Breaking His Army

In 20 months of revolt--the first 10 of which were fairly low key, giving an indication of the scale of fighting now--an estimated 40,000 Syrians have died. Assad is breaking his army. When it breaks, the regime and possibly the state itself will collapse.

In over 8 years of war in Iraq, perhaps 120,000 Iraqi civilians died (the Iraqi government says far fewer than that died) along with at least 10,000 Iraqi security personnel and about 4,500 US casualties plus over 300 Coalition personnel. About 1,500 contractors were killed. A thousand Awakening militiamen have died on the government side, too.

Perhaps 25,000 insurgents and terrorists were killed on top of an estimated 9,000 of Saddam's forces in the initial invasion.

It is unclear how many Iraqi civilian casualties are actually insurgents.

The casualties in Syria are fairly astounding by comparison:

More than 40,000 people have been killed in 20 months of conflict between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces and those fighting for his overthrow, a violence monitoring group said on Friday.

Rami Abdelrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said about half the fatalities were civilians and the other half split about evenly between rebels and government soldiers.

So 20,000 civilians have died so far in Syria. Ten thousand rebels have been killed and the same number of government forces have been killed. And the pace accelerated. As late as march of this year, the total casualties stood at 10,000. Thirty thousand more have died in the last 8 months.

Toss in desertions from the Syrian ground forces, too.

The picture is of a Syrian army that is shrinking from casualties in an ineffective fight that is not inflicting enough casualties on the rebels to degrade the rebels.

There simply aren't enough troops to police the amount of people Syria has. Rebels are beginning to control areas of Syria as the Syrian ground forces find they have too few men to hold what they have.

Russia can protest the deployment of NATO Patriot missiles to the Turkish border, but the missiles aren't that important. Unless Russia is willing to commit a few paratrooper divisions to the fight and convince Assad to abandon most of the country east of Damascus to the rebels, the force-to-population ratio is too low to win.

And the Syrian army is in for the duration with no rotations home except for death or major injury.

This army will break. Will we be able to move fast enough to cope when it shatters?