassador’s home on the outskirts of Brussels includes more than $400,000 in kitchen renovations, nearly $30,000 for a new sound system and $95,000 for an outdoor “living pod” with a pergola and electric heating, LED lighting strips and a remote-control system, government procurement records show.

    The State Department also has allocated more than $100,000 for an “alternate” residence for Sondland for September and October, while work is performed.

    ETA: a detail: The records show $82,000 was spent on a bathroom renovation labeled “backside office.” Renovation of a restroom in a vestibule, a more public space, cost about $54,000, the records show.

  16. 16.

    chopper

    @Mary G:

    Pelosi: “That’s not a plan. That’s a goal.”

    and you just know the generals to trump’s right were nodding along with this.

  17. 17.

    TS (the original)

    @Mary G: That picture – talk about the adult in the room & is she the only woman at the table or is there one more just glimpsed? All the old white guys, heads down, being lectured. That is one First Class Speaker.

  18. 18.

    Jeffro

    @Mary G: I just saw that, THAT’S AWESOME!

    I’m sure he will respond well to a widely-retweeted photo of a woman standing up and pointing her finger at him

  20. 20.

    Roger Moore

    @Cheryl Rofer:

    This has continued to annoy me – so many people of all political persuasions think it’s more important to do the macho thing of hitting back over a red line than to get greater benefits.

    To me, the biggest thing about Trump’s abrupt actions in Syria is that it should completely undermine all claims about the importance of bombing people in order to maintain our credibility. Abruptly encouraging Turkey to overrun our erstwhile allies and turning tail and running is what lacking credibility looks like. Failing to follow through on your most belligerent rhetoric is a minor blip in comparison.

  22. 22.

    Mary G

    Ex-soldier who worked with Kurds during three tours of duty shares a message from one of them:

    This is the most amazing thing. "I shouted and said I know this person and looked closely to the children you took picture with and recognized 4-5 of them. I just want to reach out to you and tell you will stay true friend to us and we always remember you as one us." t.co/dHukBIcOzY pic.twitter.com/6fLkBYcy1t— Fred Wellman (@FPWellman) October 16, 2019

    That is gracious. I would be like “all American pigs must die!”

  23. 23.

    Cameron

    I’ll admit that I’m kind of slow and not so quick on the uptake, but under what legal authority are U.S. troops operating in Syria?

  24. 24.

    Mnemosyne

    Sadly, I’ve been seeing a lot of this crap on the isolationist left as well — they love that Trump pulled out when the “warmongering” Obama didn’t and could not care less that people they don’t know are being massacred.

    And, of course, there’s also a massive social media operation insisting that Assad is just restoring Syrians to their rightful lands that they were forced to abandoned. Gee, I wonder who could be running that … ? ??

  26. 26.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Roger Moore: You make an excellent point. There has always been great doubt about what some of us call “the credibility fairy,” the idea that bombing people convinces others that you are one mean sob that they’d better not cross. There’s actually data that it doesn’t matter.

    Acting like a fool who has no idea of how wars are run, pulling out troops with no plan, betraying allies, writing letters that sound like they are from a 14-year-old trying to be a Mafia boss, yes, those undermine credibility.

  27. 27.

    Mnemosyne

    @Cameron:

    As I understand it, the legal authority of the Kurds asked for our help.

    But, hey, they’re all being slaughtered now that we left, so what are you complaining about? That they didn’t get murdered sooner?

  28. 28.

    Raven Onthill

    OK. So the USA has surrendered to Syria and Russia, and let Daesh loose again. So. Where are we?

    I am speculating about a tripartite balance of power among Russia, China, and the USA in the Middle East and Central Asia. I’m unclear on the details but I think it might be Russia – Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, USA – Israel, Arabian peninsula, China – Iran, Afghanistan. Iraq, I suppose, is up for grabs.

    What do people think?

  30. 30.

    debbie

    And the President has thrown away all of that success and by doing so betrayed our Syrian Kurdish and Arab partners, weakened and diminished the United States power and ability to project power, and degraded our moral standing. He has further destabilized the region. He has handed the Russians, the Syrians, the Iranians, and the Turks a victory without them having to actually contest for it. And he has most likely set the conditions for Erdogan to try to finally solve his Kurdish problem.

    Even Bibi was upset with this move, wasn’t he?

  31. 31.

    Cameron

    @Mnemosyne: I’m not aware that I was complaining about anything, but your response is most enlightening. You think our intervention was to help the Kurds? Interesting.

