Message Traffic: Showdown in Syria

What happened when Russia's "Wagner Group" took on US special ops

They got their asses kicked.

To put it bluntly.

The Russian mercenary force known as “the Wagner Group” is really a front for the GRU, Russia’s aggressive military intelligence agency, and the Kremlin itself—a means of doing dirty deeds while keeping their own hands clean through a cellophane-thin layer of plausible deniability. It is this group that the Kremlin has reportedly sent into Ukraine to hunt down and assassinate President Zelensky (after the fifty or so Kadyrovite Chechens originally assigned the task were all killed). This group that developed a vicious reputation for brutal atrocities while operating in Syria, and may be responsible for much of the civilian-targeted barbarity we now unfolding in Ukraine.

What Foreign Agenda has been able to exclusively confirm is that an approximately 200-strong unit of “paramilitary contractors” from Wagner—all former or even active-duty Spetsnaz (Russian special forces)—along with several hundred Syrian regulars, did attempt to engage a team of about thirty US Army Delta Force operators and Rangers, backed up by several Green Berets and a platoon of Marines, on the ground in Syria sometime around 2018.

The attackers had artillery; armor, including T-72 tanks; and superior numbers, outnumbering the American forces by about ten-to-one. But the Americans had something that their enemy had failed to take into account before so recklessly engaging them: superior battlefield management skills, which they used to call in and put to work the mother lode of close air support in the form of fast-air fighter jets, B-52 bombers, AC-130 gunships, Apache attack helicopters, and most of all Reaper drones under the control of “trackers” working out of Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field in sunny Florida.

We spoke to one of those trackers, who for security purposes must remain anonymous. As he told us: “We had probably half the floor at AFSOC all over them [the Russian and Syrian forces].  It really wasn’t much of a challenge for us.  We got an ad hoc tasking order, shifted eyes to the provided MGRS [Military Grid Reference System], confirmed the enemy activity in real time, and cleared them from the battlefield. Very methodical. We actually didn’t think much of it, and returned to our original taskings after they were all dead.”

Yup.

Think the Russian military we see struggling against the Ukrainians can take on the crack units of the United States Armed Forces and its NATO allies? Think again. But that also heightens the risk of nuclear conflict should NATO somehow end up in direct conflict with Russia. Something else to think about.

Alex Holstein is the co-author of Warfighter: The Story of an American Fighting Man, due out May 15, 2022, from Lyons Press.  He holds an MSc in Russian and Post-Soviet Studies from the London School of Economics, where he wrote his thesis on the Soviet KGB.