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What Really Went Wrong With The US Military's Syria "Train And Equip" Program
Regular readers are no doubt familiar with The Pentagon’s ill-fated “train and assist” program for properly “vetted” Syrian rebels.
The program was announced to quite a bit of fanfare - and quite a bit of ridicule due to the burgeoning debate over what counts as a “moderate” fighter - back in May and the idea was to field a group of fighters 5,400 strong by the end of the calendar year. In all, the effort was set to cost US taxpayers some $500 million.
It’s not clear why anyone thought that the “new” strategy would be any more successful than previous efforts to funnel arms, money, and training to anti-Assad elements in Syria, but apparently, Washington was confident that this time around, America was going to get it “right.”
Well, things quickly went awry and before you knew it, the vast majority of the fighters who participated in the program had either defected, been killed or kidnapped, or simply wandered off into the desert never to be heard from again. In September, US Central Command Gen. Lloyd Austin told Congress that only “four or five” of the troops the US “trained and equipped” were still fighting. “Let’s not kid ourselves, that’s a joke. This is just a total failure,” Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said.
Now, we’re beginning to get a bit of color on what exactly went wrong. According to a new piece by McClatchy, disagreements between the fighters and their trainers along with lackluster pay and a kidnapping by al-Nusra just a week into the group’s deployment doomed the project from the outset.
Upon graduation, the first 54 fighters traveled from Turkey and Jordan back into Syria and ... promptly went on vacation. “Most had been in near-total isolation during their two months of training in Turkey and Jordan, and they wanted to see their families, many of whom had been under heavy government bombardment,” McClatchy says, adding that because “it was Ramadan, they voted to take a two-week break.”
Almost immediately after they returned to base, al-Nusra kidnapped the commander of the unit in which they were embedded - the infamous “Division 30.” Two days later, al-Nusra kidnapped 10 of the trainees. Here’s McClatchy:
On July 29, a day after U.S. aircraft had attacked an outpost of the Nusra Front, al Qaida’s Syrian affiliate, Nusra seized Col. Nedim Hassan – the commander of Division 30, the rebel unit in which the trainees were to be embedded – along with seven of his men.
Then on July 31, Nusra attacked the headquarters of the division in a battle that ended with U.S. airstrikes and ground intervention by Kurdish militias. As many as 50 Nusra members died in the fighting, according to some reports, but Nusra managed to seize 10 graduates of the so-called train-and-equip program.
The piece goes on to detail an apparent disagreement between the fighters and their American trainers. The group’s leader - a former Syrian army commander named Amin Ibrahim - claims the recruits became frustrated with trainers’ insistence on worrying about ISIS first and Assad second. “Every day I had a meeting with them,” Ibrahim says. “We are Syrians. Our problem is with the regime. Help us to get rid of the regime,” he claims to have told his US trainers who allegedly responded by saying that the recruits “should not shoot a bullet against the regime.”
“The Turks were always on our side,” he adds.
Who knows why the US trainers were hell bent on compelling the recruits to ignore regime forces and focus on ISIS - perhaps by that point The Pentagon was actually beginning to focus on routing the Frankenstein monster the CIA helped to create some three years earlier or perhaps the US just needed to be able to say that at least some taxpayer money was going to people whose mission it was to fight ISIS - but it certainly makes sense that the Turks weren’t on board with a plan that involved shooting more bullets at Sunni extremists than at SAA forces.
Officials in the office of the Turkish prime minister and the Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment. A Turkish security official who spoke only anonymously because he wasn’t authorized to speak for publication did not comment specifically on the allegation of tension between Turkish and American trainers but he made clear that Turkish officials were skeptical of the program. “The Americans live in a fictive world,” he said.
In any event, morale was so low, the recruits apparently wanted to quit. “They hated the program,” Ibrahim said. “Every day we told them, ‘We want to go home.’ ”
The narrative gets a bit convoluted from there, with Col. Mohammad Daher, Division 30’s chief of staff, saying that the YPG were regarded with suspicion by the recruits and other Syrian rebels who suspected the Kurds of working with the Syrian government and of being favored by the US government, but the punchline comes later when McClatchy recounts a dispute between the Colonel and Washington over who was going to pay for the recruits' two week "vacation":
The last straw was the amount of food the Americans provided – 200 pounds of rice and 200 pounds of kidney beans, enough for each of the course graduates for a week or two, but not for their families, who are in dire financial straits. That’s when the group voted to take two weeks off and go home.
“That was a mistake,” said Daher. Ibrahim concurred. “It was not a good idea. But they’d been disconnected from the world. They asked, and we agreed. We are in a revolution, not standard military life. If you say no, they’ll just go anyway.”
