Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Oopsie

28 Comments

Panetta: “We may have lost track of some Syrian chemical weapons.”

Here’s what I don’t get. I’ve seen all these stories over the past few months about “Syria’s chemical weapons,” in which they are discussed as though it’s the most natural thing in the world that Syria would have chemical weapons. No one ever seems to ask how they acquired them. Frank Salvato was asking the same question in July.

28 thoughts on “Oopsie”

  4. The military usefulness of chemical weapons is hugely exaggerated. The banning of them after WW1 was more a result of them being a pain in the ass to whichever side was using them, too much risk of “friendly fire” casualties due to their unpredictability, and they’re pretty ineffective as area weapons (they disperse too quickly). Nerve agents are far more deadly, but have the drawback of high cost and short shelf lives.

      1. Sir,

        While keeping in mind you are paying for the bandwidth (Rand), I will be pleased to debunk Mr. Andrew W’s comments if requested.

        Regards,

    2. Chemical weapons in the modern era are not tactical weapons on the battlefield, they are strategic weapons. Syria doesn’t have chemical weapons because they think it’ll help them defeat enemy tanks, they have chemical weapons because it serves as a strategic deterrent against Israel, the US, and Syria’s neighbors.

      1. I share Mike’s hesitancy about discussing this – maybe this is completely off-topic and is an unwanted discussion – but all those chemical weapons sure were a waste of money as far as Israel is concerned. So long as an Assad was (is) running Syria, Israel has acted supremely unconcerned about Syria. Israel conducts air raids with impunity – the unanswered strike against the Syrian/North Korean nuclear reactor is only the most famous example (google “Israel buzzes Presidential Palace” to see other examples. ) . I won’t go on but in many other ways as well, Israel has, in the past, treated Syria as a solved problem. Now things get interesting of course.

        1. I share Mike’s hesitancy about discussing this – maybe this is completely off-topic and is an unwanted discussion – but all those chemical weapons sure were a waste of money as far as Israel is concerned.

          And yet you do it anyway. Unsurprisingly.

          1. Sorry. What you want and don’t want on your blog isn’t really clear. If you spell it out, I’ll abide whatever you want. But Israel’s attitude is part of a complete answer to your question though. You said “No one ever seems to ask how they acquired them.” I think Israel asked. When Israel didn’t want Syria or Iraq to have nuclear weapons, it spied upon and dropped bombs to deny them the capability. I don’t see why Israel wouldn’t have spied upon and then bombed or otherwise disabled Syria’s chemical weapons factories if it really didn’t want Syria to have them.

        2. IMO, the training Israel has for dealing with chemical attacks shows they are not blowing off the possibility.

  5. Syria’s CBW are locally made.

    The program was initiated in the late 70s / early 80s, essentially in a similar timeframe to that of Iraq. They took advantage of the relative lack of controls to import relevant process equipment, technology, expertise, precursors etc. The consensus is that by the late 80s they were producing significant quantities of Sarin and Mustard. The quality of Syrian CW agents, most importantly how stable they are in storage, is an unknown, at least in open sources.

    Over the last few decades they have improved their production facilities and expanded the range of delivery systems to include various Scud missile derivatives, artillery and aircraft systems. Missile delivery was convinclingly demonstrated in the early 2000s.

    From time to time there have been accusations, mostly through Israeli sources, that the Syrians have produced and stockpiled VX. However these claims are generally superseded a few months later by claims that they are trying to develop a VX capability.

  6. The Syrian city of Palmyra already looks like it was depopulated with chemical weapons.

    Google image link

    On the other hand, if Syria collapses and Islamists somehow don’t take over, maybe the country will be safe enough for Western tourists to routinely visit such sites. The country is full of them, but lets hope they don’t add more.

