The Pentagon has carried out two showpiece train-and-equip programs in recent years — a lauded effort in Ukraine and a fizzled effort in Syria.
The difference between the two comes down to having a clear idea of the political goals and sending the right equipment, according to military experts.
The goal in Ukraine is clear: to push Russia out of Eastern Ukraine and restore internationally recognized borders that were established after the Cold War. To do so, the U.S. is working with a legitimate government and its organized military, said Chris Harmer, a defense analyst with the Institute for the Study of War.
In Syria, where the U.S. is working to defeat the Islamic State, the situation is much murkier, for many reasons. Because the U.S. is working with rebel groups that are largely fighting against the state government run by Syrian President Bashar Assad, there’s no clear structure, Harmer said. In addition, while the U.S. has said it wants the Assad regime toppled, it is unwilling to have a hand in doing so and has no clear plan of what comes next.
“Nobody really knows how do you rebuild Syria. We rebuilt Iraq and we had what we thought was a sustainable solution, then we left. There’s no real appetite to rebuild Syria. It’s politically confused, strategically incoherent, and tactically a very muddied battlefield,” Harmer said.
“Unless we have a very clear political outcome, it’s going to be difficult to rationally distribute political aid, unless we have a very clear idea who we’re distributing that aid to or what to use it for,” he continued.
The effort to train and equip Ukrainian forces to fight Russian-backed separatists has already trained three battalions of Ukrainian interior ministry troops, Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, commander of U.S. Army Europe, told reporters this week. The U.S., along with the British, Canadians and Lithuanians, began a new phase of training last month to train five battalions of Ukrainian ministry of defense troops.
By contrast, the program to prepare Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State has been dubbed a failure by analysts and lawmakers alike. Only a handful of fighters resulted after the Pentagon spent $43 million training the first class, many of which were either killed, captured or disappeared soon after being inserted into battle.
“You’ve got this mishmash of rebel forces, some of which are pro-U.S., some of which continue to be pro-Western to get our aid. So we’ve got a very difficult time identifying who amongst the rebels we’re supporting,” Harmer said. “We’re not giving as much aid as Ukraine and there’s not a clear idea of what we want the post-conflict political construct to look like.”
The program in Syria has gone so poorly that Congress this week declined a Pentagon request for more money to buy equipment to air drop to Syrian rebels.
“You know very well it’s a result of this absolute failure of the expenditure of what was judged then to be $43 million and four or five people were trained,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told Defense Secretary Ash Carter of the denial of funds. “We don’t want to approve of something like that again.”
The U.S. has also spent more in Ukraine. American troops have provided more than $250 million worth of equipment to Ukrainian soldiers, compared with just $43 million on training and equipment for Syrian rebels.
Ultimately, everybody in America, Western Europe and NATO cares more about what happens in Ukraine than in Syria and is willing to make a bigger commitment to the success of that program, Harmer said.
“Everybody who counts is very interested in what happens in Ukraine, much more so than in Syria,” he said.
Olga Oliker, director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the U.S. also must learn to give forces in train-and-equip programs what they need and can use, a mistake America has made in past conflicts.
“There tends to be a tendency to, on the one hand, supply what is easy to supply, like surplus equipment or training that may or may not be applicable to what folks are doing,” she said. “That’s a mistake I would argue was made in Iraq early on. Adjusting training or equipment to the real needs of the people you’re trying to help, I think, is an important lesson from years of these.”