At that point, the question was who would pay for the transport. Although each had earned $225 a month for the two months of training, none had money for expenses.
So Ibrahim paid for 13 of his men to go to Hama. It cost $175, “two-thirds of my salary,” he said. The Americans wouldn’t reimburse him.
“They said they didn’t ask me to send the men to Hama,” he said.
So to summarize, US taxpayers shelled out $383 million (that's how much of the earmarked $500 million was actually spent) for the US to arm and train fighters whose mission was to go and fight other fighters whom the US also armed and trained with taxpayer dollars and while Washington was willing to spend $325 million on weapons, trucks, and other supplies, it seemingly never occurred to anyone that in order for the plan to work, the fighters would need to have enough food to eat and enough money to take care of their families.
What they got for their commitment to fight the most bloodthirsty group of jihadists the world has ever known: a bag of rice, a bag of kidney beans, and $225/month.
We close with America's pledge to the recruits as recounted by one fighter who spoke on the condition of anonymity:
“You are the first group. We will not give up on you, whatever happens."
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It's really interesting how VICE movie crew went to Syria way back in 2012 and interviewed "moderate" fighters about how they were bussed off to training camps in Jordan and trained by US Spec Ops teams, long before CentCom officially annouced the "first" group had been trained
How the fuck the question "what went wrong" could be asked here is insane. THere is no way this could have turned out right, much like if we got together to commit a crime - there is no right way to commit crimes against humanity.
"What Really Went Wrong With The US Military's Syria "Train And Equip" Program"
Cankles & bathhouse were in charge ~ Any questions?
Who says there is anything wrong? Isn't it working exactly as intended?
$500 million on “four or five” of the troops the US “trained and equipped” were still fighting.
They must be wearing "Stark Armor".
Seems to be working perfectly.
Total budget - $500 mil.
Funds for the MIC - $383 mil.
Salaries for fighters - $2.50.
Perfect. At least the money went to the right place then...
Exactly! $500 million and the group of soldiers get rice and beans, what a joke. Typical government.
The most interesting part is that they don't even know whether the number is four, or whether the number is five.
It speaks worlds about the accountability in the system that they can't even get a firm number of guys who actually number too few to need a second hand to count them on your fingers.
How in the world do they not know whether it's four or five? Why exactly can't they provide an exact count? Are they trying to add them up with Common Core math? To quote Rhonda from Thing-Fish: "What the fuck is going on here?"
Well, that accounting does beg the obvious question: What the hell happened to all that money, if it wasn't going to pay, arm and equip the scant number of fighters who were trained with $383M? I'm guessing some beltway bandits scammed lucrative contracts to 'design and implement a program to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels.' In Pentagon-speak, that sounds like $150M, easy, maybe more.
Hillary Clinton has been behind this arming of Syrian, someone, since 2012. She is tied to hip of our current problems.
Feb 26, 2012
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-clinton-assad-regime-dishonors-syria/
"Andrews: Madame Secretary, what's the fear of arming the rebels?
Clinton: Well, first of all as I just said, what are we going to arm them with and against what? We're not going to bring tanks over the borders of Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. That's not going to happen. So maybe at best you can smuggle in, you know, automatic weapons. Maybe some other weapons that you could get in."
(my add: What is she missing with our desire to have arms?)
____
And who else runs US Policy????
TO: President Obama
FROM: Michael Doran, The Brookings Institute
DATE: January 23, 2014
SUBJECT: Pursue Regime Change in Syria
“A regime-change policy, however, need not require that you send American soldiers into harm’s way. All it requires is a commitment to help American allies in the region muster sufficient force to change the balance of power on the ground in Syria. This policy would certainly include arming and training elements of the opposition. It would also mean providing strategic guidance, intelligence support and diplomatic backing. But the single most important dimension of the policy is simply the political commitment itself—the assertion of American leadership to remove a ruthless autocrat and replace him with a regime that is more representative of the Syrian population as a whole.”
http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/01/regime-change-syria-doran
_______
I just started to read on how this thing evolved and it is disjointed and guessed at from the beginning:
How screwed up is Washington? Read this:
Syrian President Assad Regarded As a ‘Reformer,’ Clinton Says March 2011
(comments from Kerry, Clinton, Congressmen)
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/syrian-president-assad-regarded-reformer...
I'd like to fanny hammer HRC until she gives brith to a shit fetus named Eglantine.
Nobody knows who is in charge and nobody knows where the money is going.
But 300,000 Syrians have died, more than a 1,000,000 maimed and killed, and over 4 million refugees created.
