Former U.S. Commanders Take Increasingly Dim View of War on ISIS

[rug]

As conflict enters its third year, endgame still elusive



Syrian Peshmerga fighters outside Mosul Aug. 18, preparing for an offensive to retake Iraq's second-largest city from ISIS. (Yunus Keles / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images)

Mark Thompson
DC
5:56 PM ET

It’s a most peculiar war: rarely has the U.S. been killing so many while risking so few. The U.S. is beating ISIS handily, judging by Vietnam’s body-count metric. The total number of ISIS battlefield deaths claimed by U.S. officials has jumped, from 6,000 in January 2015 to 45,000 last month—a bloodbath for an enemy force estimated to number about 30,000. Three U.S. troops have died. That’s an eye-watering U.S.-to-ISIS “kill ratio” of 15,000-to-1. “We’ve got good momentum going,” General Joseph Votel, chief of U.S. Central Command, who is overseeing the war, said Tuesday. “We are really into the heart of the caliphate.”

But some of his predecessors disagree. James Mattis, a retired Marine general who commanded Central Command from 2010 to 2013, says the war on ISIS is “unguided by a sustained policy or sound strategy [and is] replete with half-measures.” Anthony Zinni, a retired Marine four-star who held the same post from 1997 to 2000, says he doesn’t think he could do so today. “I don’t want to be part of a strategy that in my heart of hearts I know is going to fail,” he says. “It’s a bad strategy, it’s the wrong strategy, and maybe I would tell the President that he would be better served to find somebody who believes in it, whoever that idiot may be.”



Institute for the Study of War

Day after day, American warplanes, sometimes joined by allies, have been attacking individual ISIS targets, down to backhoes and foxholes. ISIS has lost 40% of its Iraqi territory, the Pentagon says, and 5% in Syria. It doesn’t seem to have lost any of the terrain it has staked out on the internet. That’s slow progress by a 27-state military alliance against a two-year-old rump state.

The U.S.-led war against the Islamic State is entering its third year (eclipsing the time the U.S. spent fighting World War I). In part, that’s because it’s a small-bore campaign: the U.S. is spending $4 billion a year, equal to a third the cost of a single aircraft carrier (planes not included). “Employing an anemic application of force relative to previous air campaigns has yielded the Islamic State time to export their message, garner followers, and spread their message,” says David Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who planned the 1991 bombing campaign that all-but-drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. “A comprehensive strategy to rapidly decompose the Islamic State is still lacking.”



Department of Defense

http://time.com/4474910/isis-retired-generals/

[yortsed snacilbuper]

1. "Former U.S. Commanders Take Increasingly Dim View of War on ISIS"

They probably could have stopped isis from forming if they had known what they were doing.