In Syria, it’s a little more of a mafia than it is a government. For instance, they withdrew from Lebanon but they’re still harboring terrorists and sending them across borders because Syria’s government, security, and economic elements have all got their own alliances. So you could have the government agree to a deal, and then the next day you’ve got an entire army coming across the border and setting up camp on the bank of the Euphrates. This is why this fight isn’t as simple as dropping a bunch of guys from a plane along the border.

If you infiltrated the border by air, you could maybe capture some people and get some Intel and maybe knock out a few targets. However, it would never be clear who did it and it wouldn’t discourage people from continuing to infiltrate from Syria. The terrorists over there are organizing militarily with a defense in-depth, registering fire, wearing body armor, and behaving in a very organized way. Your goal is to confront that organization and defeat the very idea of it, not necessarily the individual fighters. It takes you back to one of those little dictums of armed combat: Defeat the enemy or his will to fight.

You confront them with a coordinated assault of your own, which will demonstrate to them their inability to stand up in the face of what you can mount. It’s an object lesson set at a slow pace. The Marines set this bridge head up and then go to Obeidi, where they encounter a defense in-depth: a blocking action that uses all the enemy’s assets as force-on-force against the opposition. A classic example of this is the Maginot Line* in World War I, which turned out to last about a day. It’s far better to take your men, weapons and fortifications and spread them along the projected enemy’s line of advance.

I think after the Marines used a heavy hand on them—with the air strikes to counteract what had been set up and it looked like there was an established sortie against them, discretion was the better part of valor for the enemy. On the part of the good guys, the prize is kind of lost because of the huge engineering activity of putting a pontoon bridge across the Euphrates. That’s pretty observable and obviously takes a considerable amount of time.

So you wage this huge battle that isn’t even the fight you came to fight, and then you head off to the real operation and basically there’s no one there. It falls into that general military absurdity that every soldier lives with because when you’re down there among the ranks you never hear the big plan; you only hear the small details. In this operation, from the soldier’s point of view, he might feel he wasted his time. It’s easier for us to see the big picture: that these Marines went in there and waged a good battle. They went in with force, took all the time in the world to set up a bridge head, came across with a big tactical column and swatted the enemy. We denied them the ability to organize in the way they were intending to, and it’s not a bad thing that we proved our point right at the outset..

*Editor’s note: The Maginot Line was a fortification built along the French border from Switzerland to Belgian before the start of WWI. The French falsely believed the wall was impenetrable and would substitute the need for mobile warfare, until it was easily flanked by the Germans in their French campaign of 1940.