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By David Enders | McClatchy Newspapers
ANTAKYA, Turkey Though degraded by a war of attrition against increasingly capable guerrilla militias, the Syrian military remains a cohesive force capable of continuing its operations for the foreseeable future, according to independent military analysts.
The assessment that the Syrian military remains a potent force contradicts months of suggestions by Obama administration officials that defections and the pace of the increasingly violent conflict is overstretching the military, a theme thats been voiced repeatedly for months in official State Department briefings.
We think that the army is increasingly overstretched. We think that the economy is under increasing strain. And we think the rebels are getting stronger, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said Aug. 9 in one typical comment.
Yet despite a bombing in July that killed four of President Bashar Assads closest advisers including his minister of defense Syrian military strategy has changed little from six months ago: using the highly mechanized army built to fight the Israeli army to surround rebel-held areas and pound them with artillery and airstrikes before making incursions with infantry and paramilitary forces.
Theyre still capable of handling the threats that theyre dealing with, and theyve been reaching deeper and deeper and deeper into their armory, said Joseph Holliday, a researcher at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington who specializes in the Syrian conflict.
Thats not to say that the rebels havent made the conflict costly for the military. Since the conflict began, the military has been forced to call up reserves and it continues to use paramilitary forces to supplement its infantry.
Theyre taking somewhere around 40 (killed in action) a day. If you extrapolate from that, wounded would be about four times that number. So you can see theres a steady toll just from combat on the army, said Jeff White, a senior defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
While there continue to be individual defections from the military, mass defections generally havent occurred, something Holliday credits in part to a government strategy of teaming units made up of conscripts with more professional, better trained troops.
They are pairing their elite, reliable units with their less reliable units to prevent defections, Holliday said.
White thinks the overall trend is downward for the army and that the rebels eventually will prevail. He thinks the fact that the rebels continue to contest areas in Aleppo, Syrias largest city, and in Damascus, the capital, show the militarys weaknesses.
The armys going to become less and less capable of conducting operations successfully, and I think the best example of that now is Aleppo, he said. The city is critical to the regime by all accounts, and it is disputed territory. For the regime, I think that is defeat. Its not decisive defeat, but the regimes inability to reclaim the city is a defeat.
Holliday is more skeptical. The rebels are trying to harass supply lines, but the corollary to that is that the regime is making sure it has everything it needs in place. Its not going to lose a fight in Aleppo, Holliday said.
The mixing of army units that Holliday described has made it difficult to track which military units are fighting where, though Holliday said it was clear that Syrias 4th Armored Division and Republican Guard were undertaking most of the fighting near Damascus. The 4th Armored Division is led by Assads brother, Maher Assad.
The rebels have managed to destroy significant amounts of the armys equipment, becoming particularly adept at attacking armored vehicles with rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs.
At the beginning we were seeing T-72s, White said, referring to the most advanced tanks, bought from Russia, that the Syrian army possesses. Now were seeing some T-54s and T-55s.
T-54s and T-55s are Cold War-era tanks that first went into production at the end of World War II.
But the army hasnt yet deployed some of its heaviest weaponry. Despite punishing artillery and rocket strikes on rebel-held areas, a number of rocket and artillery systems havent yet been used.
To me, thats the most important advantage the Syrian military has over the rebels, White said.
He predicted that the rebels eventually will acquire anti-aircraft weapons or learn to use the weapons they have to shoot down jets and helicopters, which the Assad military has begun to use more frequently. The use of jets to bomb rebel positions is among the developments that led the death toll to surge in August to 5,384, more than triple the number of dead recorded in May and the highest monthly total yet of the 18-month conflict.
But that wont erode the regimes advantage in artillery, White said. The one thing they will find it very difficult to deal with is the artillery, he said of the rebels.
White said that even if the military were to be broken, it probably wouldnt end the violence. He suggested that some commanders would use the mayhem to set up regions that theyd control. It isnt going to be just one outcome for the army, he said.
Holliday pointed to the shabiha, a pro-government militia whose membership is drawn largely from Syrias Allawite religious minority, to which Assad and much of the countrys elite belong, as one likely outcome for a dissolved army. The militia has been used as infantry across the country, and human rights groups and the rebels accuse it of carrying out some of the worst atrocities in the conflict to date.
The shabiha are a big deal, not only because theyre being used as infantry, but its also a nightmare scenario for what the army could become, Holliday said.
Analysts: Syrian army in no danger of collapsing from rebel assaults | McClatchy
... Because the Syrian army isn't fighting their own people ... Because I see no progress on the ground , do you ? Syria or Assad's regime was supposed to collapse in a few months after the start of the insurgency , according to propaganda media ... But thats a negative , Houston ! ... Even though you have written a lot of fancy stories , you haven't yet posted any independent credible source for it ... What large areas are controlled by FSA ? I would love to know ... You understand what do they mean when they say that the army hasn't yet brought out its best in the field ? 
... It means that they aren't stretched , they aren't in an emergency because the moment you see a " Point of no return " or " Worst case scenario " , you throw out everything you got to the opposition ... A move desperate ...