Forward to more chaos, corruption and killing
The MIC makes no money selling food, fools. GUNS AND BOMBS PLEASE.
Correction: Maimed and injured not maimed and killed
Too early to be drunk but this Syrian clusterfuck drives me to drink early and often
"Alcohol: the cause of---and the solution to---all of the world's problems."
H. Simpson
The MIC makes money transporting the food. Those bags of rice & beans cost $1.2M each to get to the front.
With the refugees the trojan horse has landed
Trojan horse head.
Week or 2? 200 pounds is at least 6 months for an individual, and a month for a family.
They were selling it on the side. Revenue stream. Thus no amount would have been enough.
You are correct cougar. This article is crap. These people were not trained and sent to fight ISIS. They were sent to fight Assad. This article is disinformation and lies. I have eaten a lot of beans and rice and that much would definitely last one person for 6 months.
Maybe they where French, they fart in a general direction you know....
200 pounds beans + 200 pounds rice = 400 pounds.
Basic math.
Difficult to envisage how any grunt gets to the front lugging 400 pounds on his back, Not much of an allowance for ammo or weapon load, water, protective gear.
Basic stupidity.
200 years from now someone will go out to the Syrian desert and find this line of skeletons buried beneath piles of fossilized rice and beans and ask "What is this?"
US miliary initiative is the answer.
Basic insanity.
Is there a typo in the article, the fighters could not feed their families with 200 lbs of Rice and 200 lbs of kidney beans as the food would only last for two weeks ? Are you fucking kidding me, my family could live for an entire year off 200 lbs of Rice and 200 lbs of beans. How big are the families, 200 people each ? WTF ???
Possibly the 200lbs was the total distributed to all the trainees, not the amount per. The article is unclear.
A four-ounce serving of each, cooked with a couple cups of water, is a pretty good meal for one or two people. I know because that's one of my staples (with variable stuff thrown in for flavor). So a 25-lb bag of each should provide 100 meals. Two hundred pounds of each then should make 800 meals, and they aren't light meals either. One often fills me for an entire day, with leftovers. Even at two meals a day, that much dry food should last one dude a year, easy.
I don't believe that it is a typo, but ambiguous sentence construction. There was a group of 54 graduates to whom the 200lbs of rice and 200lbs of beans were allotted. Thus, the week or two per graduate is in keeping with the range of 6 month to 1 year estimates provided by cougar_w and Implied Violins with respect to an individual.
Kidney beans are culturally insensitive - they should have sent Garbanzos.
So is rice.
Should have sent them hummus infused with bacon.
All I see, is a slush fund of money going to the ME...are we really supposed to believe, that people will go to war for $225/month, red beans and rice..?
C'mon
$225/month, red beans and rice, plus free AK47 and all the ammo you can use, plus get to play with 60mm+ mortars, zu-23 dual canons, Tu-55 and later tanks, ATGMs - and air protection provided by the good ole' ASU. Sounds like a good deal - until the likes of Russia step in.
Train & Equip group A, train & equip group B, make them fight each other. Sounds like they planned on running a sustained war to create as much chaos as possible. I wonder why they would want to do that?!
I wouldn't be surprised to discover that Obama was with Erdogan on this oil theft and sales deal!
#syrianterroristsmatter
I don't believe it went wrong at all...
The whole Syria/ISIS thing is just an anti-Iran proxy war to protect Israel.
Between Turkey and Saudi proxies filling our US "policy" this whole deal is just helicopter money being dropped in a war zone.
All the energy intrigue in Turkey, all the arms sale to Saudi are not coincidence that a bunch of fighters are waging havoc across Shia hard-points.
TOW missiles, training camps, intel and comm logistics, FACs, a Cecil B. DeMille wagon train of refugees into the heart of America and Europe peppered with all the social media propaganda to just accidentally forecast a larger Sunni-Shia portent war.
Bizarre-o.
Exactly what "American" interests are in play here?
One of these days (maybe after 20 years of this war) someone will release the 9/11 redacted Saudi involvement part and decide its time to cut the throat of the House of Sade.
I wish we knew what the US interests in Syria were. I mean seriously? Israel? No bombs are falling in Israel. Oil? Prices never been lower, and we have a nuclear deal with Iran. Keep Russia out of the Mediterrannean? Who cares?
The accounting still seems a little fuzzy on that $383M. I'm not surprised they didn't produce an army. I'm surprised that the $383M can just vanish with nothing to show for it. If it was all in $100 bills, it would weigh over 8000 lbs. Did this include the equipment we were airdropping over the desert?
