New war in Syria won't be short and easy
New War in Syria Won't Be Short or Easy
The U.S. and its allies will be forced into a ground fight if they want to defeat the extremists, a former air attack commando says.
Lt. Gen. William C. Mayville Jr. speaks about the Syrian bombing campaign Tuesday at the Pentagon.
The new U.S. war in Syria will not yield quick or easy solutions. Pentagon officials believe the fight may last for many months, if not longer, and reports that the Islamic State group is already fleeing into dense civilian populations may mean victory hinges on some sort of ground force.
“I would think of it in terms of years,” Army Lt. Gen. William C. Mayville Jr., operations chief for the Defense Department Joint Staff, said at a Pentagon briefing the morning after the airstrikes in Syria began.
The new battlefield in Syria represents an extension of what the U.S. hopes to achieve regionally, Mayville said. The strategy is designed to break up Islamic State group havens, training grounds, encampments and financial centers in Syria in an attempt to weaken its posture in neighboring Iraq. Iraqi security forces and the Kurdish peshmerga should then be able to retake ground seized by the extremist fighters in Iraq.
“What you saw today, and what you saw last night, were disruptions to ISIL forces that were enabling their strikes into Iraq,” the general said, using a common alternative name for the Islamic State group, meaning the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
The time and place of further attacks will be dictated by intelligence on the ground and opportunities the U.S. and its Arab partners see in targeting the group’s other points of strength and resources, he said.
Map of the airstrike campaign in Syria. Airstrikes are marked in orange. See more airstrike images here.
But the strikes also reveal a potential weakness of the U.S. and coalition strategy in Syria. The attacks, which began at midnight in Syria, were against buildings and fixed objects, all of which were “known targets.” Mike Golembesky, a former Marine Corps commando who specialized in operating behind enemy lines to call in airstrikes – a position known as a joint terminal air controller, or JTAC – says such strikes don’t require someone on the ground for guidance.
“It’s when you start having ground troops integrated with air power,” says Golembesky, who served in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010 after time in Iraq guarding posts as an infantry Marine at the Syrian border. “That is when you need controllers on the ground targeting real-time, moving and sometimes close-proximity targets.”
President Barack Obama has promised U.S. ground troops will not participate in combat in Iraq or Syria, meaning someone else will have to take their place. But the Defense Department has seen intelligence that indicates Islamic State group fighters are already retreating into civilian areas, making it more difficult to target them from the skies.
The absence of ground troops in support of airstrikes makes it nearly impossible to confirm whether a target was killed, and that the strike went according to plan.
“You can only gather so much information from drone cameras and radio/phone chatter,” says Golembesky, who documented his experiences in a book, “Level Zero Heroes: The Story of U.S. Marine Special Operations in Bala Murghab, Afghanistan.” The U.S. and its allies could be squeezed into deploying some sort of ground force in as soon as a week, he says, depending on how quickly extremists spread into civilian regions.
“This type of air campaign will only get you so far. These guys are rats, and if we are serious about destroying them, then eventually someone is going to have to kick in the door and shine the light on them,” he says.
Pentagon officials declined to comment on whether the U.S. was working with any ground force for the latest strikes in Syria.
“For this operation, I can tell you that based on our [intelligence/surveillance/reconnaissance] capabilities and careful evaluation, we have high confidence in the ISIL and Khorasan group targets we chose and ultimately struck,” says Navy Cmdr. Elissa Smith, a Defense Department spokeswoman. “As always, before any mission, every precaution is taken to ensure civilians are not harmed.”
Administration officials have leaned on the plan Obama announced two weeks ago that involves training moderate factions of the Syrian opposition in Saudi Arabia. They will eventually return to Syria and redirect their fight from against the regime of President Bashar Assad to the extremists occupying their homeland.
The plan’s main issue is its timeline. The Pentagon’s own schedule involves taking up to five months to identify the rebels that can be safely trained, and then as long as a year to train them into an organized militia. Defense officials estimate as many as 3,000 rebels per year could be trained once the program is operational.
That’s a long time to wait while the Islamic State group continues to lay siege to Iraq and Syria. But the Pentagon insists it can make do.
“There are other ways to deliver precise munitions than putting JTACs forward,” Mayville said Tuesday. “Obviously, it’s something that we would prefer to do.”
He pointed to operations around Iraq’s Mount Sinjar to rescue trapped Yazidis, and other strikes that retook areas around the Mosul and Haditha dams from Islamic State fighters. Those missions, however, included ground support from the allied Iraqi security forces and Kurdish peshmerga.
The Pentagon and U.S. Central Command – which is overseeing this latest mission – released photos of the Syrian targets before and after the strikes, and some video of the attacks. They indeed were all against fixed targets such as buildings and broad encampments.
Mayville also offered a few new details of the strikes, which took place in three waves beginning at midnight in Syria. The first wave consisted largely of Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from two ships in international waters in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea. The missiles were aimed at Khorasan group compounds near Aleppo in western Syria, in an attempt to prevent the al-Qaida-linked network from conducting what the U.S. believes was an imminent attack against Europe or the U.S.
The second and third attacks involved cooperation from the militaries of Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with Qatar in a support role. Air forces dropped laser-guided munitions and bombs on the northern and eastern parts of Syria, including Islamic State group stronghold Raqqa in the north and areas around Dayr az-Zawr in the east.
American drones and fighter jets participated in the strikes, which marked the stealthy F-22 Raptor’s inaugural combat role after the fighter was commissioned in 2005.
Syrian anti-aircraft defenses were in a “passive mode,” Mayville said, declining to offer further details. This usually means radar is picking up on incoming aircraft but not directly tracking their locations. The Syrian government may have opted to power down its active radar after receiving word from the U.S. the strikes were coming, for fear they would have been targeted in an act of defense by American or coalition warplanes.
The Pentagon says the latest strikes were “very successful” and “only the beginning.” Now that the Islamic State group knows it cannot operate in the open, the next attacks may not be so clear-cut.
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