  32. 32.

    Mary G

    More on the meeting:

    Wow– more details on the White House meeting, via a senior Democratic aide:
    Pelosi directly to Trump: Russia has always wanted a "foothold in the Middle East" and now it has one.
    "All roads with you lead to Putin."

    — Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) October 16, 2019

  34. 34.

    RAVEN

    I wonder how much this shit cost?

    Washington (CNN)Two US Air Force F-15 jets conducted an airstrike targeting an American munitions storage bunker at a US base in Syria Wednesday in order to prevent the munitions and other equipment from falling into the hands of armed groups, two US defense officials told CNN.

  35. 35.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Cheryl Rofer: And in this case it really wasn’t and still isn’t clear who employed the chemical weapons in that specific attack. And if Congress refuses to give approval for an attack, after demanding they wanted a say, then the smart thing to do is to not attack.

  37. 37.

    Jeffro

    @Mary G: I can’t imagine what set him off about that last line. LOLOLOL

    Fox News dot com has the ‘Dems Storm Out’ as its headline at the moment…the GOP apparently finds it “baffling”. ORLY? I do love how every last bit of insanity and weakness trump still has rattling around in his swiss cheese brain is being projected onto Nancy Smash. Keep doing that, trumpov, it’s working, absolutely! LOL

    Speaking of Faux, I noticed they had a small article up quoting Moody’s as saying that trumpov is likely to win in 2020 “unless Dem turnout is high”. Let’s walk through all of that, shall we Moodys? The Dems just had a nice big ol’ Blue Wave a year ago and show no signs of settling down. The country is already – a MAJORITY! – in favor of not just impeaching but removing this asshole. trumpov’s “strongly oppose” numbers are twice as high as his “strongly support” ones.

    Oh and as if that isn’t enough, he’s melting down in new ways each hour, not just each new day. Impeachable crimes are mounting up and Senators are wavering.

    They could at least take 20 minutes and come up with ‘Recommendation B’: “here’s what we think will happen if and when this clown is impeached and removed in early 2020”. Why not? It’d be just as worthwhile as all their other predictions.

  41. 41.

    Adam L Silverman

    @debbie: More scared that he’d bought a pig in a poke. That he thought he’d locked the President in to support him and Israel and now he’s realizing that the President is unreliable.

  42. 42.

    Ladyraxterinok

    @Cheryl Rofer:
    I thought the scare 24/7 Nazi bombing of London in WWII pretty well showed that constant bombing can just anger your target population and make them resist/fight harder.

    IIRC we got that message in my freshman 57-58 American history course in the section on the war.

    Maybe having been born during the war and it still being so close in time we got the message with every breath?

  43. 43.

    mad citizen

    @Mary G: I suppose this jab from Nancy was as much for everyone else in the room as well as trumpov. When or will the republican party ever wake up to what is going on? w t f ?

  45. 45.

    Leto

    @RAVEN: Just the F-15s cost, approx, $23k per hour to fly to go bomb our own munitions. The munitions, lets go with hundreds of $k. The cost to our reputation? Priceless.

    When you have to go batshit dumb, go Trumpov.

  46. 46.

    patrick II

    Some Republicans are complaining that Obama wasn’t aggressive enough, particularly regarding letting Assad cross the “red line”. They ignore Mcconnell’s refusal to back Obama’s proposal to bomb the Syrian air force. Looking back now I wonder if Mcconnell wasn’t already too good of a friend of Russia. Just me being paranoid I guess, just Mitch screwing over Obama at every oppoIrtunity regardless of harm to our country.

  51. 51.

    Laura Too

    Thank you Adam. Trying to keep up with this, but…it is so overwhelming. I appreciate your knowledge and perspective.

  55. 55.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    No meltdown! No meltdown! Nancy’s the meltdown!

    Donald J. Trump @ realDonaldTrump
    Nancy Pelosi needs help fast! There is either something wrong with her “upstairs,” or she just plain doesn’t like our great Country. She had a total meltdown in the White House today. It was very sad to watch. Pray for her, she is a very sick person!

  56. 56.

    J R in WV

    So after reading your well written piece about low intensity warfare, I thought about historical analogs — T. E Lawrence during WW I in this general area was a solo Special Warfare operative working with local forces grateful for the little bit of munitions the Brits could provide, to fight the Ottoman Empire.

    Interesting thought, eh?