$383 million is peanuts. $8 billion was flown into Iraq by the pallet load on C130s. That all disappeared without trace.
I suspect that there are some former U.S. Military members who were involved that are now enjoying very comfortable retirements.
I'm not disparaging them in particular, it's just that when sending that much money into a war zone with loose controls and little accounting, human nature will be a factor.
Seems like Congress could up their pitiful approval numbers by exercising some taxpayer oversight over this undeclared warlette. But that would require they put down the crack pipe and do their job as representatives of the electorate.
Merry Christmas kchrisc, "Liberty is a demand, Tyranny is submission," wherever you are.
"In my coun-try there is pro-blem,
And that pro-blem is the trans-port.
It take ve-ry ve-ry long,
Be-cause Sy-ri-a is big.
Throoow trans-port down the well......"
IF YOU WISH TO BE INFORMED, there is a ton of information on this subject.
I highly recommend Ben Swann as he's done a few videos on arming Syria that have been phenominal.
I also recommend the following Frontline episodes although something has changed with this news organization since these videos were made (hint: Koch brothers).
Frontline: Losing Iraq
Frontline: Syrias Second Front
Frontline: Syria Armint the Rebels
Frontline: The Rise of ISIS
If you watch these and pick up Ben Swann where Frontline left off, it makes it pretty clear that the US (and Turkey) have been involved very directly with the rise of ISIS. This is not the first time this has happened in our history as Al-Quaeda were called "Freedom Fighters" during the Afghan Russian war and most Americans are totally ignorant as to where Saddham Hussein got his chemical weapons from (hint: we gave them to him).
This stuff will continue as long as there is no accountability. The US government talks tough about going after STATE SPONSORS OF TERROR but in realty, when we arm, fund, and train ISIS, we are in fact state sponsors.
So when I see any US official talking tough on ISIS it's hard for me to believe what they are saying when there is so much evidence to the contrary. It seems that there was a plan at a high level to destabilize the region by creating a proxy army (ISIS) which was believed to be able to overthrow Assad and then the US could go in and take care of business. Well, obviously that backfired. But that tends to happen when you ally yourself with extremists.
The worst part of this is that Turkey has a mountain of evidence against them and nothing is being said in the Mainstream Media and nothing is being done to hold them accountable.
Just because the Mainstream Media doesn't report it, doesn't mean it didn't happen. It does show however just how corrupt our news media has become when they refuse to report the truth. But that tends to happen when SIX corporations control all print, radio, and television news. It may not be directly controlled by the state but it certainly is controlled by the mega corporations and that may be worse as RT reports more news these days than the mainstream media does.
In the age of information, IGNORANCE IS A CHOICE. If you wish to be informed, you will need to seek your information outside mainstream media. And that I suspect, is why you came to the hedge - which is one of the better sources out there.
They don't care if it works. Chaos is a fine outcome. It keeps their heads out of nooses better than a win. If there was a defiinte win, we might decide to continue the peace.
If peace, our Israeli-Neocons hang. There can be no peace, worst possible outcome for those treasonous criminals.
Yemen has a better idea.
Cheaper to hire mercenaries.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/09/mercenaries-in-yemen-the-us-conne...
Damn near as good of an assessment as to what's coming and what is indeed the real strategy for ISIS as any... Engdahl is insightful, per usual. This is a fantastic read. - Eric Dubin, Managing Editor, The News Doctors.
---
WW-3 Players Positioning Despite U.N. Agreement On Syria; Erdo?an, Salman and the Coming ‘Sunni’ War for Oil - F. William Engdahl
http://thenewsdoctors.com/ww-3-players-positioning-despite-u-n-agreement-on-syria-erdogan-salman-and-the-coming-sunni-war-for-oil-f-william-engdahl/
9/11 says that hugely complicated multi-step plans can indeed work.
But the US government hasn't made anything work for some years, unless 'work' means 'produces great chaos and anger'.
500 milion to train 5 people. Are people really that stupid not to realize this is another of those $1,000 hammer stories. The money is being stolen. Period. When there is no one in charge it's a free for all. Those in the know understand this ship is sinking fast and they're tearing anything off the walls they can take. That half of this country thinks a 70 year old moron who has never held a real job can run this country shows me just how stupid the US population is.
Hah ha what a joke
Spend billions on weapons
but starve the soldiers (& their families)
chimplogic
(mabbe chimps are more intelligent than this)
Were they magic beans?
We were told that the rebels were fighting for freedom and democracy.
Fighting for food and salary, even if it's little, makes them more of mercenaries than revolutionaries.
In contrast YPG fights for the freedom of their nation and the don't ask for salary, only for weapons.