Syrian Chaos: Can this end well?

I might have misremembered some of the details, but here: http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1985/jan-feb/nelson.html listing weak points of the Hind, "an oil tank inexplicably but conveniently located beneath the red star on the fuselage." The point is, there was a place where it was possible to penetrate the fuel tank of the Hind with a bolt-action rifle, and this place was marked for easy identification by the usual Soviet red star. Possibly the vulnerability was only significant in the early part of the fighting when pilots would assume they were mostly immune to small arms and fly into canyons and such where a guerrilla would be able to take a shot from concealment at relatively short range.

First: the article cites two authors published in Soldier of Fortune.

Second: The words "small arms" are used, not rifle. These words do not mean what you think they do. To the US military, small arms means under 20mm. To NATO, small arms means under 50mm. Usually squad manned weapons, and rocket propelled grenades are not included, but that depends.

Small arms:

It appears that you're right; I'd originally heard it elsewhere, but it appears that all of the mentions I can find trace back to this same article.

I remember reading a book on the subject once by an ISI officer in charge of supplying the Mujahideen. He described the effort it took to get Oerlikons (third image) over the Sulaiman Range, how the Mujahideen would have to set up an ambushes for Hinds due to the inability to maneuver them, and how the guns still wouldn't reliably punch a hole through a Hind resulting in the crews getting shredded. Which is why the US decided to part with some Stingers, even though even back then they had a feeling they weren't getting them back.

The Oerlikons were great when firing down on a Hind, so Charlie Wilson's War tells it. The Stingers were grand, but many aircraft kills were from simpler weapons employed with cunning. AIUI.

That's basically what I meant by "not reliably," sorry, could have worded it better.

Naturally, it's not a great way to fight a war, because it means you have to reliably predict the way which your enemy will approach otherwise bad things.

Oh, yeah, sorry, I meant my anedcdata as further exposition on the topic, not a refutation.

You may have been giving too much credit to the training and threat warning equipment of the Syrian Air Force.

In other news, somebody unplugged the router in Syria's server room today, the entire country is now offline.

Google is providing a way to keep twitter in use despite the outage. The blackout hashtag on it has some good info on specifics of the blackout. Well, good info for people that understand it, I guess, I have no idea.

Cloudflare, predictably, has a good blog post on the issue.

Is there a good summary of why the regime appears to be losing? I recall when this started flaring up it was felt things would never go against the regime in Syria because the regime was willing to do whatever it took to crush a rebellion, including genocide.

Such is my recollection anyway.

It was actually a pretty fraught argument among people that were actually making measured guesses rather than people talking out of their asses. What was *interesting* about Syria was that Assad had the room to see what other regimes had done, and opt for Bahrain/UAE/etc rather than Egypt/Tunisia/etc. The open question was whether that would be sustainable in a country as big and complicated as Syria.The biggest point against the regime in my opinion was what I highlighted a while back, which was that there was not, according to any good intelligence, an actual Syrian regime. Instead, you had factions with a common interest but who also had irretrievable breaks as the revolution proceeded and old resentments came to the surface.

A number of early crises laid these bare, but by the time of Assad's big first escape from Damascus and the assassination of the security chief, you were seeing all kinds of internal regime struggles come to the fore that the rebels weren't really taking advantage of. But they also had no way to lose from it, so it worked out.

But if I had to give you a one sentence summary, I would say the regime had a winning strategy but insufficient unity across its elite. I would also posit that virtually every high level defection only became "to the rebellion" after the fact, when it was really caused by high level competition among bastards and turned into something that suited the prevailing narrative later.

I think the Syrians have been told that any attempt to involve Israel or other neighbours would result in the whole B2s-oops-where's-my-army? thing the US is quite good at.

Heard a report this morning that an intelligence official indicated that it looks like the regime may be moving some chemical weapons into place. Hillary said the US would get involved if any such were used.

AP story.

Wow, madness. I never thought it'd reach that point.

Seems like that'd pretty much guarantee no chance of Assad seeking asylum outside Syria. Talk about burning all your bridges!

Who was the last dictator to use chemical weapons, Saddam Husein?

What's messed up is that I after reading that story, my first thought was "What fucking bastards". As if the Syrian regime's actions up to this point weren't bad enough to warrant that label.

Sri Lanka, few years ago.

Thanks. I'd completely missed that one.

Yeah, I'm still doubtful that they'd go that far as it'd be a huge casus belli and probably get China and Russia to back off vetoing intervention in the UN. And as you point out they're already doing just fine at massacring people.

Some times people do stupid things when they're desperate though. And frankly, I don't think Assad has ever been particularly astute.

Nevermind Security Council vetoes; I'm pretty sure I'd be okay with the US bombing the ever-loving motherfuck out of anything that looked vaguely Assad-related once things enter "genocide against your own people via chemical weapon" territory, and I'm in like the third percentile of hawkishness.

