Jura The idiot
General
very interesting (I put some parts in boldface):
This is the Pentagon's new strategy to defeat ISIS
This is the Pentagon's new strategy to defeat ISIS
source is NavyTimes:The U.S. military headquarters here is outfitted with maps showing a "forward line of troops" — a FLOT, in military-speak — that divides northern Iraq's Kurdish region from territory held by the Islamic State group. The line is precisely drawn, following the contours of specific roads and berms. A mere 40 miles west, the terrain is pocked with trenches, fighting positions, razor wire and armed checkpoints. It's like a scene from Europe during World War I, one American official says.
It's a jarring change for the personnel who've spent much of their careers fighting on far more ambiguous battlefields. Steadily, though, they are coming to grips with it as, during the past several months, the Pentagon and the White House have fundamentally shifted their strategy for defeating ISIS. The way forward will mean potentially more key U.S. support troops on the ground to back friendly local forces who will wage the fight to retake ISIS-held territory.
The new plan calls for fighting the terror group like a conventional enemy, relying on traditional military tactics such as maneuver-style warfare and attrition. This has replaced last year’s approach, dubbed the “Iraq First Strategy," which was widely criticized as ineffective, especially after ISIS fighters seized the city of Ramadi in May. Instead, the U.S. and its allies now intend to confront the extremist group and its force of about 30,000 fighters, targeting their strongholds and resources across Iraq and Syria simultaneously.
Publicly the Obama administration says its strategy to defeat ISIS has not changed significantly, but realities on the ground and discussions at home indicate otherwise. Details about the shift became clear during the past several weeks, after a series of interviews that Military Times conducted with top commanders in Iraq, senior defense officials in Washington and outside military experts keenly familiar with the Pentagon's war plans.
Political considerations in Washington and Baghdad will limit the size of the U.S. force on the ground, so the campaign relies heavily on a dizzying patchwork of local ground forces — often with competing agendas — moving in large formations to isolate and ultimately invade the two major ISIS strongholds: Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. In Mosul, the plan calls for the Iraqi army to attack from the south, while the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga squeeze Islamic State forces from the north and east. In Syria, U.S. forces will support friendly militias in the northeast as they push south toward the Islamic State's defacto capital.
"Our campaign plan's map," Defense Secretary Ash Carter told soldiers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on Wednesday, "has got big arrows pointing to both Mosul and Raqqa."
In a secondary front, the Iraqi army will move west from Ramadi, the recently reclaimed capital of Anbar province, up the Euphrates Valley and toward the Syrian border. Another key pillar of this strategy requires cutting off the Islamic State's primary supply line to the outside world by pressuring Turkey to seal its border with Syria.
The new strategy coincides with the October appointment of an Army stalwart, Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, former commander of the First Armor Division, as the first flag officer to oversee all anti-ISIS operations in both Iraq and Syria. "Before that, the senior guys on the ground were pretty much from the special ops community," said retired Army Col. Peter Mansoor, a former top adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq who now teaches military history at the Ohio State University. "And now to put in someone who has a more conventional background … does signal that this is going to be a much more conventional fight than the [Obama] administration had first calculated."
Meanwhile, Iraqi leaders have begun imposing restrictions on the size and scope of the U.S. military force in their country. Factions within Baghdad’s Shiite-led government are influenced by neighboring Iran and thus oppose expanding the American military mission there. "Iraq is proving to be a lot trickier than we thought," said Michael Knights, a military expert with the the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "You’ve always got the risk that you can unbalance the government if you do too much. ... We've learned that it can be a lot simpler operating in an environment where you have no sovereign government [like Syria] than to operate in a place where you’ve got one, like in Iraq."
The new battle plan has many potential pitfalls, of course. And there are no clear plans for ousting ISIS militants from their strongholds in Syria west of the Euphrates River, where several rebel factions are fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has been buoyed by Russian military forces that have established an air base along the Mediterranean coast. For the U.S. and its allies, Russia's presence and activity in the region only further complicates an already convoluted pocket of Syria’s five-year-old civil war.
This campaign will take years to execute, officials say. But it is underway, both operationally and politically. Carter's recent trip to the region, which included stops here in Irbil, Baghdad and Turkey, set things in motion.
