Ironically, there’s such a thing as winning too soon too easily. In a conventional war the enthusiastic young men who constitute the bulk of an army fight until victory or until they’re either dead or totally and completely demoralized. In other words, those who are determined to fight to the death are given just that opportunity. They also do you the favor of self-segregating themselves from the non-combatant population so you can shoot them more easily. In modern asymmetrical war the mechanized forces steamroll any conventional opposition almost at once and the defenders settled down to a guerrilla war of attrition against the occupiers. Arguably it’s more effective to take three to four years to slowly grind the opposition to powder than it is to smash conventional opposition immediately and then spend at least the next four years trying to suppress guerrilla resistance.
Bit of a hijack, but a fun one. There’s not an agreement on how many active fighters ISIS has. I’ve seen estimates anywhere from 50k to 200k. IIRC the U.S. claimed to have killed 10K of them. Even if they have 100k+, you have to wonder how many of them are stupid kids who shoot full auto from the hip. But they’ve been able to effectively fight the Syrian and Kurdish armies, so they’re not shabby.
I’m pretty sure WWII era armor would get blown up real good by the stuff ISIS has. ISIS has better toys, but the WWII army might have way better training. I’d bet on ISIS, but it could be close.
They’d get slaughtered. We’re talking about an army carrying Lee-Enfields and Springfields and no armor worth a spit, not to mention still heavily relying on horses for logistics, fighting an army with automatic weapons, RPGs, TOWs, self-propelled guns, and APCs? Not to mention radio and internet communication. WWI armies got stopped cold by WWI era machine guns and artillery, I don’t see how they’d march against a defended ISIS position.
Now I’m curious if one truck with a machine gun in the back and ghetto armor plating bolted on the sides could circle around an old infantry block (who were still using smooth bore muzzle loaders) and kill them all, or how many they’d kill before a lucky shot hit them.
Would a 8 or 12 pound cannon even do anything to 20th century light armor, or any tanks? Wouldn’t it just bounce off? Maybe if they got lucky they’d screw up the tracks or the gun.
Political will to get the job done. No one has it.
I didn’t realize they had that many troops. If they can support that large an army, I wonder how innocent the innocent civilians really are. They must surely have some significant support from the population to maintain that kind of strength.
I believe you’ve been whooshed by the ghost (my [del]lips[/del] fingers to God’s [del]ears[/del] eyes) of Donald Rumsfeld.
Some are innocent, some not at all innocent, and everything in-between. Figuring which is which is part of the problem. Allegiances can and do shift, depending on who is in a stronger position at the time. We had the nominal help of the Sunni Arab tribes in Iraq’s Anbar provence when we drove out al Qaeda, but many of the same folks have aligned with Da-esh because they are dissatisfied with the Shi’a dominated central government. If you’re a Sunni Arab in that region, which devil do you choose to work with?
I’ve seen a number of experts on PBS shows state that ISIL is really a poorly trained militarily and could be removed in a matter of weeks/months. All of their conquests are based on terror. They go into a town, pick out a handful of people they chose ahead of time and brutally kill them. When confronted by real boots on the ground they cave out of a lack of experience.
As the op pointed out, this is easy territory to hunt them in. Better to go in and wipe them out systematically then let them build a terror network with the hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal and export it to areas we can’t easily fight them in. We can take the money that is captured from them and use it to restore the lives destroyed and the areas they’ve ruined.
And the last time I checked PBS wasn’t run by the ghost of Rumsfeld.
I apologise if this sounds a little naive - but I did read an article in the Guardian on this, so I’m merely parroting. Don’t shoot the messenger.
From what I recall, Isis are no more of a danger than many other terrorist groups the world has seen over the last 50 years. Apparently the terrorists in South East Asia in the Vietnam war era were far more ruthless.
The writer of the article suggested the reason why Isis are so feared is due to social media. They are amplifying their ideology with this method and it’s scaring everyone into believing they are more of a threat than they are. This pressure is causing the various western governments to do they ‘token’ efforts. Ie, airstrikes etc, and the main reason why no nation has taken up the reigns and declared ‘right, that’s it, we’re going to get rid of them’.