Is it really that hard for him to pay a few people off and fly out of there in surprise/secrecy?

Hard to arrange, no. Hard to arrange in secret, yes. There's a reason dictators are paranoid, and all the more reasons when their position is in danger.

It's really really fucking bad over there. I've been watching some horrifying videos of kids and families mutilated, crushed and blown apart. This is just indiscriminate murder and frankly I'm shocked there isn't more world condemnation other than "Yeah, Assad should really really stop this".

I'd would love *someone* to just step in and help. Hell, using air power alone could help tip the scales. I read that the Turks want to back Islamic based rebels while the US/Jordan and the West want to back secular rebels. Maybe that's keeping people from intervening?

I was looking into Aleppo a good bit last month since my abortive NaNoWriMo novel was set there. It's pretty horrific in human terms, of course, but also tragic in cultural/historical terms. Aleppo has been inhabited probably since 5000BC, and in the past few months large parts of it have been damaged and destroyed. The other cities in the region are similar, I'm sure.

Well, from a strictly historical perspective it's not the first time the city has been destroyed, whole or in part.

true. but it's depressing that we're still making the destructive kind of history.

The issue is that historically we suck ass at figuring out when we should intervene and how. We're kind of at a trough in our "willingness to intervene" cycle.

Thanks for that snippet Lum.

From a certain angle I'm loath to see the man get off so easily, but him stepping away would seem likely to lead to a better (though obviously not good) resolution to the current tragedy.

No fricking idea who steps in if he vacates though; would the civil war continue?

Fucking Chavez.

I am about as sympathetic as you can get to Latin American countries getting their own shit together and out from under US hegemony, because it's total bullshit and we've really badly fucked up that entire part of the world. Chavez is such a massive asshole, though :(

With that, I feel like an educational thread about the subject could be in order. It's not like we have any real 'murrican politics to jabber about right now anyway.

Why? Because he might be willing to give Assad an out so he doesn't feel forced to take everything down with him?

Yeah I was about to say. I hope this probe for asylum doesn't become an opportunity for someone with international presence to grandstand against Chavez or whomever. It doesn't make him equivalent to Assad, just outside of the US sphere of direct influence and convenient for the purpose of getting him out of the way as soon as possible.

But I think those who've stuck with him would be mad to let him go, and he'd have to be pretty skillful to pull it off. And it's unclear to me what prevents grand-scale ethnic cleansing as a sequel, especially given the barriers currently in place to intervention (which might not stop it anyway).

I'm guessing an exhausted populace and a "victorious" rebellion establishing a shaky power sharing relationship with what's left of the establishment, devolving into factionalism and (possibly) a second civil war. See: Egypt.

And that's best-case.

I don't think that's an accurate comparison, given that the military will not be able to feign the referee role that it held in Egypt, which requires a great deal more plausible deniability in their connection to the dictator's person. Also, it's unclear if the level of killing in Syria has irretrievably shaped the political culture of the opposition to the point where it's primarily those good at being warlords that are at the top, or if there ever was anything resembling an institutional opposition with different skill sets, which Egypt definitely had.

I honestly can't think of any Arab Spring situation that presents analogous problems well. The closest things that spring to mind both involve massive US occupations and have all kinds of distortions as a result.

yeah you're probably right :( A fuckload of weaponry distributed amongst the population, a billion local militias/warlords/protection schemes, a previously organized military in disarray. It just seems Syria has (had) the kind of civil infrastructure that should be able to survive. But we'll see.

there are quite a few former military in the "Free Syrian Army" structure that might be able to play a leadership role and bring the remnants of the military into line...

Posting this from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Syrian_defectors) partly for the info and partly for the typo in the last line.

• Mohammad Bassam Imadi, Former Ambassador to Sweden - 2011
• Abdul Razzaq Tlass, Former Syrian military officer, and currently one of the Free Syrian Army commanders - June 2011
• Riad al-Asaad, former Colonel in the Syrian Air Force,[2] and current commander of the Free Syrian Army,[3] July 2011
• Mustafa Al-Sheikh, former General in the Syrian Army, and current head of the Free Syrian Army - 6 January 2012[4][5]
• Imad Ghalioun, parliamentarian for Homs - January 2012 (to Egypt)[6]
• Firas Tlass, son of Mustafa Tlass, the former defence minister under Hafez al Assad - 12 March 2012 (to Paris)[7]
• Abdo Hussameddin, Deputy Oil Minister - 7 March 2012
• Hassan Hamada, Syrian Air Force Colonel - 2012 (to Jordan)
• Manaf Tlass, Brigadier General of the Syrian Republican Guard - 2012 (to Turkey, later Paris)
• Nawaf al-Fares, Ambassador to Iraq - 2012 (In Iraq, later moved to Qatar)[8]
• Adnan Silu, Major General and former head of Syria's chemical weapons program - July 2012 defecated to the opposition.[9]