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The Military Balance in a Shattered Levant

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The Military Balance in a Shattered Levant burke chair in strategy The Military Balance in a Shattered Levant Conventional Forces, Asymmetric Warfare & the Struggle for Syria By Aram Nerguizian June 15, 2015 Request for comments: This report is a draft that will be turned into an electronic book. Comments and suggested changes would be greatly appreciated. Please send any comments to both Anthony H. Cordsman at [email protected] and Aram Nerguizian at [email protected]. ANTHONY H. CORDESMAN Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy [email protected] The Shattered Levant Military Balance 06.15.15 2 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This study focuses on how regional military competition is affected by the political upheavals in the Middle East, economic and demographic pressures, sectarian struggles and extremism, ethnic and tribal conflicts, and how these tensions all combine to produce new complex patterns of competition. The civil war in Syria in particular has complicated relative stable long-term trends in both regional conventional and asymmetric forces. The conflict also challenges both the US and Iran to find new ways to compete in spite of regional unrest, albeit with the risk of further deepening both regional instability and the overall level of strategic competition. The Impact of Radical Changes in the Regional Military Balance Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Syria have all built up strong conventional forces, but their relative capacity for asymmetric warfare has become steadily more important as non-state actors have come to play a growing role in the region, and both state and non-state actors have come to rely on asymmetric warfare and threats. Moreover, the civil war in Syria, the overthrow of Mubarak, and increasing tensions in Jordan and Lebanon are all having a major impact on the conventional balance while internal struggles are empowering non- state actors. US military aid to Israel has insured its preeminence in the regional conventional military balance. Neither Egypt nor Jordan now actively competes militarily with Israel. Syria was forced to abandon efforts to achieve strategic parity with Israel in favor of strategic deterrence in the 1980s, and is now caught up in a civil war that seems certain to leave it a far weaker military power at its end. This, however, is only part of the story. The dynamics of civil conflicts and popular protests have all but shattered the regional conventional military balance. Nowhere is that more the case than in Syria. After years of protests, violence, and an increasingly sectarian civil war, the Syrian military is no condition to compete directly with any of the other regional militaries. In contrast to the declining significance of the conventional regional balance, the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war provided the first major indication of the growing significance of regional competition in asymmetric forces. While countries such as Syria have focused on building up their strategic deterrence against Israel, non-state armed groups – such as Iranian and Syrian-backed Hezbollah and Hamas – have become key players in the regional asymmetric military balance. This threat must be kept in proportion. Boasts by Hezbollah and Hamas about defeating Israel in a future conflict are propaganda fantasy, not reality. Israel, the US and key regional allies do not face anything approaching critical or existential threats from today’s armed groups. Such non-state actors do, however, pose a risk to US preferences on regional stability and the development of the Arab-Israeli peace track, which in turn informs US concerns about their future development and roles in regional security politics. At the same time, the military competition between the US and Iran in the Levant has been shaped by their respective ties to different regional powers and non-state actors. Both the US and Iran have worked hard to nurture security partnerships and relationships with The Shattered Levant Military Balance 06.15.15 3 regional state and non-state actors to promote their regional interests, project power, and shape the broader regional balance of power. The Quest for Stability in a Region in Crisis Any apparent stability in the area between the 1973 War, the end of the Cold War, and the beginning of the uprising in Tunisia in 2011 is now clearly over and is likely to be over for well over a decade. The US needs to recognize that no amount of development assistance can correct or fix underlying socioeconomic and demographic forces that had become compounded over decades, and that it may take decades to find some form of stability. The US cannot ignore the steep rise in sectarianism in a region spanning well beyond the Levant, from North Africa to Afghanistan. Iran has repeatedly turned to sectarian affiliations and its Shi’a clients in its efforts to balance against the US and its regional allies. However, key US allies – like Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia – have also resorted to leveraging Sunni-Shi’a divisions in their own bids to shape dynamics in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq and in the broader balance of power with Iran. Ungoverned and under-governed spaces have become fertile ground for increasingly radical Salafi-Jihadi groups like ISIS, Jabhat al-Nursa and Egypt’s Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis. Combined with the scale of regional Gulf competition, the Levant may yield even more space within which Salafi-Jihadi groups can try to consolidate their expansion in the Levant in the wake of regional protests in 2011. The US cannot afford to ignore groups like ISIS, or to strategically compete to nowhere. Many of the key decisions made by Iran and its Gulf opponents between 2011 and 2015 are the definition of tactics and not strategies. Conflating the two puts both opponents like Iran, and allies like Saudi Arabia, in equal jeopardy and in ways that the US is unlikely to benefit from in either case. The US will have to work with the broadest possible mix of players to create the kind space that may eventually allow for some degree of stability across the Levant. As the country-by-country analysis will show, however, this is only part of the challenge. US military assistance and aid efforts must be linked to political and economic efforts as well. The US must be prepared to deal with the full range of factors driving instability in each country in the Levant, and as serious as some potential military risks may be, the political, economic, religious, and social upheavals may ultimately prove to be more important. Syria While Syria has been a challenge for US policy-makers for decades, the current round of instability is unprecedented. The situation in Syria is not predictable enough for the US to be able to develop a sustainable strategy in the short term. The US and key regional allies have steadily sought to increase pressure on the Assad regime and provide different levels of support to anti-Assad political and insurgent forces. Through these actions, the US and its regional allies are pursuing several aims, not the least of which is to weaken Iran’s role as Syria’s sole major state ally, while at the same time finding ways to halt the spread of military Jihadi grounds in Syria and beyond on favorable terms. The US had used limited covert or overt arms sales and military aid to Syria to compete with Iran since at least July of 2013. Covert aid presents the problem that it could fall into The Shattered Levant Military Balance 06.15.15 4 extremist hands. Overt aid could only occur if Assad fell and a suitably favorable new regime emerged in Syria. In the meantime, both the Assad regime and its opponents are evolving and devising new strategies and tactics in the hope of shaping relative success in Syria’s civil war. It would be easy to make the causal leap that Assad forces are certain to buckle, fail, or abandon the regime as a result of these pressures. The Syrian military can do little more than compensate for losses in the field, and has no real-world recourse to mass mobilization. There are also significant fiscal challenges, especially in the wake of the regime’s losses of rent-earning resources that include oil fields now under the control of ISIS, the Nusra Front and other militant groups. Such conclusions remained largely premature in mid-2015. While the Assad forces had been whittled down by four years of fighting, they were increasingly focused on frontier defense missions in what some increasingly described as Assad’s “vital Syria.” This focus was reinforced by the fact that loyal Alawites largely had nowhere to go, and were more inclined to fight for their towns and villages than to engage in fruitless military adventures in eastern and northeastern Syria – far both from reliable supply lines and a strong enough reason to fight on. The Assad regime may have lost some -- if not much -- of its ability to raise central government funds or amass foreign currency reserves. However, it could still depend on strategic rent-seeking from Russia and Iran in mid-2015. There is little doubt that both Russian and Iranian aid levels to Syria were driven by each country’s discreet set of national interests. Russia continued to see Syria as bulwark both against perceived interventionist policies in the West, and the loss of what remains of Russian influence in the Levant. Meanwhile, Iran’s priorities tied to Syria were largely dictated by the need to secure its long-term investment in Hezbollah – something it may not be able to do without a pliant Syria. So long as the US and its Arab allies, and Iran, pursue their respective foreign policy priorities – and as long as no realistic political alternative is found -- Assad will have the opportunity to pursue a duel strategy that has remained largely unchanged since Syria confronted the West and its allies in Lebanon over the 2004 to 2008 period: continue to extract rents from your allies and buy enough time to take advantage of changes in international and regional policy.
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