"Turkey - Syria brawl" Topic

The Syria-Turkey brawl continues to go on:

link

What's fascinating is that NATO member Turkey is unable to establish dominance over the Syrians who are far more poorly equipped.

The Turkish military initially also suffered against ISIS including losing at least 6-8 modern Leopard 2 tanks as well as multiple older but considerably upgraded M60s and even an AH-1 gunship to a Kurdish missile.

So the second largest army in NATO continues to stumble against poor equipped troops. How would they go against the Russians/Soviets who are are far better equipped.

There are similar parallels to Saudi performance in the Yemen War where despite technologically qualitative and quantitative advantages the Saudis have stumbled against the Houthis.

Goes to show it's not the weapon, but rather the men that are important.

Thankfully there was no mention of US troops in that article. That is a one mess we don't need to be involved in. Now if we would pull all our troops out of Afghanistan that would be good too.

Not surprised with Syrian incompetence, especially since Erdogan reportedly sacked many of his effective military leaders, like Stalin did back in the day, due to worries over coup plotters.

Turkey's inability to tame the Syrians is like Saudi Arabia's inability to tame the Houthis. Conventional means are ill-suited to deal with unconventional asymmetrical opponents.

I can't believe that asymmetric warfare is entirely alien to the Turkish military establishment for a very obvious reason, but selecting your officer corps on the basis of perceived loyalty to an ideology, or person, or the ability to say 'yes' a lot has seldom worked out well…