Breaking with the more cautious position of the administration he served, Fred Hof, a former top State Department adviser on Syria, said Thursday that the US should provide arms to select Syrian rebels and might target the Syrian regime’s command and control centers and missile forces to prevent the use of chemical weapons.

Hof, who left the Obama administration in September and is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Al-Monitor in an interview that “it is inevitable” that the US will begin providing weapons to elements of the Syrian opposition as the conflict intensifies. The US, he said, has now had sufficient time to vet the rebels who are organizing themselves politically as well as militarily and needs to send weapons to influence the shape of Syria’s future government.

Hof spoke following reports that the Syrian regime last week fired half a dozen Scud missiles against opposition forces that have been gaining territory including on the outskirts of the Syrian capital, Damascus. President Barack Obama has warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that using chemical weapons against his own people would be a “red line” that would have serious consequences but has not specified what those might be. More than 40,000 people have already died in Syria since protests broke out in March 2011.

“I might ignore the chemical side and concentrate on targets that could disable the regime’s ability to wage war across the board,” said Hof, a former US Army officer with decades of experience in the Middle East. “It could be very complicated and perilous to go after the chemicals themselves” because of the danger that striking such stockpiles would disseminate poison gas to civilian populations.