Syria has certainly blunted rebel momentum with the help of Iranian money and advice and Russian arms and diplomacy--with a strong assist by our administration which refused to play a strong hand against a teetering Assad when we could. Strategypage discusses this refusal by Assad to just step aside as our president advised him to do.
A major part is overcoming the manpower shortage that early on led me to conclude that Assad could at best hold his corner of Syria in an arc from the Turkish border near the coast down to the Israeli and Jordanian borders.
Strategypage writes:
Suddenly the Syrian government no longer has a military manpower crises. The government recently issued another amnesty for those who had failed to show up when conscripted and thousands of “draft dodgers” have changed their minds about avoiding military service.
This year, with Iranian help, Assad recovery in military manpower has been striking:
In early 2011 the Syrian security forces had 450,000 personnel (50,000 secret police, 300,000 troops and 100,000 police). About half this force was gone by early 2013. Over 30,000 had been killed or badly wounded. Over 100,000 had deserted and nearly 100,000 troops were in units that the government is reluctant to send into combat because of loyalty issues. During 2012 about 100,000 armed men joined the Assads, mostly as local militia. But the Assads had fewer than 100,000 troops they could move around to fight the rebels. There’s another 100,000 that are, in effect, garrisons in places like the east [sic--read that "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 them to) move elsewhere. The government was having difficulty finding replacements for army and police losses, 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 grew stronger. But the introduction of the Iranian supplied mercenaries changed everything.
I'd add that Assad also largely abandoned huge chunks of Syria in order to concentrate on the west.
The post notes that by summer 2013, Iran had put 10,000 Shia mercenaries into Syria to fight for Assad. I don't know how many died or went home, so I don't know what the current strength is. But added to several thousand Hezbollah fighters, Assad had shock troops to lead his far less motivated surviving forces.
The post also notes that Assad needed 150,000 conscripts per year out of 500,000 Syrians who turn 18 each year to keep his 450,000 security forces running. With the pro-Assad recruiting pool perhaps a quarter of the total, that still leaves Assad 25,000 short per year to support that size of a force.
Of course, Assad's loyal forces are much smaller than that pre-revolt figure, now. So as long as Assad's base of support is willing to send their 18-year-old sons to Assad, Assad can withstand the attrition if you just look at the math.
War is never just an attrition calculation. War is morale and not just math. I believe Napoleon put the ratio at 3:1.
Consider that in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, Iranian casualties ran about double the Iraqi casualties. During the war, the consensus was that Iraq was the side in danger of collapse since Iran's population was three times the size of Iraq's population, making the losses effectively greater for Iraq.
But Iraq did not break first--Iran did. The recruits stopped showing up to fuel human wave assaults and those in the field lost the will to hold their ground in the face of Iraqi firepower superiority and their expanded numbers.
And while Hezbollah may tire of the losses, they are training more men in order to rotate new forces into Syria. Since the Shia foreign legion that Iran has organized will presumably have lots of new, eager recruits coming in, Assad will likely always have a force of perhaps 10,000 shock troops to lead the assault.
But even with better recruits, Assad still is enduring heavy losses and has only a portion of his ground forces in mobile units that are capable of moving around the country and following the shock troops into action. Most are too ill-trained if loyal (the militias) or too shaky with loyalty despite training (the troops only trusted to hold their bases).
And if Saudi Arabai can funnel more Sunni foreign forces into Syria to bolster the rebels (who already have al Qaeda foreigners as their own shock troops), the Syrian garrison forces will continue to suffer casualties as the foreign Shia shock troops are moved to the next offensive.
Remember, there are apparently 100,000 rebels in the field--an amazing number when you consider we never faced more than 25,000 Sunni rebels in Iraq (al Qaeda, Baathists, and Sunni "nationalists"). Even if they can't hold ground in the face of the revived Assad ground forces, they can use hit-and-run tactics to inflict casualties and depress morale among Assad loyalists.
Yes, we harmed rebel morale and raised Assad's loyalist morale by making a chemical weapons deal with Assad that took even the threat of leading an aerial intervention off the table. And we've harmed rebel morale by refusing to send arms to non-jihadi rebels in large enough quantities to even begin to make a difference.
But despite our self-inflicted wounds, Assad is not out of the woods. We could reverse Assad's gains yet, if we decide that Assad is a bloody dictator with American blood on his hands who deserves to lose his grip on power rather than a valued partner in a pointless chemical weapons deal.
While Assad has stemmed the tide of rebel advances, I don't assume he has set himself on the path to victory. The foreign shock troops are few, his own casualties are still high, his security forces' morale is still shaky, his air force is not a decisive weapon, and too few Syrians provide the basis of support.
If the still-numerous rebels keep surviving and fighting without being permanently ejected from the core Syria that Assad is trying to clear and hold in the west, the Alawite core could collapse at any moment as the strain of endless war against the majority finally wears them down. You never know what might trigger that moment.
We need to work the problem, too.
