YPG Forces Seize Jabar, Deploy Closer To Al-Tabqa Dam

Yes, but the Americans and French aren’t particularly good at military strategy. The tactical and operational abilities of the officer corps is weakest point in the US military, and pretty well always have been. SOF units are no exception to his. Study the 1st SFOD-D and Navy SEAL operations in Panana in 1989, and then Gothic Serpent in Somalia 1993.

Planning and command and control are terrible even in the elite units. Planning is cumbersome, takes too long, relies on too much information, and is too specific and choreographed, with insufficient room for things to go wrong. Tactical/operational execution involves too much micromanagement by too many different people, without clearly allocating authority and responsibility for crucial steps of the plan. That is why, in Mogadishu, the team that went in to do the capture sat there waiting to be picked up for 30 minutes, while the convoy sat there waiting for a call to come pick them up, and not a single one of the officers in charge thought that maybe they should talk to the other group and see what the delay was. It took an attached Air Force NCO sitting in the convoy command vehicle to finally be like “Hey’ what’s going on?” and find out that the inserted team had been waiting for extraction the whole time.

The US military gets by through having competently trained enlisted people, who can reasonably well use their advanced equipment, and by fighting third-rate militaries. In terms of per-man efficiency, however, the US has been outfought by every peer nation it has faced. (American Revolutionary War, War of 1812, WWI, WWII). They disguise this by fudging the figures heavily, and selectively focusing on certain leaders, operations and battles in the history, while ignoring the majority where things don’t go well.

The French have almost all the same problems, in their own, unique French way. Officers have too much status and authority, but not enough actual leadership skills. Plans are too complex, and there is never enough focus on a Plan B. And this is also a continual historical trend. Except for Jeanne d’Arce, who used unorthodox tactics for her time (Why she was accused of Witchcraft!), a period in the late 17th Century, under people like Conde and Turenne, and the period under Napoleon (who wasn’t French!), the French have been outperformed by all of Northern Europe pretty continuously. They’ve done okay against the Austro-Hungarians only because they were such a multi-cultural, bureaucratic mess. AHE got beaten up by the second-rate Turks quite a lot too, so one can see the level of skill the French required here. As Frederick the Great of Prussia said to the Duke de Belle Isle: “Your army, sir, are a pack of cunts.”

The main contribution of the US and French advisors is with technical skills, and individual/team-level fire and movement, weapons handling, etc. All the enlisted level stuff the US is decent with. The SF Warrant Officers, MSGTS and SFCs have a lot of useful stuff to teach about weapons handling, clearing rooms, blowing stuff up, and so on.

The SDF/YPG have to be careful planners, because they are a heavily decentralised force (Anarcho-Syndicalists) whose individual units only participate if they want to. If they don’t like they plan, they can and do pack up and go home. Their commanders have no real ability to force people to go along with dumb plans.