The only thing that fits is Putin was testing Trump. Putin was wanting to see how many red lines he could cross. He learned that with Obama the red line was written in pencil. Every military response down to the squad level had to be okayed by Obama political operatives. President Trump gave the military a mission and let them decide how to accomplish it. Trump’s red line is the red line and the military is guns free after that.
The larger objective IMHO was in shaping the battlefield for a future attack. Putin gambled with his merc’s. He calculated that Trump is in a weakened political position and would not want to risk open conflict with Russians. Wagner group would open up an avenue of approach and set the precedent of battle groups moving past the red line. Future combined Syrian, IRGC group would mimic Wagner and attack USForces. If they killed or captured a large number of US troops it might force us to withdraw.
Putin made a basic miscalculation. President Trump is not operating under the same basic premise as Obama. Trump will not shrink from confrontation.
Putin’s C & C of this op is suspect. There are open lines of communication between US and Russian forces. After the first bomber strike the Wagner group had to be rendered incapable of performing the mission. The Russians had to know that gunships and arty were on the way. Why did they not call the US command and use some cover story to request a cease fire to retreat and pull the KIA and WIA out. Either the Merc/regular army command and control are inadequate or it was just piss poor planning with commanders not up to the task.
Future threats must be considered. The Russians will be much more hands off next time. They’ll use their Iranian Guard counterparts so as to avoid Russian casualties and questions in their ability to project power regionally. The IRGC will aggressively plan to inflict as much political and military damage to US Forces as possible. They have a target within range and forces available. They will continue to explore their options.
“The only thing that fits is Putin was testing Trump... Putin gambled with his merc’s.”
I agree. He gambled and lost. If he had captured the oil fields, any future Kurdish region would be considerably poorer and weaker, and Assad’s regime would be significantly enriched and strengthened.
The Iranians recently engineered the capture of the much larger oil fields around Kirkuk from the Iraqi Kurds, shifting the strategic calculus there significantly. In Iraq however, the Iranians exploited rivalries among the Kurds, to engineer a relatively uncontested handover of positions from PUK Peshmerga to Iranian-supported Hashd al Shaabi militias, with the support of the Government in Baghdad. I suspect that they may have covertly murdered Jalal Talabani (former PUK leader), because they could cut that deal with his son shortly afterward.
The Russians however, tried to shoot in and grab the al Omar fields, apparently hoping that they could do it before Americans reacted (or that the Americans might not have the balls to engage them on that scale). Bad gamble.
I am guessing that once things went South, none of the regular Russian military command would take personal responsibility for blowing the deniability cover story, so they left their boys exposed in the open desert for hours getting shot up, like fish in a barrel, rather than admit to the Americans that they were theirs.