Does the war against ISIS show the futility of fighting without air Power?
How would things look without the massive air campaign?
The airstrikes against ISIS were effective.
It would look a lot different. Consider…currently, ISIS (and AQ et al) have to be pretty circumspect in concentrating or even exposing their C&C. Without air power they wouldn’t have to do that, and they could more tightly control their forces, and not have to worry about their tail. That, alone, is a huge difference to how things are. Additionally, the US and presumably Europe would have to have a lot more boots on the ground…or, basically, concede that Iraq and Afghanistan were lost causes along, most likely, with much of the middle east, and just pull out and hope for the best (better start looking into alternative fuel sources for 100’s of millions of vehicles, which I’m doubtful we’d be able to do in a compressed time frame).
Perhaps it is the flip side that is true. It shows the futility of fighting without boots on the ground.
This. For all our airpower and sophistication, our results against the Taliban, Al Qaeda in Iraq, and now ISIS have been less than spectacular.
Airpower is not just airstrikes. Air mobile operations are also a subset of this and in places like Afghanistan, those have been much more important than strikes.
If you mean “killed less than 100% of them” then you’re right. Otherwise, you’re clearly wrong.
I LOVE our soldiers, so I don’t want to run them down, but … most people wouldn’t consider our efforts in Afghanistan or Iraq very “successful”. Yes, we killed a shit-load of bad guys, but they still hold territory in both those countries. It’s not all that different from what happened in Vietnam, unfortunately.
The holding of territory isn’t even a main consideration. Dreams of starting an Islamic fundamentalist caliphate aside, it doesn’t take a lot of real estate to train a bunch of guys to blow up a shopping mall.
To be honest, ISIS’s strategy is a bit baffling to me as our military would probably love nothing better to have a defined territory to drop bombs on vehicles waving enemy flags.
Isn’t ISIS on the verge of defeat now, with only Mosul left?
Yeah I’m not sure what HurricaneDitka is talking about. The war in Iraq, against ISIS, or against the Taliban in Afghanistan looking nothing like Vietnam. ISIS, like if you’ve been following the news at all you’d know they’ve lost a huge percentage of their territory in the last year. Many of the foreign fighters who have entered Syria and Iraq have fled (under risk of execution en masse) to get the fuck out, ISIS, a year or so ago was paying people fat wages to run oil fields and etc–now it’s the terrorist outfit equivalent of bankrupt, few oil fields left, can’t pay its fighters much etc. It loses thousands of fighters a month and isn’t able to replace them.
The only major city they control in Iraq is Mosul, their “capital” in Syria, Ramadi, is facing daily assaults from a rejuvenated Syrian regime.
Let’s compare that to Vietnam. We sign the Paris Peace Accords and pull out, the American people are told we’ve won, South Vietnam is safe. Very shortly after we’re gone, the North invades, the South falls like Sonny Liston in his rematch with Ali, and Vietnam is unified under the Communist North under the Communist system. American allies in the South are sent to reeducation camps, and many hundreds of thousands flee to avoid this fate creating a massive refugee crisis.
So compare that to ISIS, which in the 1.5 years since the Battle for Kobani ended (that was the first real “last stand” that was made against ISIS during their initial surge, where the West pumped a lot of effort and resources into a local ally to fight ISIS–and won) ISIS territory has been steadily going down every month. That’s very different from Vietnam.
Afghanistan also isn’t remotely like Vietnam. We’re down to less than 10,000 soldiers there, and the Taliban is in no serious threat of conquering Afghanistan. Afghanistan is probably stuck in a stalemate with the Taliban long term, but they lack legitimacy with enough of the Afghan population to ever return to power. They’ve essentially in the position the Northern Alliance was after the Afghan Civil War–the Taliban couldn’t quite finish them off, but the NA wasn’t able to do anything against them (until America swooped in after 9/11.) The main reason the Taliban was able to take Afghanistan at all was in the 1990s literally hundreds of thousands of Pakistani fellow travelers, trained in extremist madrasas and probably aided by the Pakistani intelligence service were sent across the border. They’ve all largely died or ran back to Pakistan now, and the ones who are still alive are more concerned with fighting Pakistan now (they turned on the government in Islamabad when said government changed course and decided to clamp down on terrorist groups like them.)
