Hey, let's look at a real death trap for soldiers--the Syria Revolt:
As of Tuesday evening, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it had documented the deaths of 14,521 soldiers. The activist group issues daily detailed updates on casualties on both sides.
Syria analyst Jeffrey White estimated that an average of 40 Syrian soldiers are killed every day, or about 1,200 a month. He said this is based on the analysis of funeral data, but he declined to elaborate.
In no year did our losses in Iraq ever exceed one thousand. Losing 4 troops per day represented a bad month. If accurate, this Syrian casualty rate is astounding. Add in the wounded who can't return to battle (most wounded can return to the fight) and desertions, and it is easy to see why Assad is recruiting militias to supplement the troops.
Further, the army casualties would be primarily in the poor bloody infantry, leaving an army with a higher proportion of support troops and artillery units rather than infantry. So there is more reliance on bombardment. And an increasingly brittle army of rear echelon types screened by not much.
And I still see no reports on training new army troops. Where one would properly put them through training without being targets is one problem, I imagine. You'd need troops just to guard the training facilities.
I don't know how long Assad's army can fight before its morale breaks. Assad has an advantage over us in Iraq because he has no choice but to fight--he can't just get tired, decide to cut his losses, and go home. There is no exit strategy but defeat.
But I might need to wonder how long the army can fight before it just dies off. Quagmire is the best case scenario for Assad, now.
UPDATE: Related discussion of US casualty rates.
UPDATE: Rumors of a military draft panic Damascus residents:
When a government-linked Islamic body in Syria said this week it was a "sacred duty" to join the army and fight the revolt, Damascus was ablaze with rumors of a mass military draft.
Men of military age panicked, worrying they would be given a gun and told to fight never-ending street battles with rebel fighters before being returned to their families in a wooden box, like thousands of soldiers over the past two years.
These men are unwilling to fight for their own government. Even in the Iraq War, we had no problem getting volunteers to enlist and fight in Iraq. Just as a point of comparison for what "an increasingly unpopular war" against an actual national resistance looks like.
The Assad regime denies that they are planning a mass draft, but if they could get away with it, they'd do it:
The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London said on Thursday the Syrian army's strength has roughly halved to around 110,000 men due to defections, desertions and battlefield losses.
"Essentially, the regime could only be certain of the loyalty of the mainly Alawite Special Forces, the Republican Guard, and the elite 3rd and 4th Divisions - perhaps 50,000 troops in total," the think tank said in its annual report on the world's militaries.
Strategypage has more, describing how Assad has about 200,000 loyal forces, with half being mobile forces he can count on:
Two years ago the Syrian security forces had 450,000 personnel (50,000 secret police, 300,000 troops and 100,000 police). About half this force is now gone. Over 30,000 have been killed or badly wounded. Over 100,000 have deserted and nearly 100,000 troops are in units that the government is reluctant to send into combat because of loyalty issues. Over the last year about 100,000 armed men have joined the Assads, mostly as local militia. But the Assads have fewer than 100,000 troops they can move around to fight the rebels. There’s another 100,000 that are, in effect, garrisons in places like the [west] (near the coast) Damascus and towns and cities in central Syria that will fight defensively, but will not (or the government will not order to) move elsewhere. The government is having difficulty finding replacements for existing soldiers and police (especially the secret police who are the most loyal and effective armed men the government has). Several thousand of the security forces are being killed or wounded each month. Add in over a thousand desertions and you have a situation where the Assad forces keep getting weaker while the rebels grow stronger. There’s little doubt where this is going. ...
Throughout the country there are now over a million armed men organized for fighting. Less than a third of those are loyal to the government and there only about 100,000 troops and secret police that the Assads can really depend on.
If the rebels really have 700,000 armed men, I assume that represents 70,000 in combat. I thought the general rule of thumb was that only about 10% of insurgents are really full time rebels while the rest are part-timers who assist from time to time and are a logistics and intelligence resource for the active fighters.
Recall too, that in both Iraq and Afghanistan, our enemies relied on mines and IEDs and avoided direct combat with our troops. In Syria, press reports show lots of infantry-type fire fights. I haven't seen break downs of casualties, but I'd bet that the vast majority of Syrian security force casualties are from direct fire weapons. That's another indication of the strength of the Syrian rebels in contrast to Iraqi and Afghan insurgents in our fights.
I will say, if Assad really has 200,000 ground security forces available, they probably have enough on paper to hold an arc from the western coastal region down to Damascus--but excluding Aleppo. But Assad would have to evacuate security forces, key assets (like ammunition, arms, chemical weapons, missiles, and aircraft), and supporters from areas outside that core area. And Assad would have to restore the morale of his supporters and troops. I still think a Russian combat contingent (say a naval infantry regiment at Russia's naval post in Syria and a parachute regiment to screen the truncated border with Turkey) might do the trick.
But Syrian morale might not survive such a big withdrawal. Which is rough since Syrian morale won't survive the current fight, either.
