LONDON — The Obama administration has ended the Pentagon's $500 million program to train and equip Syrian rebels, administration officials said Friday, in an acknowledgment that the beleaguered program had failed to produce any kind of ground combat forces capable of taking on the Islamic State in Syria.
Pentagon officials were expected to officially announce the end of the program Friday, as Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter leaves London after meetings with his British counterpart, Michael Fallon, about the continuing wars in Syria and Iraq.
"I wasn't happy with the early efforts" of the program, Carter said during a news conference with Fallon. "So we have devised a number of different approaches." Carter added, "I think you'll be hearing from President Obama very shortly" on the program.
A senior Defense Department official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that there would no longer be any more recruiting of so-called moderate Syrian rebels to go through training programs in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates. Instead, a much smaller training center would be set up in Turkey, where a small group of "enablers" — mostly leaders of opposition groups — would be taught operational maneuvers like how to call in airstrikes.
While many details of the new approach still need to be worked out, President Barack Obama endorsed the shift in strategy at two high-level meetings with his national security and foreign policy advisers last week, several American officials said.
The change makes official what those in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the administration have been saying for several weeks would most likely happen, particularly in the wake of revelations that the program at one point last month had only "four or five" trainees in the fight in Syria — a far cry from the plan formally started in December to prepare as many as 5,400 fighters this year, and 15,000 over the next three years.
Already, the Pentagon has announced it was "pausing" the transfer of trainee candidates in Syria to training sites in Jordan and Turkey. About 150 opposition fighters already at the training sites will complete their instruction — learning to help call in allied airstrikes and operating 122-millimeter mortars — and they will be placed in opposition groups in Syria to enhance their combat effectiveness, officials said.
"Training thousands of infantry was not the right model, I think that's become pretty clear," said another senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning.
The official said the training was "to be suspended, with the option to restart if conditions dictate, opportunities arise." The official also said that support to Sunni Arab fighters in eastern Syria was an example of focusing on groups already fighting the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, "rather than using training to try to manufacture new brigades."