 When Assad threatened the base commander with shelling, the commander negotiated a surrender; Assad later claimed that the base could have withstood his forces.Not long after Assad's election to the Regional Command, the Military Committee ordered him to strengthen the committee's position in the military establishment.Assad may have received the most important job of all, since his primary goal was to end factionalism in the Syrian military and make it a Ba'ath monopoly; as he said, he had to create an "ideological army".