The second war in Iraq also was “essentially” ended successfully, although some consider the ISIS war a continuation of that. We knocked Saddam out of power, put a mostly ineffective government in his place, and then fought a long insurgency. That largely ended because two parties agreed to stop fighting–the Mahdi Army under Muqtada al-Sadr (the largest Shiite insurgent group) and because of the “Awakening” in which Sunni tribal forces decided to enter the fray in direct opposition to Sunni insurgents. Unfortunately it wasn’t a lasting peace, the Iraqi government is ran unspeakably poorly, and had two very bad Prime Ministers in a row. Guys like Abu bakr al-Baghdadi kind of hid around in the shadows for a couple years, building up support, and then struck–showing the government in Baghdad to be a paper tiger. Shiite military units fled regions at the first sound of gunfire because they weren’t willing to shed a single drop of blood to protect the population in Sunni areas. In some cases they fled military bases even though they had 3-4 times as many men as the ISIS attackers, and left huge caches of military hardware behind.
I mean Iraq and Afghanistan are in many ways complete clusterfucks and boondoggles. But they really aren’t comparable to Vietnam. Our ally in Vietnam, we signed a peace treaty designed to save face (and for Nixon to say he won the war and got our boys home, after he had first enlarged our presence in the war and committed vast war crimes) and then shortly later that country no longer existed. In Iraq Afghanistan we have governments that we helped created that have been standing for years now. They ain’t pretty, but they aren’t South Vietnam either.
ISIS basically answers a question “can a terrorist group hold territory and function as a normal state in contravention to the wishes of the United States?” The answer is essentially no. al-Baghdadi broke away from al-Qaeda in essence because of a strategic disagreement. He wanted to seize territory, establish himself as Caliph, and kill everyone who got in his way–particularly apostates (any Muslims who didn’t follow the ISIS party line, or groups like Yazidis that aren’t really Muslims but that ISIS considers apostates anyway.)
Traditional al-Qaeda believes in spreading a political message, but fighting from the shadows, focusing on spectacular attacks. For whatever you think of ObL, he never believed he could win a real war against the West. He was fighting a war for the hearts and minds of Muslims, he knew he couldn’t outright win a war. But what he could do is create situations in which Muslim men get radicalized to his worldview. His logic (and I think it’s somewhat sound) is if his view was the majority view in a country, and you instituted a government to reflect that, the West would be loathe to fight the entire population of the MENA region. Basically imagine creating versions of Iran all over the middle east (an Islamic theocracy–not actually necessary the same model as Iran since ObL was a Sunni and in life probably deeply hated Iran)
al-Baghdadi basically believed this was a pussy’s way to fight, he has a background in the Saddam era Iraqi Army and basically said we’re going to stand up and fight, take territory and rule shit. There’s also some promulgated belief that at some point in the near future ISIS will fight an apocalyptic, Ragnarok type battle in the Middle East against the West.
The reality is it’s very, very difficult to openly take and hold territory if your enemy’s have aerial superiority and you have no air force at all. You’re largely limited to cities, because they are dense enough that the West cannot just carpet bomb you out of them without causing an international humanitarian incident. But when you can’t adequately man your toll roads anymore or secure your oil fields, shit starts going south really quickly. When you can’t easily reinforce weaker areas quickly because convoys of your men are sitting ducks, it’s difficult to wage a cohesive theater wide military strategy.
The ISIS capital in Syria is Raqqa, Ramadi is a City in Iraq that is now I think already back in the control of the Iraqi government.
You’re right–my bad.
Here’s the basic calculus of dropping bombs from planes. A plane with a bomb gives you only 2 policy options - “make [thing] explode” or “not”. You can’t control ground with bombers or make the people on the ground do anything you want, for that someone has to actually go and stick a bayonet in the other guy’s face. This is true even if you were willing to carpet bomb cities. It was done in WW2, and we know the results.
In military terms a bomber can greatly assist in an attack by ground forces, or it can stop an attack by the enemy when they are on the move, by attacking troops on roads and logistics, but an army can easily stay more or less immune to air attack if they are confident that no ground offensive is forthcoming. This is true even for heavily mechanized conventional armies. The Yugoslavian army did just this in Kosovo in 1999. By simply dispersing their forces/vehicles and having a basic level of competence in fieldcraft, they suffered few losses, but could not conduct any active operations and would have been vulnerable to a concerted attack by ground forces.
