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Putin's Goals in Syria Went Beyond Saving Assad

Rogue Valley

Rogue Valley

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The Moscow Times - Putin's Goals in Syria Went Beyond Saving Assad

By Leonid Bershidsky for Bloomberg
Jan 5, 2018

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Bashar Assad and Vladimir Putin in Damascus, Syria

The Russian Defense Ministry is denying a report by a leading Moscow newspaper that seven Russian warplanes were destroyed in a New Year's Eve attack on the Khmeimim air base in Syria. Two Russian servicemen died in the attack, according to the ministry. Clearly, fighting in Syria isn't over for Russia yet, despite President Vladimir Putin's self-congratulatory conversations with Syrian ally Bashar al-Assad. Recently, however, General Valery Gerasimov, head of Russia's General Staff, made public his post-mortem of the Syrian operation, revealing Russia's military priorities in Syria and its persistent conviction that every conflict in which it is involved is a proxy war against the U.S. That war won't be over even once Syrian violence subsides. In the interview with pro-Kremlin daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, Gerasimov provides the basis for Putin's claims that Russia has defeated ISIS.....

continued @ link above
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Musings of a Russian General of the multifaceted rationale behind the Russian military expedition in Syria.
 
Fascinating article, thanks for sharing. I find that Russia's command infrastructure seems far more prepared for the type of conflict which looks to be more and more likely in the coming century - that of great power conflict, but not in the typical army v. army sense. They have been on the front lines of developing cyberwar doctrine (Gerasimov himself was at the forefront of this) and their method of rotating commanders, technology, and troops through the Syrian theater is both interesting and smart. The US does not seem nearly as well-prepared for this sort of undeclared conflict, where great powers are consistently finding themselves at odds, but are not reaching direct military action against one another. The Russian use of 'green men' in Ukraine and their cyber strikes against us in the 2016 election, and against Eastern European countries generally, shows how ill-prepared we are for this next generation of warfighting.
 
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