Another way Bashar has tried to raise his game is by taking advice from Hezbollah activists and Iranian cadres that seem to have made their way into Syria. Hezbollah fighters employed a network-and-swarm concept against the Israeli Defense Forces during the Lebanon War in the summer of 2006. They organized in countless small teams that held their own in the field against one of the world's best militaries. But Bashar isn't facing the IDF, which looks a lot like his own armed forces. Instead he is going up against something that looks a lot more like the Hezbollah order of battle. He needs a model to counter irregulars, not a concept for fighting conventional forces. At the margin, the Iranian advisors are providing him useful insights -- but not enough to achieve a decisive advantage over the insurgents.
Bashar's last, best hope may lie now with the Russians. Not in receiving more arms from them, but in learning from their wars with the Chechens. In 1996, a large conventional Russian army was driven from Chechnya by a loose-knit swarm of tribal fighters. Yet a few years later, the Russians came back and defeated them. How? They succeeded by creating and unleashing a network of small units of their own, and by co-opting some of the clans. That is, they learned how to use swarm tactics against irregulars -- a real doctrinal breakthrough in military affairs. It is rumored that some of the Russian counterinsurgency specialists who helped turn around Chechnya are now providing advice along these lines to regime forces.
But could the Syrian Army really undertake such a radical shift in the middle of combat operations? It is certainly possible, but every indicator suggests that the regime's military leaders are habituated to highly centralized control and heavily scripted operational plans. And even if the army does make the effort to change its concept of operations, it will be necessary to halt ongoing offensives while the force is reconfigured. This would cede much of Syria to the rebels, a gambit fraught with peril and profound material and psychological consequences.
The bottom line is that the regime's military performance is highly unlikely to improve to the point at which it can defeat the insurgents -- unless Bashar is willing to "roll the iron dice" (as German chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg put matters on the eve of World War I) and take the risk of scaling down his forces into small units and have them wage a kind of guerrilla warfare against the guerrillas. For their part, the rebels are just as unlikely to succeed in the near- or mid-term without either vastly improved armaments or outside intervention in the form of air support. Giving them more lethal weapons risks having them sent downstream to al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations. And more overt military intervention risks conflict escalation, certainly with Iran, and possibly with Russia, which has a naval base in Syria and has expressed deep concern about the security of the Christian community there.
A stalemate. Which, in a caring world, would energize an innovative diplomatic approach, one that does not insist on Bashar's immediate removal, but does demand the safety, security, and gradually increasing liberty of the Syrian people.
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