As the Pentagon gets ready to “vet” the potential Syrian rebels they hope to train for the new pro-US rebel faction they intend to create to fight ISIS, it’s looking pretty easy. They already know most of these guys, because they already trained them.

“We’re not starting from scratch,” one official noted, adding re-vetting people they already know should take no more than a single day, and many of these worked through the CIA programs from previous years.

The unspoken downside to this is that these same rebels were trained to do the exact same thing they’re being trained for this time, and it didn’t work before.

The Pentagon estimates they can get 5,400 rebels ready to go in a year, and that they’ll need around 15,000 to seriously contest ISIS territory. Yet so far these rebels have been extremely unsuccessful in fighting ISIS and pretty much everyone else they’ve gone against, so the estimates seem extremely optimistic.