The Obama administration is considering a plan to use U.S. military trainers to help increase the capabilities of the Syrian rebels, in a move that would greatly expand the current CIA training being done quietly in Jordan, U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Any training would take place outside Syria, and one possible location would be Jordan.
The officials said no decision had been made, but that
discussions were going on at high levels of the government. It comes as
the Obama administration prods Congress to authorize limited military
strikes against the Syrian government in retaliation for a deadly Aug.
21 chemical weapons attack.
The proposal to use the U.S. military to train the rebels -
something the administration has resisted through more than two years of
civil war - would answer the demands of some lawmakers, including Sen.
John McCain, R-Ariz., to do more to train and equip the Syrian
opposition. President Barack Obama in June decided to provide lethal
aid to the rebels, but so far none of that assistance has gotten to the
opposition.
Officials said Thursday that talk about a military training
mission has increased but that there have been no specific Pentagon
recommendations forwarded to the White House on how big it should be or
how many troops it should involve.
The CIA has been training select groups of rebels in Jordan
on the use of communications equipment and some weapons provided by Gulf
states. The new discussions center on whether the U.S. military should
take over the mission so that hundreds or thousands can be trained,
rather than just dozens.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the plan publicly.
Any new training program conducted by the U.S. military
would take time to put in place and likely would not begin until after
any potential military action had been taken in response to the recent
chemical weapons attack. It would require getting approvals from the
host country, finding appropriate locations, getting the right number of
personnel in place to conduct the training and setting up a vetting
system to insure that instruction was not provided to any rebel groups
that may not be friendly to the U.S.
The Pentagon already has at least 1,000 troops in Jordan,
including trainers working with Jordanian forces. The U.S. left about a
dozen fighter jets and a Patriot missile battery there after a recent
training exercise.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
has told Congress that the U.S. military would be prepared to do more
training for the Syria opposition if needed.
In response to questioning Wednesday during a House Foreign
Affairs Committee hearing on Syria, Dempsey said he was "mostly
supportive of helping the opposition by their development, by their
training and equipping, not by becoming their military arm."
He provided more details in a July letter to Sen. Carl
Levin, D-Mich., the chairman of the Senate Armed Services, in which he
laid out military options in response to the chemical weapons attack.
That letter was sent before Obama announced plans to go to Congress to
seek authorization for military strikes in Syria that would be limited
in time and scope and would involve no U.S. troops on the ground there.
He said the U.S. could provide between several hundred and
several thousand trainers, with a cost of as much as $500 million a
year, depending on how large the training mission became. Noting that it
would require using "safe areas" outside Syria, he said the risks
included "extremists gaining access to additional capabilities,
retaliatory cross-border attacks, and insider attacks or inadvertent
association with war crimes due to vetting difficulties."
In hearings this week, some members of Congress complained
that the Obama administration has not done enough for the rebels, while
others strongly opposed any American military involvement in Syria.
Lawmakers warned Dempsey and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that
Americans are weary of war and are not willing to spend more money and
risk more lives.
U.S. officials continue to say that any likely military
action would be limited and bear no resemblance to the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, or even the short military operation in Libya in 2010.
Instead, it would center on cruise missiles fired from U.S. ships -
including submarines - in the Mediterranean Sea.
There also is no enthusiasm for sending U.S. pilots into
Syrian airspace. If additional military assets are needed in order to
strike a larger number of targets inside Syria, the U.S. could use
long-range bombers, which could fire missiles without crossing into the
country's airspace.
France also has a dozen cruise missile-capable fighter
aircraft at military bases in the United Arab Emirates and the Horn of
Africa nation of Djibouti.
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