Despite Early Signs Of Russian Buildup In Syria, U.S. Officials Caught Flat-Footed
By Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung October 9 at 5:58 PM
Among the first clues that Russia was mobilizing for a military offensive in Syria were requests Moscow began making in mid-August for permission to cross other countries’ territory with more and larger aircraft.
“We were getting the word the Russians were asking for inordinate overflights,” a senior Obama administration official said, referring to reports from U.S. allies receiving the requests. Russia was seeking clearance for not only cargo planes but also “fighter aircraft and bombers” that Syrian pilots had never been trained to fly, the official said. “It was clear that something pretty big was up.”
But despite that early suspicion — which only intensified as Russia then deployed fighter jets and teams of military advisers — the United States seemed to be caught flat-footed by the barrage of airstrikes that Moscow launched last week.
[U.S. will not confront Russia in Syria, Obama says]
The attacks pounded Syrian rebels who were trained and armed by the CIA over the past two years but who appeared to get no warning that they were in Russian jets’ crosshairs. The strikes also damaged a fragile U.S. strategy that sustained an additional blow Friday when the Pentagon acknowledged that it was sharply scaling back its effort to build a force to battle the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
The setbacks involved separate programs with distinct missions. One is a covert intelligence effort to aid Syrian rebels trying to oust President Bashar al-Assad; the other is an overt military operation using U.S. air power and aid to other rebel groups on the ground to decimate the Islamic State. But U.S. officials and experts said that in both cases the Obama administration was slow to recognize and respond to trouble signs that seem abundant in hindsight.
“It seems to me there’s some kind of gap or disconnect between the intelligence side and the policy and operational side” on Syria, said Jeffrey White, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who tracks the Syria conflict at the Washington Institute. Amid Russia’s buildup “we actually saw quite well what was going on — equipment was tracked,” White said, “and then there was some kind of failure to read what the implications of that were.”
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