A few thoughts on Chemical Warfare

Since the beginning of
Syria’s roughly 20-month-long civil war, the question of whether or when the
regime would turn to chemical warfare to ensure its survival has loomed large
for Syrians and the wider world alike. Damascus maintains, by most estimates, prodigious
stocks of blister agents and even advanced nerve agents that could inflict
horrific results on civilians and soldiers alike. The recent military gains by
rebels in the neighborhoods of Damascus and their increasingly potent air
defense capabilities all speak to plausible motive.U.S. officials report preliminary steps towards readying, and exhortations to begin
employing, chemical weapons as well.

We know relatively little
about the regime’s mindset, or its military’s logistical or ethical readiness
to follow out such horrific orders. Nevertheless, it is wrong to suggest Syria
is the first regime to face an endgame with chemical weapons in its arsenal. If
Assad’s regime’s death spiral involves poison gas, it would in fact be the
first incident of its kind.

One of the first – if not
the first – regimes to collapse with chemical weapons was Tsarist Russia. Even
in its death throes, it did not deploy them, although Tukachevsky inflicted
chemical warfare against the Tambov Rebellion before the end of the Russian
Civil War. The Russian Revolution and Civil War demonstrated a recurrent
pattern, although one with a very small sample size.

Embattled regimes, on their
last legs, do not deploy their chemical arms. Germany, despite highly advanced
CW capabilities, used them during the Holocaust but not on the battlefield,
even as vastly superior Soviet forces were crushing the Third Reich. Nor did
Japan, a country which used gas and biological weapons frequently against the Chinese
early in the war, and whose soldiers frequently displayed suicidal levels of
loyalty and commitment, employ gas against the Americans.

Rather than a last resort,
CW is most frequently used when the side employing it appears to control the
escalation ladder (though with such a small sample size, the exact causality
here is murky). Iraq used CW from the very beginning of the Iran-Iraq war, and
it could do so with relative confidence. It had the Soviet Union as its patron
and there was no chance the U.S. would decisively crush the bulwark against
Iranian power. Saddam also used CW to massacre weaker opponents and civilians,
as the Anfal campaign horrifically demonstrated.

So why do dictators appear
to forgo chemical warfare in their most desperate hours, particularly when they
are willing to use them in less immediately dangerous circumstances? A major
explanation is the increased danger of escalation or reciprocity. The Allies,
too, had major chemical weapons stocks in WWII, and were prepared to use them
if the Axis deployed them. Japan was well aware of this:

In 1944 Ultra revealed that the Japanese doubted their
ability to retaliate against United States use of gas. ‘Every precaution must
be taken not to give the enemy cause for a pretext to use gas,’ the commanders
were warned. So fearful were the Japanese leaders that they planned to ignore
isolated tactical use of gas in the home islands by the US forces because they feared
escalation.

Unsurprisingly, the Japanese used
chemical weapons against Chinese forces with limited capability to retaliate in
kind, but forwent their use even as the U.S. was crushing them. Although the
U.S. also forwent an invasion that would likely employ them, it unleashed a
much more deadly and efficacious weapon on two of Japan’s major cities instead
– the atomic bomb. Similar considerations likely guided German reluctance to
employ CW against the allies – for a losing side the prospect of increased
escalation is generally a poor idea.

Of course, even if the FSA captured
chemical weapons depots, it would have limited ability to escalate. Assuming
Assad was inclined to use chemical
weapons, that possibility is strongly balanced by the U.S. “red lines” against
chemical warfare use. While they are vague, explicitly committing to any
specific series of punishments could be politically complicating enough with
regard to domestic concerns and international commitments as to undermine the
credibility of the threat. Given that basically all U.S. military options for
dealing with CW are immensely problematic, locking the U.S. into any specific
course of action would be highly problematic.

Deterrent threats from third party
actors do sometimes work in these cases. When Iraq appeared to be employing CW
against Shia in the south of Iraq, James Baker used a similar script. While military options were considered, they were never officially stated.
Of course, despite the ultimatum, the lack of chemical weapons use, and the
imposition of a No-Fly Zone, Saddam still ably suppressed the Shia and held
onto power for more than a decade.

Another limiting factor on chemical
weapons, separate from the issue of escalation and 3^rd party
intervention, is that they simply are not very effective outside of certain
battlefield circumstances. Effective Iraqi CW against Iran involved massed
fires and combined arms against identifiable hostile formations, command, and
logistical elements. Fighting a guerrilla opponent grants few of these
advantages. Chemical weapons in and of themselves did not cause anything but a
small minority of deaths or casualties, but they did pose effective in
constraining Iranian options for massing their forces. Against Halabja, gas
killed thousands, but it was in the context of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi
forces in a combined arms operation against insurgents almost a magnitude
smaller in size – and it still failed to destroy insurgent activity in that
corner of Kurdistan. Iraq was never able to fully destroy the Peshmerga, and
indeed relied on leveraging Kurdish infighting as part of its counterinsurgency
in the north.

