War and community organizing are alike in one respect: The first rule is there are no rules.

Beyond that is anybody’s guess — especially the guess of President Barack Obama, who doubles as our commander in chief and chief community organizer.

On Friday, Obama committed a small number — no more than 50, said White House spokesman Josh Earnest — of U.S. special operations forces to the ground war in Syria.

They will be deployed in northern Syria to work with local troops in the fight against Islamic State militants, the White House said. It marks the first time Americans will be deployed openly on the ground in Syria.

It’s a risky, dangerous move for at least two reasons.

First, critics note that Obama has been resistant to putting U.S. boots on Syrian soil since 2011, when Arab Spring protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad escalated into a civil war. Obama’s action now, they say, is too little, too late to have any effect.

Second, the presence of Russian forces in southern Syria, ostensibly to defend Assad against the Islamic State, poses a threat of U.S.-Russian conflict in what began as a Mideast proxy war.

That possibility is disturbing enough on its own. But consider the words spoken just one day earlier by the U.S. director of intelligence, James Clapper.

Moscow’s escalating militancy in Syria comes not because of careful strategic decisions but rather because Russian President Vladimir Putin is “winging this,” Clapper told CNN in an exclusive interview.

Clapper said Putin was “very impulsive and opportunistic” as he increased Russian support for his longtime ally Assad.

“I personally question whether he has some long-term strategy or whether he is being very opportunistic on a day-to-day basis,” Clapper said. “And I think his intervention into Syria is another manifestation of that.”

Putin is winging it in Syria. With only one ally — Assad — and one objective — keeping Assad in power — Putin seems unconcerned that Russian air strikes have strayed north and west, killing Kurdish and Syrian moderate rebels, who are potential U.S. allies against Assad, along with ISIS troops situated farther south and east.

Now Obama appears to be winging it, too. The United States has no allies in Syria and no clear-cut strategies to achieve two hazy objectives: removing Assad and containing the Islamic State.

U.S. officials have called Russia’s airstrikes, which began a month ago, a “strategic blunder,” with Obama saying earlier this month that Russia was heading for a “quagmire” in the country.

“It just won’t work, and they’re going to stay there for a while,” Obama said at a news conference.

Obama’s been wrong before about the war in Syria, most notoriously calling ISIS a “junior varsity team” in January 2014.

Obama wanted to play up the notion that Islamic jihad had been eradicated under his presidency — a notion that resurfaced during the recent Hillary Clinton congressional hearing on Libya.

Twenty-one months later, ISIS is still operating unchecked in Syria and western Iraq.

Obama might be wrong again.