    Long ago I read his writing about his war. Pretty amazing stuff. Then the movie was a work of art. Nearly historically accurate…

  57. 57.

    trollhattan

    @Leto:
    When Sherman was plowing through the Confederacy a lot of that renowned burning was conducted by the fleeing CSA Army. I’m sure the locals left behind to “greet” the Union were thrilled.

  61. 61.

    Mary G

    @patrick II: I think this is a years-long project by Putin, using white male supremacy, “religion,” and love of guns to infiltrate the Republican party. Russian mobsters have owned apartments in Trump Tower in NYC for a long time. It’s paid off for him beyond his wildest dreams.

  63. 63.

    Raven Onthill

    @Raven Onthill: Well, I suppose there could be a complete meltdown. Or maybe the Houthi could sweep out of Yemen and defeat the Saudis.

    The conflict promises to raise petroleum prices, pretty much regardless of how it falls out. I am looking forward to seeing conservatives embrace wind and solar power.

  70. 70.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Cheryl Rofer: I was providing some analytical support from my office at USAWC as well. Basically assessments of potential follow on effects. So I feel your pain.

  71. 71.

    Repatriated

    @RAVEN: The cost is secondary.

    The real problem is that our troops had to bug out without enough time to carry out the emergency destruction of munitions plan.

  72. 72.

    FelonyGovt

    Thank you, Adam. I so appreciate your knowledgeable and cogent explanations of these military and security issues.

  73. 73.

    WaterGirl

    @Mary G: I’m absolutely certain that Nancy Pelosi’s absolute disdain for Trump drives him into a rage. The three big Ds – disregard, disrespect, disdain.

    Every one of them is a thing that must not be tolerated if your name is Donald J. Trump. And from a woman!!!

    Go Nancy.

  75. 75.

    Adam L Silverman

    Oh good!

  77. 77.

    Mike S (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)

    Thank you for this Adam. I don’t know where I could learn this otherwise. I only knew the faint and sketchy outline of this before.

  81. 81.

    J R in WV

    Bombing our own bases to prevent them from falling into the hands of our enemies. Not since Vietnam… fuck LBJ.

    Fuck Trump.

  82. 82.

    cain

    @Adam L Silverman:

    debbie: More scared that he’d bought a pig in a poke. That he thought he’d locked the President in to support him and Israel and now he’s realizing that the President is unreliable.

    Worse.. he made Israel’s standing weaker by empowering her enemies. Bibi is going to be in deep shit for helping prop up Trump

  84. 84.

    Sally

    May I please add, with respect, that Gen (ret) Patraues wrote (hmmm) F M 3-24 with a huge assist from Lt-Col (ret) Kilcullen, and who never takes any credit. Even though he had written this exactly sort of material widely and previously for the Australian Army. With great respect.

  85. 85.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Sally: Let me be clear in case it was confusing in the text: GEN (ret) Petraues did not actually write FM 3-24. He assembled a team of subject matter experts, as the Combined Arms Center Commanding General, to provide inputs to the doctrine writers at the Combined Arms Center so they could revise the old manual. However, he is credited, because he was the commanding general that ordered the revision, with the revision. The XO on the project is my former colleague from USAWC and now retired colonel Con Crane, PhD. It was Con who brought all the historical pieces and context together and who oversaw the day to day operations of the team of writers that did the revisions. Kilcullen and Nagl were involved. As was Kilcullen’s wife, Janice Davidson. One of my former bosses was also involved. As was one of my senior mentors. And several other people. When they did the revisions in 2014 for the most recent version, Con asked me to provide him with revisions to the culture center which he forwarded to the doctrine shop. Which, based on what Con told me at the time, the doctrine shop completely ignored because they really didn’t want any inputs.

    To be brutally honest, both the revision that GEN (ret) Petraeus had done in the mid aughts and the 2014 revision of that revision are a mess. They are a mess historically. They are a mess conceptually. There are a lot of reasons for that, but it’s late and I’m not going to write a post about them now.

    I’ve been at programs with Kilcullen. Where I’ve been on panels with Con Crane, Nagl, and Kilcullen’s wife – he was on a panel later in the program. He does take credit. Hell there was a cottage industry at one point of him promoting his relationship to Petraeus as his COIN advisor in Iraq. Lots of B roll footage, lots of interviews. The simple reality is that what that group tried to do failed. And it failed not because of what was being done at the brigade and below level, but what was being done at the theater and force command, embassy, and national command authority level.

Comments are closed.