Last month, Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, asked Dempsey, a sixty-one-year-old Army man who commanded U.S. forces in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004, to provide him with an unclassified list of options for the potential use of U.S. military force in Syria. Dempsey responded with a letter, which, he said, contained “my independent judgment with as much openness as this classification allows.”
The first option that Dempsey listed was one the Pentagon is already implementing, to some extent: “Train, Advise, and Assist the Opposition.” Dempsey’s second option, which appears to be the one Obama has settled on, was “Conduct Limited Stand Off Strikes” at targets of high value to the Syrian regime, such as air-defense systems, aircraft, warships, missile batteries, and command and control facilities. A third option that Dempsey listed was “Control Chemical Weapons,” but he made clear that this would be a vast undertaking.
At a minimum, this option would call for a no-fly zone as well as air and missile strikes involving hundreds of aircraft, ships, submarines, and other enablers. Thousands of special operations forces and other ground forces would be needed to assault and secure critical sites. Costs could also average well over one billion dollars per month.
With the involvement of U.S. ground forces ruled out, the Obama Administration appears to have settled on a version of the second option—stand-off strikes carried out from U.S. ships and, possibly, aircraft. Officials have played down the scale of such an operation. In an interview with the PBS Newshour earlier this week, Obama talked of “limited, tailored approaches” designed to “send a shot across the bow” of the Syrian leader Bashir al-Assad. But that doesn’t seem to jibe with how Dempsey described the option of conducting limited stand-off strikes.
Force requirements would include hundreds of aircraft, ships, submarines, and other enablers. Depending on duration, the costs would be in the billions.
Such an attack could lead to “significant degradation” of Assad’s military capabilities and a rise in the number of desertions from Syria’s armed forces, Dempsey went on, but that would take time. In other words, it would need to be expanded well beyond a timeline of one or two days, which is what Administration officials have been suggesting as the likely duration of the attack. And even if an attack of this scale and duration was carried out, Dempsey added, there was a risk “that the regime could withstand limited strikes by dispersing its assets. Retaliatory attacks are also possible, and there is a probability for collateral damage impacting civilians and foreigners inside the country.”
These weren’t the only risks that Dempsey highlighted. After going through each military option in turn, he ended his letter with an over-all assessment that should be required reading this Labor Day weekend:
All of these options would likely further the narrow military objective of helping the opposition and placing more pressure on the regime. We have learned from the past 10 years however, that it is not enough to simply alter the balance of military power without careful consideration of what is necessary in order to preserve a functioning state. We must anticipate and be prepared for the unintended consequences of our action. Should the regime’s institutions collapse in the absence of a viable opposition, we could inadvertently empower extremists or unleash the very chemical weapons we seek to control.
I know that the decision to use force is not one that any of us takes lightly. It is no less than an act of war. As we weigh our options, we should be able to conclude with some confidence that the use of force will move us toward the intended outcome. We must also understand risk—not just to our forces, but to our other global responsibilities…One we take action, we should be prepared for what comes next.
Those are the cautionary words of an Army general who commanded U.S. forces in Baghdad ten years ago and saw firsthand the consequences of precipitous U.S. military action. White House officials argue it’s misleading to make any comparison with the full-scale invasion of Iraq. In the coming action in Syria, the goals and the military means to be employed are both far smaller, they insist. That’s true enough. But have the President and those pushing him to go ahead with an attack fully taken account of General Dempsey’s warnings?
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: John Cassidy
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