Trying to uproot and destroy the Islamic State’s army of terrorists inIraq without American ground troops, as President Obama promoted Wednesday night, is doomed to failure, national security experts say.
At the least, the president needs to get ground troops closer to the fight, say some politicians and analysts. He should introduce special operations units to advise and join the Iraqis on hunt-and-kill missions against Islamic State leaders, as well as insert controllers to point out targets for warplanes.
“What a waste of time,” said Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and counterterrorism official at the State Department. “We have not learned a thing in 80 years. [The Islamic State] is an army. The air power is not going to get the job done. Until you put troops in and kill these guys, they’re going to continue. They adjust to tactics. They meld into [the] civilian population.”
Militants in the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, are so embedded in Mosul, Fallujah, Ramadi and other Iraqi towns that it will take skilled land combatants to evict them, block by block, analysts say. Relying on the Iraqi security forces, even with front-line U.S. air power, is iffy at best, because Iraqi troops have conducted mass retreats rather than standing and fighting in major battlefield offensives.
Said an Army officer in the Pentagon: “Air power alone cannot win wars. [The president’s] stated strategy ignores this widely accepted truth. But with troops on the ground, in very small numbers, we can team with Kurds and Shia to support those ground forces in rapidly defeating ISIS.”
Retired Army Gen. John Keane, an architect of the 2007 troop surge carried out by Gen. David H. Petraeus, said that, at the least, the campaign needs American advisers closer to battle.
“If the U.S.-led coalition conducts a very aggressive air campaign that hits ISIS hard, sustained and simultaneous[ly] in Iraq and Syria, then ISIS will lose freedom of movement [and] initiative, and will become defensive,” Mr. Keane said. “However, defeat requires a ground counteroffensive to retake lost territory, led by the Iraqi army and the Free Syrian Army [and] supported by close air support.”
Mr. Obama Wednesday night refused to characterize as a “war” his new campaign to degrade and destroy the Islamic State. Instead, he likened it to long-term counterterrorism operations in Somalia and Yemen against al Qaeda and its spinoffs. Those operations are largely conducted as drone missile strikes on terrorist leaders without an air campaign or ground troops.
Experts say defeating the terrorist army is more akin to what was required to beat its first iteration, al Qaeda in Iraq, which was founded in 2004 by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and subsequently led by the group’s current chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, an Iraqi cleric.
From 2007 to 2009 the U.S. assembled a synchronized force of air power, special operations troops, conventional warriors and ground intelligence operatives who expelled al Qaeda terrorists and insurgents street by street and town by town.
Except for air power, all the other components are missing in Mr. Obama’s plan, though the enemy has an even more formidable upper hand in terms of held ground, weapons and manpower.
Retired Army Col. Peter Mansoor, a top aide to Gen. Petraeus in Iraq, said what is needed is for Americans to embed with the Iraqis while they are fighting, not just while at training bases.
“I interrupted the speech that we are going to provide advisers and trainers to help forces and improve their capabilities, perhaps in training areas and bases away from the front line, but the advisers would not accompany the Iraqis’ formations into combat, and I think that’s a shortcoming of the strategy that he announced,” Mr. Mansoor said.
The Obama strategy might work, he said, if the Iraq army and Kurds train up to higher standards and Baghdad persuades Sunnis to turn on the Islamic State.
“I would be more confident that it would work if there were American advisers and special forces embedded in these formations to help them call in airstrikes and to stiffen them,” Mr. Mansoor added.
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