If Assad is sleeping better at night because of analysis like this, he's foolish:
Despite President Obama’s assertion on Thursday that he reserves “the options of taking additional steps, both diplomatic and military,” foreign intervention in Syria seems a distant prospect, and that, along with a string of military successes, has fueled the perception that president Bashar al-Assad now has the upper hand in his country’s bloody civil war. As Republican Sen. John McCain bluntly put it this week: "Right now, Bashar al-Assad is winning."
No, Assad is not winning. He is doing better in battle recently for two reasons as I explain in this post. One, he has abandoned the fight for all of Syria and is focused on the region from Damascus up to the Turkish border closer to the coast; and he has had an infusion of loyal but ill-trained militias to replace the losses his infantry suffered in the last year of much more intensive battle.
Indeed, the article even admits the first factor.
These are not factors that will lead Assad to win the war.
Obviously, not fighting for the whole of Syria is an indication. For Syria to win this way--this has to be the first step of a phased reconquest of the whole country. This requires the Assad government to secure their core area and then rebuild their military to advance out of their core area to retake the country. This could require half a million ground troops and security forces.
I don't believe that Assad has even a couple hundred thousand ground security forces. And his demographic base of the Alawite community and other minorities aren't going to be able to generate the numbers for the time needed (or the economic activity to support that effort).
While the addition of 60,000 militias organized with Iran's help (and an assist by Hezbollah) is bigger than I expected, these loyal forces are being used as the shock troops of the Assad offensives to drive back rebels from strongholds within the core Syria that Assad is fighting for right now. This will burn them up.
Throughout the Iraq War (and in the Afghanistan post-surge phases) I did back-of-the-envelope calculations and concluded we had enough troops to win in Iraq (here's one post on Iraq and one on Afghanistan). One key was to ignore the media's focus on just counting American troops. All troops and security forces counted--even militias. As I argued, it is ridiculous to assume all the troops need to be SEAL Team 6-quality. You wouldn't waste such troops in a traffic circle observation post or in some security detail in a relatively safe area. Police and local defense force militias have a role in less-demanding security functions.
When I said Assad needed militias, I assumed they'd be used to free up regulars for front line duties. This doesn't seem to be the case. No, the new militias are the shock troops.
They will be used up pretty fast in this role, I believe.
Consider the fighting:
Syrian government troops on Thursday flushed out rebels who had stormed a prison compound in the northern city of Aleppo in a bid to free hundreds of political prisoners inside.
The forced retreat was the latest setback for fighters seeking to topple President Bashar Assad, whose forces have been gaining ground in the country's civil war. ...
[Rebel] activists said the rebels were forced to retreat from the prison in Aleppo a day after they broke into the sprawling facility by setting off two simultaneous car bombs before dawn. By nightfall, the rebels had not dislodged regime forces or freed some 4,000 prisoners held inside.
The Observatory said Syrian warplanes bombarded areas around the prison causing casualties among rebels. State news agency SANA denied opposition fighters entered the prison compound, saying regime troops had repelled the attack.
But activists said fighting near the prison continued with rebels firing locally-made rockets at regime forces inside the facility late Thursday.
Remember that in both Iraq and Afghanistan (although there were some exceptions to this rule in Afghanistan), rebels and terrorists only launched television assaults on defended bases. That is, a small force would hit the gates of the outpost, and try to penetrate it before the tiny suicide-force was wiped out by the defenders.
And then count on reporters to wring their hands in despair at how the enemy keeps attacking even though the attack never had a chance of taking the base.
And even those were rare with IEDs and quick rocket or mortar barrages preferred.
The Syrian rebels are clearly far more formidable. Keep in mind that the rebel setback was in a lengthy effort to assault the prison and take it. This is no suicide raid. This is a battle. The rebels may have lost it, for now--but they fought a battle.
And this is part of a long battle in Aleppo that has settled into a stalemate with both sides holding portions of the city. This has been a Verdun for the Assad infantry and was a mistake in the first place.
When enough militia die, lots of the rest will go home. And then Assad will have to transfer his capital to the coast, abandon Damascus, and hope that the threat of jihadi rebels will motivate the Alawites and any friends left to rally to the Assad banner one last time to hold their rump Alawite mini-state, and then look to Lebanon for added depth in the south by working with Hezbollah to create a pro-Assad region in the north of Lebanon.
And a regiment of Russian paratrooper wouldn't hurt, either.
Have no doubt. Assad is losing. Even Hitler managed to scrape up forces for counter-offensives against the Western allies and Russians in the waning months of World War II.
UPDATE: No regiment yet, but the Russians have bolstered Assad's Mediterranean flank:
Russia has deployed upwards of a dozen ships to its naval base in Syria over the past three months, and recently sent advanced anti-ship missiles to the embattled Syrian government, highlighting the depth of Moscow’s commitment to the Assad regime and the challenges in finding an internationally palatable solution to the crisis. ...
The weapons enable “the regime to deter foreign forces looking to supply the opposition from the sea, or from undertaking a more active role if a no-fly zone or shipping embargo were to be declared at some point,” Nick Brown, editor in chief of IHS Jane’s International Defense Review, told the Times. “It’s a real ship killer.”
I don't think we'd risk surface vessels too close to Syria, anyway. Subs could provide plenty of cruise missiles. And we don't need a carrier with NATO Turkey and also Jordan close by. There are also British bases on Cyprus, for that matter.
But the Russian naval forces and missiles would help to prevent a Western blockade of shipments to Assad's forces.
UPDATE: I should say that it is not totally correct to say that there weren't battles in Iraq. But the battles that took place were American offensives into rebel- or terrorist-held terrain. I was talking about how the enemy attacked us, but don't want to imply that there weren't pitched battles at all in Iraq. In Syria, rebels do a good amount of attacking in order to capture terrain rather than just television operations or harassment.
