The Militia Option in Syria
By Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen
BESA Center Perspectives No. 616, October 16, 2017
https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/militia-option-syria/

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The war in Syria has focused attention on the role of
militia forces. Although we may see the phenomenon as entirely negative, it
also has positive aspects and reflects a genuine need that affects our lives
as well.

Much has been said about the Iranian and Iraqi Shiite militias operating in
Syria. The Kurdish forces and the forces opposing the Assad regime are in
fact also militias.

At first glance, nothing appears to be new in this phenomenon. Since the
days of the ancient world, militia forces have played a significant role. In
the time of the biblical judges, the tribes of Israel did not have a
standing, regular army, and preparations for war were primarily tribal and
local. In the war between the forces led by the Canaanite commander Sisera
and the Hebrews led by Deborah and Barak ben Avinoam, a regular army
equipped with nine hundred iron chariots prepared for war against an army of
farmers who had united for action on a tribal basis.

In modern history, too, militia forces have recorded significant
achievements. Garibaldi, hero of the Italian resurgence (the Risorgimento)
in the nineteenth century, conquered Sicily with a militia that did not
number more than a thousand people – all of whom were civilian volunteers.

And yet something is indeed new in Syria. If in the past, militia forces
were employed out of circumstantial necessity; namely, the inability to
assemble an organized military force. In recent years, militias have become
a necessity for other reasons.

The advantages of a militia force

Militia forces were traditionally viewed as offering two advantages. One was
the ability to organize more rapidly and flexibly, when the situation called
for it, than an institutional military could. The second was the strong
motivation arising from a sense of mission, compared to motivation in
institutional military frameworks that is based on organizational discipline
and obedience to rules and laws. These two advantages of militia forces have
proved beneficial during the fighting in Syria.

In the initial months of the Syrian civil war, the standing Syrian army
suffered failures stemming from modes of operation that were not suited to
the new circumstances, as well as from a weak fighting spirit. The immediate
solution was to resort to popular, non-organized forces that operated out of
loyalty to the regime – forces that acted with great cruelty and without
restraint.

Later, Hezbollah forces joined the fighting. Despite their institutional
military organization, they showed an intense martial spirit and willingness
to sacrifice that stemmed from religious and ethnic motivation. They proved
themselves able to adopt new forms of warfare very rapidly.

In the fall of 2015, when Russian forces got actively involved in the war,
the presence in the arena of the local forces – the Syrian army, Hezbollah,
and others – fundamentally affected the Russian mode of operation. With
local forces already caught up in the fighting, the Russians were saved the
trouble of introducing an effective ground force, which would have required
time for organization and preparation as well as risks of ongoing
entanglement. Under the circumstances that developed, the US and its
military allies, along with the Russians, showed operational awareness of
how difficult it would be to prepare a ground force and deploy it as an
expeditionary force in a way that would jibe with rapid strategic
developments. Thus the Russian operational approach combined Russian air
power, which was immediately available, with ground warfare based primarily
on local forces that were already involved in the fighting and ready for
action.

The form of combat the Americans devised in liberating northern Iraq and the
city of Mosul from ISIS forces stemmed from a similar logic. Despite
differences in culture and doctrinal tradition between the US and Russian
military establishments, the two superpowers have so far refrained from
adding their regular ground forces to the battlefields in Syria or Iraq.
First and foremost, they want to keep their soldiers out of the
heavy-casualty fighting. This abstinence is also, however, significantly
motivated by the recurrent phenomenon in the new era of war as an adventure
that might spin out of control before the goal is achieved. Under these
conditions, when the time comes to decide about using military force,
national leaders are inclined to turn to local militia forces as a resource
of another kind, one that saves them the risk of entering a maze of
uncertainty.

The potential for strategic ambiguity

From the standpoint of the Russian interest, deploying the secessionists of
Donetsk – i.e., natives of the place – as militia fighters reflected the
classic logic of maintaining strategic ambiguity in a tension-fraught area.
From a domestic Russian perspective, having the secessionists carry the
burden of the ground fighting saves Putin the need to use his own soldiers
and parry their mothers’ question: “What are we doing in Donetsk?”

In terms of the world at large, amid criticism from the international
community, the approach offers a no less significant advantage: the hybrid
identity of the Russians of Donetsk. While they are Ukrainian citizens,
their struggle is driven by their Russian identity on behalf of the Russian
national interest. Maintaining their militia status means Putin can evade
questions of direct responsibility for the fighting.

The louder the international demand for policy transparency grows, the more
the global dissemination of knowledge and international supervision curtail
the legitimacy of using force in open and direct warfare, the more vital
such ambiguity becomes.