ISIS isn’t as vehicle/logistically heavy force as the Yugoslavian army so they are less vulnerable to attack from the air and can still operate easily enough given that they face so little opposition on the ground.
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
The reality is it’s very, very difficult to openly take and hold territory if your enemy’s have aerial superiority and you have no air force at al.
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The reality is that its very deeply difficult to take and hold territory is a flat-as-a-pancake-except-for the-Kurd-areas, Iraq. Not so much in Afghanistan, filled to the brim with tall as shit mountains.
Of course in the later place, helicopters and airmobile operations have also reduced the ability of guerrillas to take and hold territory. Unlike the British who had to fight for every hill, defile and pass, the USSR and the Americans in Afghanistan, and also Pakistan in FATA have been able to use air power to help ground forces take back territory.
Where the lack of air power is hurting ISIS is when it hits them in conjunction with attacks from Kurds or Iraqi special forces (or the Syrian regime–albeit we at least don’t admit to helping them much, and they focus more on other rebels than ISIS.)
It makes it very difficult for them to wage any tactical counterattacks because doing so requires massing men and material and moving them at the enemy, but doing so makes them sitting ducks.
ISIS also makes a lot of its money from oil, pumps it and ships it by truck. Coalition targeting of these oil trucks has caused a lot of their drop in revenue. The young men with dreams of glory who when they signed up were receiving pretty good paychecks, now are not–and that has a material impact as well.
The air campaign against ISIS has been overwhelmingly successful. We’ve destroyed their strategic assets and thereby reduced their ability to gain funding and stockpile weapons. Captured equipment, fighters, and competent senior leaders have been killed that would otherwise be put to use fighting the Kurds or the Iraqi army. At the tactical level, close air support to Iraqi and Kurdish ground forces allow them to maintain superiority even when their actual forces are inadequate. Air superiority and close air support not only multiply the effectiveness of ground forces, but it gives them a measure of confidence - which is something the Iraqi army has a major problem with.
Nobody ever said that a strategic air campaign would - by itself - cause ISIS to collapse or surrender. In fact, ours leaders have spent years saying the exact opposite. The fact that they are allowing and requiring the local forces to do their own fighting, while using US assets to shore up their deficiencies, shows that Obama has clearly learned the lessons of our recent counterinsurgencies.
The Vietnam comparison is, in some ways, accurate, but in other ways it is completely wrong. As others have pointed out, the US war in Iraq was highly successful. Contrary to what the Republicans might want you to believe, when we left Iraq the country was mostly peaceful, the insurgents were regarded as a nuisance, and observers were praising the progress it had made. It could have continued on this trajectory if the Shia government hadn’t immediately turned on the Sunnis and launched a new phase of civil war. But you’re not likely to hear that, because the critics only ever want to condemn the US without acknowledging the success US forces enjoyed nor the role the Shiite government played in the disenfranchisement of the Sunni population. The forces in Vietnam never enjoyed that kind of success, even temporarily, except perhaps in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive.
The Afghanistan situation is dire but hardly catastrophic. US forces have been overwhelmingly successful on the battlefield. Al-Qaeda’s presence and infrastructure in Afghanistan is almost non-existent. The Taliban was all but annihilated in 2001-2, and some observers describe the neo-Taliban resurgence as an almost completely different organization. Keep in mind that the Taliban only controlled Afghanistan (partially) for five years. The current Afghan government has already exceeded that several times over. The fact that the US refuses to meaningfully participate in combat with the Taliban anymore is the *fulfillment *of our strategy. The goal from the start was for the Afghan government to fight their own battles, because America cannot now and never could wave a magic wand and solve Afghanistan’s problems for it. This also demonstrates the extent to which Obama has mastered modern COIN strategy, and it is a stage that the US in Vietnam never achieved.
Air power, along with artillery and armor, are a way of attacking concentrations of enemy force large and dense enough to make striking it with mass weaponry worthwhile. That’s the point of combined arms: if the enemy masses enough to resist your infantry, they’re now a big enough target to get blown away by various means of delivering high explosives.