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Unity of Command

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Awesome.

The first question the British will face is “Whose army?”

For they will find themselves advising a ragtag rebel force that cannot even agree on who its top officer is, amid squabbling between two generals who both come with unsavory baggage.

The dysfunction was on full display here this week. “I control everybody, the rebels and the regular army forces,” one of the two, Gen. Khalifa Hifter, said in an interview on Monday. “I am the field commander, and Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes is chief of staff. His job is to support us in the field, and my job is to lead the fighting.”

The rebels’ civilian leadership, the Transitional National Council, has insisted, however, that General Younes remains in charge of the military. “This is not true,” an official close to the council said Tuesday when told of General Hifter’s claims. “General Younes is over him, this is for sure, and General Hifter is under him.”

Last week, Pithlord wrote:

On the purely military level, isn`t it significant that the Rebellion`s weaknesses are in the areas where NATO assistance is most useful: weaponry, logistical capacity, aripower and money. A small investment by NATO`s standards can have a huge impact on the military balance.

There were reasons to suspect that this wasn’t true at the beginning of the intervention, and now it has become painfully clear that this statement is wrong. What the rebels lack is training, organizational cohesion, and political acumen. NATO cannot, with “a small investment,” solve these problems.  A capable rebel force might emerge over a year or so, assuming that that de facto partition results in a rebel state strong and coherent enough to field useful military forces.

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