Jan 11, 2019

The Donald Trump administration’s confirmation that the US military has begun pulling equipment out of Syria has highlighted the Pentagon’s tensions with hawks such as national security adviser John Bolton, current and former defense officials told Al-Monitor.

Why it matters: Bolton’s insistence that the United States still stop the re-emergence of the Islamic State and Iranian-backed proxies in Syria could frustrate military planners trying to interpret Trump’s withdrawal order. The circumstances could prove especially difficult, experts say, as Washington faces a partial government shutdown with acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan only 10 days into his new job.

“I can only imagine the commanders and the planners saying, ‘now what are we going to do,’” said Donald Bolduc, a retired brigadier general who led US special forces in Africa. “The Pentagon’s in a transition mode itself. It’s the middle of the holiday season, a lot of jobs aren’t getting filled. You’re in the middle of a government shutdown. The focus is on that.” A former military official said US military planners first received their notice about the Syria withdrawal from media reports and the president’s comments in December rather than an official military order to leave, forcing them to immediately begin planning.

It’s complicated: On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that US ground troops and naval vessels are moving toward Syria to assist with the withdrawal, defying Bolton. The national security adviser pledged during a visit to Israel this week that the United States would still achieve the objectives articulated before Trump announced the pullout. “Nothing has changed,” a defense official told WSJ. “We don’t take orders from Bolton.”

But alarm bells are ringing in the Pentagon that the new secretary might not be able to get around Bolton’s views on Syria, which are far more hawkish than Trump’s. A former US official told Al-Monitor that former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis “had a unique level of credibility and juice” to defy Bolton, and that few people in the Defense Department have anything good to say about Bolton. That’s different from most administrations, where the national security adviser is assumed to speak for the president, a former National Security Council staffer said.