Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee derided the Obama administration’s effort to train Syrian rebels, predicting it would have no effect against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
“It’s very weak and will not have significant impact,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told reporters following an hours long, closed-door briefing on the program.
{mosads}He also criticized Defense Department officials for telling potential recruits that they could only fight ISIS and not the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, calling it the “most ridiculous thing.”
“This strategy makes Pickett’s Charge look well thought out,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters. He called the training effort “militarily unsound” and “immoral.”
“We’re about to train people for certain death,” he said. “If I were Assad I’d take the first recruits we send and kill them in the cradle. This is the infancy — these are infants coming out of the Free Syrian Army. If they meet a certain fate, it’s going to be hard to recruit.”
President Obama proposed the train and equip effort last summer as a major pillar in the strategy to defeat ISIS. The plan is also intended to avert the need for a massive deployment of U.S. troops back to the Middle East.
The president has insisted he will not deploy U.S. troops into combat and that local security forces will do the fighting against ISIS.
The Pentagon last week said “several hundred” U.S. troops would soon receive orders to deploy begin training Syrian opposition groups with basic military skills.
Reportedly 400 trainers — a mix of special operations forces and conventional forces — will be involved in the effort with the goal of training roughly 5,000 rebels.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said there are roughly 30,000 ISIS fighters in Syria alone and that projections for when trained rebels might have an impact on the ground there are “not particularly comforting.”
“It’s just going to be a long time in Syria before we can any effective opposition up,” he said.
Instead, the U.S. should be working with the Iraqi government, as well as Sunni and Kurdish leaders, to drive ISIS out of that country, according to Sessions.
He proposed deeper U.S. involvement in Iraq, including embedding soldiers with Iraqi security forces — something the administration has been reluctant to do.
“The idea that we can’t put an embedded soldier in with an Iraqi army that we trained makes no sense at all,” Sessions told reporters.
One of the panel’s Democrats urged a wait-and-see approach.
“We’re just at the beginning stages of it and we still have a lot of work to do,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) said. “And we have a lot of questions for them to answer.”
Graham suggested the flow of potential recruits would also be impacted by conditions on the ground, as Lebanon and Jordan consider closing their borders to Syrian refugees.
“Syria’s about to become beyond hell on earth,” he said.