The period when American forces are flowing into a theater but before we are organized with enough troops is our period of maximum vulnerability. The Jordanian army is good enough to protect against Syrian ground attacks. We're getting ready to handle missile and air threats by planning to leave Patriot missiles in Jordan after a training exercise ends:
Oscar Seara, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said the military would be deploying Patriot missile launchers and F-16 fighter planes as part of a training exercise with the Jordanian military called Eager Lion.
“In order to enhance the defensive posture and capacity of Jordan, some of these assets may remain beyond the exercise at the request of the government of Jordan,” Seara said.
With the air defense missiles in place, the aircraft could return quickly if ground personnel remain, too.
With a shield in place, the question then arises about the sword that we might deploy in this southern front. Troops can be flown in, of course. But equipment must be shipped in. Crossing Israel or Iraq is unlikely. I'd guess we would ship equipment in through Aqaba. When we invaded Iraq in 2003, I kept looking for signs we were moving in enough equipment for a heavy division to advance out of eastern Jordan.
We did advance out of eastern Jordan, but it was limited to special forces with support from separate Army National Guard infantry battalions used to garrison airfields in western Iraq. I think there was a small contingent of Marines, too. The main effort came out of Kuwait.
But this time our main effort has to be Jordan. And this time, shipping stuff north from Aqaba would be the way to get equipment in. The equipment we could ship in most quietly would be the afloat prepositioned equipment of our Army and Marine Corps.
Other equipment in the Gulf region for Army heavy forces should remain in case Iran gets active in that region. But the afloat equipment could be moved in fairly quietly, I'd think.
Just a single Army brigade and a Marine Corps air-ground force based around a brigade-sized ground element would get us close to 20,000. We could also fly in a paratrooper brigade directly from the United States if we had to. We also have a paratrooper brigade based in Europe. I don't recall seeing casualty notices from 173rd Airborne in recent months, so I'll assume they are free rather than deployed in Afghanistan.
We'd also need a couple Turkish corps moving in from the north. Plus a Jordanian corps moving with our troops. Would French, British, and Italian forces enter Lebanon to keep the fighting from spreading too much there? And then move north and east to support the northern and southern fronts?
We need to defeat Iran and Assad. This won't be a clean win, given all the jihadis running around and the chemical weapons stockpiles that we'd have to deal with in the post-Assad chaos; but it would be a win to get rid of Assad who has been a deadly enemy of ours, and to remove an asset from Iran's ledger.
I still hope that supporting rebels could minimize our need to intervene except in the more narrow (but still tough) mission of securing chemical arms and missiles. But the war has dragged on so long and expanded so much during our period of inaction that I don't know if we can get away with the cheap option.
And I'd like to add that Assad would be in a tougher position if we hadn't walked away from Iraq at the end of 2011. Had we retained 25,000 troops in Iraq and remained active in promoting Iraqi political developments, there is no way that Iraq would be supporting Assad under tremendous pressure from Iran.