Much as the Japanese and Germans lacked
much of the equipment and mass to use CW effectively in the closing years of
WWII, a massive CW campaign, if it does occur in Syria, would likely be too
little, too late to significantly check the FSA, but would almost certainly
arouse increased regional attention. While chemical weapons are horrific in
effect, their lack of clear military efficacy against an opponent willing to absorb
the casualties and capable of adapting their tactics does a significant part of
explaining their relatively infrequent use. Against a casualty-averse opponent,
such as a potential foreign intervening actor, they may be of great use,
particularly if that foreign intervening state lacks the capability to escalate
in response to CW use. Against a determined popular insurgency, CW use is not
particularly efficacious outside specific tactical situations (such as clearing
confined areas). That lack of efficacy has compounding effects. Not only does
it make states less likely to employ CW, those ordered to employ CW who still
fear losing are more likely to defect (particularly when combined with the
issue of escalation), or else suffer at the hands of the victors.

Of course, assuming Assad does decide
to break with this small pattern and use CW in his regime’s death spiral,
should the U.S. intervene? Dominic Tierney has pointed out that deciding to go
to war on the basis of a regime murdering civilians in one way rather than
another seems morally insignificant,
particularly when the lack of efficacy of chemical weapons relative to
conventional ones is apparent (indeed, I dislike the term WMD for skewing
attention away from much more historically lethal conventional arms, lumping in
CW with nuclear weapons generally). Syrian chemical weapons use, particularly
at a stage where its air force is increasingly threatened by MANPADS and AA
guns and its ability to maintain large formations is withering thanks to Syrian
rebel IED use and raiding, is unlikely to be highly effective, and given the
lack of battlefield experience with them, it is questionable if Syria’s troops
would even be effectively versed in their operations. As in basically all other
major conflicts with CW, conventional arms would remain responsible for the
vast majority of the death and misery inflicted on the country.

I do not necessarily agree with
Tierney’s argument there are strategic reasons to oppose Syrian WMD use in this
case. Firstly, Assad’s use of chemical weapons is not likely to trigger
chemical weapons use elsewhere, since the factors I mention constraining, such
as fear of escalation and limited efficacy would hold regardless. Indeed, the
overplaying of the effect of CW probably adds as much to their symbolic and
psychological value to foreign regimes as does their actual record in the
field.

Secondly, far more likely than Syrian
CW use seriously affecting proliferation or use elsewhere, an intervention to
destroy Syrian CW would be a massive military campaign, and one that actually
secured the CW on the ground (particularly after guards presumably desert
depots after bombing) would be a significant ground campaign. I have argued elsewhere that a WMD-focused mission would be
immensely difficult and expensive,
and not only that, but even limited airstrikes would pose severe problems due
to the intelligence considerations of finding weapons and the collateral damage considerations of actually hitting them.

Especially if our concern is preventing
terrorists or other groups from acquiring CW, limited deterrent airstrikes simply
will not do. Somebody will need to provide a comprehensive ground presence, and
even then the insertion of specialized personnel to destroy or transport out CW
would be incredibly vulnerable without protection. If Benghazi was bad, one can
only imagine what would happen to Western personnel traipsing about a Syria
where Jahbat al-Nusra is active. Not only that, but given the complexity of accounting for CW, the length of time it takes to destroy them (the U.S.
still isn’t done), and the difficulty of using CW in an effective terrorist
attack*, one would be wise to consider the costs of such an operation. 

Hopefully, as in past instances of
civil war, revolution, or regime downfall, Assad will forgo using CW against
his own population. Given Turkey’s emphasis on missile defense from NATO, the
use of CW against 3^rd party states with lower casualty tolerance may
be Syria’s aim. Generally, CW’s effects, its likelihood of use, and the
necessity of going to war to stop it seem frequently overstated. While this may
be an exception to that general pattern, we should recognize it is far from a
clear one as we consider policy options.

*This is a controversial point, but Aum
Shinrikyo’s attack, while awful, was not so horrific as to suggest CW terror is
worth a war to try to prevent. The Tokyo Sarin attack killed 13 and injured over
1,000. The London bombings in 2005 killed 52 and injured 700 with vastly less
complex resource requirements. Aum Shinrikyo had a large amount of technical
expertise to the point they could produce their own factory and atropine
antidotes. A group which has CW simply through the fortune of stolen artillery
shells is highly unlikely to be able to employ CW to effects so dramatic it
warrants a preventive war to forestall. Much more dangerous, I suspect, will be the new generations of
jihadists trained in small-unit tactics and IED-building. A CW attack would be
dangerous but given its similar damage profile to a conventional attack with a
similar (or smaller) amount of personnel and lower technical complexity,
preventing them from proliferating alone is probably not worthy of a massive
conventional land operation to secure CW.

www.cnas.org