They all know they are burning fast and dying young. Their whole philosophy and ideology is not sustainable in the long term. No country wants to be the one to jump in and risk killing their own for something that isn’t likely to last.
These terrorist attacks are again amplified via social media, and for many people under the age of 25, this is their first real glimpse of terrorism on a semi regular basis.
The world is safer than at any time in history. Terrorist attacks are at an all time (recorded) low. Domestic violent crime is at an all time low (UK and USA) but with the creation of social media - all incidents receive their 5 minutes of fame, and the perception is that these acts are on the increase, when they really aren’t.
My common sense prompts me to think that if Isis were as dangerous as we are led to believe, then there would be a genuine land offensive. As there is not, I believe that these airstrikes are merely a token offensive to please the masses while they burn out over the next couple of years anyway.
Well, until the next swarm of mentalists…
So what? We don’t want to hold territory. We didn’t want these cities before, and we sure as hell don’t want them now that ISIL’s had time to booby trap them. The only advantage an invasion has is if you somehow believe that urban combat against an entrenched enemy with insurgency experience is going to be less bloody than just blasting them from afar.
Quite right-Vlad Putin says he can prove Turkish involvement in funding ISIS. If he can do this, I guess Obama’s credibility is finished. The Turks do not want an independent Kurdistan-if that were to happen, the breakup pf Turkey would begin.
Since ISIS holds territory they can’t be defeated without losing said territory. It requires ground forces to do that. I never speculated we would “want” to hold large portions of Syria and Iraq–in fact it’s obvious the administration has no interest in that (and I personally do not either), that’s why the administration has been so desperate to try and find a “partner” to wage ground war against ISIS along with our airstrikes. So calm down–no one is saying “we” want to hold Raqqa/Mosul/Ramadi etc, I’m just saying someone has to take that territory from ISIS or ISIS isn’t going anywhere, and airstrikes cannot take territory.
In Syria, we had hoped some of the non-aligned rebels would serve that role of ground force partner. But it ended up we failed to really train or equip any such group, a lot of the non-aligned rebels have very ISIS-like extreme jihadist views and aren’t suitable for partnership, and the other groups like the Free Syrian Army ended up not being very trustworthy. They have a bad track record where some of their soldiers sell materiel to ISIS and have even sold American hostages to dangerous jihadist groups.
In Iraq the Iraqi Army has been shown to be almost unimaginably corrupt and ineffective. The majority Shiite Army has shown that it simply is not willing to fight to defend areas that have a majority Sunni population, and even where they are willing to fight their results have been less than stellar.
That’s left us with few alternatives. We’ve supported the Kurds in Syria and in Iraq, but we have to be careful. We’re generally okay with supporting the Peshmerga (the official military force of Iraqi Kurdistan, although all Kurdish fighters are often colloquially referred to as Peshmerga), but the Peshmerga often work in an uneasy alliance with the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) out of Turkey, which is seen as a terrorist group by the United States and any active American support for them would be a major problem with Turkey, one of our NATO allies. Additionally, the Kurds are looking to stake out territory in the region roughly defined as “Kurdistan” they aren’t going to be the ones to push into parts of Syria with low or no Kurdish population, or places like Anbar in Iraq.
Another alternative are the Shiite militias in Iraq, which are more prone to engage in “holy war” against the Sunni ISIS. They have a lot more backbone than the Iraqi Army, but they have two big negatives–they are closely associated with Iran, funded by Iran, trained by embedded Iranian soldiers and etc, and they also in the past have had a nasty habit of being pretty terrible to the Sunni population in areas where they’ve pushed ISIS out–including committing stuff that we’d consider war crimes. These militiamen don’t see their job as freeing Sunni Iraqis from the ISIS yoke, but broadly as subjugating Sunni Iraqis themselves.
What about the 5 guys we reportedly vetted and trained? They could inflict some serious damage!!
I’m confident the training was fast and the weapons transferred will make them a furious force to recon with.