  7. They could be frok Iraq and/or domestically made. The two are not mutually exclusive.

    If they were from Iraq, the Democrat response would be, “Why didn’t Bush attack sooner? He wasted all that time going through the UN and Iraq used it to smuggle those weapons out of the country. BushMcChimpyHitlerburton wanted those weapons to go to the dictator in Syria because he is racist and stands to make a profit.”

  8. The Free Republic linked to Frank Salvato’s piece. Comments were left at the Free Republic’s website. The comments are more informative, and less political than the commentary left at Brietbart’s website. You can read the comments here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2906455/posts

    One comment linked to this Jerusalem Post article on the subject, which discusses Syria’s chemical arms program since the 1970s:
    http://www.jpost.com/Features/FrontLines/Article.aspx?id=273925

    Finally, I found the following article, which (from my American perspective) says that the Bush administration suspected Indian chemical companies of helping Syria. How do we know? Wikileaks. Here’s the article:

    http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-12-19/india/28252183_1_graphite-indian-firms-ballistic-missile

    (The URL says “ballistic missile” but chemical weapons are also discussed.)

  9. …and Syria was the most likely place for Sodamn Insane to have dumped the chemical weapons he HAD that WE GAVE him, that we couldn’t find in Iraq. At the time the DoD had photos of lines of trucks running from Baghdad into Syria.

    1. “We” didn’t give them to him. He got the plant, equipment, and majority of precursors from France (Protec) and Germany (Karl Kolb) (see here).

      A couple of US companies were prosecuted for violating export controls in sending a small amount of precursors.

  11. One point that has been largely ignored while discussing chemical weapons is that the Syrian delivery systems are designed primarily for use against airfields, and the chems are likely intended primarily for that purpose. This isn’t a big surprise, as the Syrians took most of their doctrine from the Soviets, who saw chemis as paramount in this role. Remember, a huge chunk of the effectiveness of the IDF (as with NATO) is tied up in their air supremacy (the Syrians have been on the receiving end of this several times in the past), and thus it isn’t unreasonable to expect that if the airfields could be knocked out (or at least severely degraeded), that the IDF would be substantially less effective, perhaps enough to make the difference in time of war.

    None of this suggests that there aren’t plans to use the chems strategically, if it came to that, but the chems used (nerve aerosols, in particular) aren’t all that valuable as strategic killers (not enough area of effect, and easily avoided if you know that they are coming), but excellent for area denial and disruption, precisely what you would want for degrading air operations.

    1. That’s very interesting. Do you have any recommendations on what to read if one wants to learn more about different countries’ various military strategies?

  12. Almost all of the good stuff is out of print or seriously expensive, but look up Harriet Fast Scott and William Fontaine Scott as the most accessible (and decently researched…I met them in the mid 80s while working on my dissertation), while David Glantz’s stuff is the comprehensive. Amazon should have most of it, but don’t be too upset if you get sticker shock…sigh…

    1. Thanks! If you go to Google shopping, you can see some of their books (from the 1980s) for sale for under $10. I wonder how much of it is still relevant, and how much has is seriously out of date due to a) the lack of a USSR, and b) advances in technology (computers, drones, GPS,…)

      1. A lot of it is quite dated, and you are right to observe that much of it no longer applies. Massed tank attacks, for instance, have become as obsolete as cavalry charges, though I suspect you could probably find some high-ranking officers in numerous armies who still love the idea.

        The weapons built during that period, however, are still around, and their capabilities (optimized for the way they were going to be used), haven’t changed a great deal. Thus many client states of the former Soviet Union (or current client states of Russia) have large stocks of these old weapons, and have to live within the limitations of their capabilities. So even though the doctrines which inspired the SCUDs, and FROGs, and SS-21s, etc. have long since been relegated to teh trash, the weapons themselves are likely to be used as intended for no other reason than they are typically incapable of doing much else.

        Note that most Western weapon systems, built with a far greater margin for growth (which is one reason why they were so very expensive compared to their Soviet counterparts) have often been modified beyond all recognition, and thus rarely suffer from the same limitations.

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