Tribal fighters take part in an intensive security deployment against Islamic State militants in the town of Amriyat al-Falluja in Anbar province, November 5, 2014. Credit: Reuters/Stringer
The Pentagon’s ‘Nine-Brigade Gamble’ On Iraq -- Robert H. Scales, Washington Post
Robert H. Scales, a retired Army major general, is a former commandant of the U.S. Army War College.
Last Friday, on a dead news night and three days after the election, the White House announced another surge of U.S. troops to Iraq. Why now? Why so many? And are these enough to defeat the Islamic State?
The answers lie in large part in “ground truth,” the balance of battlefield conditions that ultimately determines success or failure. The Islamic State’s offensive over the summer gave it effective control of all of Sunni Iraq, including Anbar province and cities that run like a string of pearls from Syria down the Euphrates River.
The first tranche of U.S. advisers, along with a feeble series of airstrikes and reinforcement by the Kurdish pesh merga, were sufficient to force the Islamic State to “culminate” at the gates of Baghdad. Culmination is a military term that describes an offensive campaign that has reached its limit of advance. The aggressor can go no farther, but the defender lacks the power to reverse the attack and take back lost ground. It’s a contemporary, irregular-warfare version of what the Germans faced before Stalingrad in 1943 or Lee’s predicament after losing the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.
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My Comment: A must read analysis on the U.S. strategy and plan to defeat the Islamic State. What's my take .... too little and too late.
1 comment:
I like this analysis as a description of what is and what to caution for, but it had no recommendations for what to do, though it implied quite a bit.
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