The Russian policy in Donetsk sheds light on the dynamic of the past two
years of fighting in Syria. More than once, ceasefire agreements between the
powers have facilitated a double game: whereas the regular Russian and
Syrian forces comply with the ceasefire, the militia forces, which are not
subordinate to the institutional chain of command and control, sustain the
momentum of the fighting.

The ways in which this logic is used shed light on other arenas that exploit
the advantage stemming from systemically combining institutional forces and
extra-institutional militia forces. For example, the Palestinian Authority
continues to maintain connections between the organizational forces – the
Dayton forces – which are under the full authority of Chairman Mahmoud Abbas
and deployed under American supervision, and other forces, such as the
Tanzim groups, which also are armed but have a militia-type nature.

The positive side of the militia phenomenon

The cases of the Iranian Shiite militias and the secessionist forces in
Donetsk could lead us to condemn the phenomenon entirely. Yet it has
positive aspects as well, fulfilling a real need that also affects our own
lives. The recent movie Dunkirk highlights the worthy aspects of the popular
volunteering spirit in times of emergency. Thousands of civilian seamen who
had been recruited sailed eastward in their small boats under the terror of
German aerial bombardment, and saved hundreds of thousands of soldiers of
the British Crown from falling into German hands. The spirit of the British
nation, in all its patriotic hues, is the hero of the movie.

Beyond depicting a historical event as a moving cinematic experience, the
direction of the film conveys a simple, heroic, relevant message to Western
society even as it descends into antipatriotic neoliberalism. The simple and
apposite message: not only do the spirit and capabilities of the military
depend on the spirit of the people, but in a time of crisis, such as
Dunkirk, the spirit of popular sacrifice and the resourcefulness of citizens
provides the military with a safety net.

When it came to building up Israeli resilience for times of emergency, that
spirit was an unquestioned premise. After the establishment of the state,
the various efforts in the spheres of security, settlement, industry,
science, and culture were integrated into a single system. Yet within
Israel, too, as in the Western countries, neoliberal tendencies, such as
those manifested in the report on the settlements by Molad (the Center for
the Renewal of Israeli Democracy), seek to distinguish between the
responsibility of the security forces – which are entrusted with defending
the country – and the rights of citizens, who are supposed to “sleep
soundly” even in border settlements and focus on making the most of their
civilian lives.

It is worth looking specifically at the defense establishment’s plans to
evacuate, in an emergency situation, tens of thousands of residents of the
confrontation lines on the northern and Gaza borders. The traditional
approach of the defense establishment, up until the tenure of Chief of Staff
Rafael Eitan, was to make the settlements an element of defense under the
territorial concept of defense. The residents of Malkia, Manara, Avivim, and
Hanita indeed complained to me about the directive to abandon their homes in
case of emergency instead of mobilizing to defend the border from within
their homes. They look to the IDF to arm them and include them in the
defense effort. Even an eighty-year-old, male or female, can, if armed and
familiar with the locale, make a real contribution in an emergency
situation.

Reestablishing the pioneering ethos of volunteering, of joint responsibility
and common effort, remains even now the task of the hour.

The danger of losing the state’s monopoly on the use of armed forces

The use of local militia forces exacts a price. Since the Treaty of
Westphalia in the seventeenth century, the use of armed forces in sovereign
states in Europe has been the exclusive right of state governments. Based on
this logic, the Israeli government stuck to its demand that the Palestinian
Authority exercise an exclusive monopoly on the use of armed forces – “one
sovereign, one law, one weaponry.”

With the growing tendency of advanced countries and superpowers to use
local, non-state forces for their own strategic purposes, the chain of
command, through which complete, sovereign state authority was supposed to
be implemented, has been detached from the actual deployment of force.

When a state authority turns to local warlords to employ force, those
warlords are guided by their own local interest. The set of considerations
and constraints exists outside the institutional chain of command and is
very liable to spin out of control. That is essentially what happened when
the IDF lost control of the Christian Phalange in Sabra and Shatila in the
fall of 1982. It poses a threat to the Americans as well as they rely more
and more on local forces.

It was the advantage of transferring the burden of fighting to local forces
that seems to have led Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to say, regarding the
Oslo process: “Jibril Rajoub will do the work without the Supreme Court and
without B’Tselem.” Rabin apparently foresaw a kind of cooperation like what
was maintained with the South Lebanon Army or Tzadal, which at the time
operated in the southern Lebanon security zone in coordination with the IDF
and under the command of General Lahad. In Rajoub’s case as well, however,
as a “warlord” deploying a local force, he went along with the Oslo
agreement out of his own interests. It comes as no surprise that from that
juncture, things developed in such a way that the state of Israel lost
control.
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Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen is a senior research fellow at the
Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He served in the IDF for forty-two
years. He commanded troops in battles with Egypt and Syria. He was formerly
a corps commander and commander of the IDF Military Colleges.

BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the
Greg Rosshandler Family