“Advanced in armored vehicles from Ramadi”? WTF? Why didn’t US air power take them all out long before they reached their destination? These guys have to be sitting ducks in that terrain. What am I missing here?
I doubt they would advance like a typical army does, and instead would conceal themselves as much as possible is small towns that dot the roads. The allies certainly have the technology to seek them out and destroy them, but it would take a lot of effort and some would inevitably get through.
I think our strategy is to wait until they establish a somewhat concentrated force that would be needed to defend a major city like Ramadi and then hit them hard versus trying to pick them off one at a time. This is just an educated guess of course.
From what i have seen, so far, U.S. and allied airpower has been used on a limited basis, targeting specific hard points or Command-and-Control Centers. There has been no major air assault in the manner of WWII or even the attacks on North Vietnam.
I have heard no explanation for those tactics. There may be a reluctance to broaden the scope of the war; there may be pressure from allies to not get “carried away”; there may be simply a lack of sufficient airpower in the region after we withdrew a couple of years ago. Given the dicey political situation, the U.S. may be acting in a support role, rather than as the leadership for the anti-ISIS raids.
While it is true that it is harder to hide in a desert than in a jungle, the attack on Ramadi may have been staged over months, with small units–too small to justify the risk to attacking aircraft–moving forward over many weeks until they were assembled for the grand assault.
I understand the US doesn’t have any boots on the ground, so how long would it take for information from Iraqi sources to filter up through the Iraqi chain to reach the US to have an aircraft tasked to an airstrike. Probably longer than it takes for an armoured column to assemble and get where its going I would think.
I suspect that’s why airstrikes to date have been against fixed C&C targets, they’re less likely to have moved.
I wonder how much of a problem identification is. While this specific case there is a column of armoured vehicles. I suspect that the vast majority of their troop movements in general are carried out by what would effectively be civilian vehicles. So unless they actually are in a large column with obvious military vehicles, how could the pilots be sure they’re ISIS/ISIL and not some civilian going about his normal business. I’m sure the last thing the US would want is to have images of a normal family having been blown up by an airstrike splashed all over the media.
A quick search doesn’t show much in the way of recent updates but for a long time we hadn’t even reached a level of action on par with Libya a couple years ago.
Along with the issue of telling IS operated civilian vehicles from actual civilians there’s also the issue of telling IS operated combat vehicles they took from Iraqi security forces from actual Iraqi security forces. Dropping bombs on the wrong target would effectively be giving IS air support. Outside of actual fighting we also need to consider that IS has spent a lot of time focusing on the urban areas. That both means places to park vehicles under cover until you need them and also offers opportunities to park them next to schools, mosques, hospitals.
Perhaps its a matter of letting the home team stand on its own two feet and not run away, like in the beginning. If they constantly expect fast movers to solve their own problems, there really is no incentive to stand and fight and apply lessons.
Politics and the rules of engagement is almost certainly the answer. And look at the photos of your “massive military parade”. It’s Toyota pick up trucks with people holding AK-47’s in the back. Not one armoured vehicle or clearly identifiable “military” vehicle in sight. By the time the air power arrives, the pickups scatter and they hide their weapons. How do you tell them from civilians then?
It’s a military parade. It is also not in urban setting. And “the time the air power arrives” from visual detection to boom is what - 3 minutes?
And guess what - if the “massive military parade” scatters, as you say, that’s a propaganda win for the coalition. There definitely have been few of those lately.
Where are you getting this number from? Do you imagine there are 24 hours a day armed fighters circling over ISIS territory looking for targets of opportunity with pre cleared authorisation to “fire at will” ? Thats kind of not really how it works…
This is another chapter in the Sunni-Shia 1300 year war. This didn’t happen under Saddam Hussein, because he was a brutal dictator that crushed all opposition. Our invasion and toppling of Hussein allowed these elements to regain power, and now we have this civil war. Absent another strongman, Iraq will break up. I am not sure that we gain anything from trying to stop this.
We seem to have learned little in our 14 years of war, in the ME.
You may want to reconsider this statement. You can’t even manage to say what you mean, and what you meant to say is indefensible. Coremelt listed necessary conditions for what you said previously to be possible.
You’re looking at it from the wrong perspective - from the perspective of an ISIS fighter it’s maybe a couple minutes from the time that a target knows there are hostile aircraft in the area to the time the target would be destroyed.
coremelt is speaking from the perspective of the USAF - it will be some time between when a battlefield target is detected by the Iraqi Army or a militia until when a US aircraft can arrive.
Take this cycle:
Iraqi militiaman identifies ISIS target -> reports to his commander
Iraqi commander considers report -> requests support from US aircraft
Iraqi commander’s request -> translated into English for US personnel
US personnel figure out priority and appropriate weapons to destroy target
Aircraft is armed & fuelled
Aircraft flies to target
Aircraft destroys target
Very little of that can be done in less than 3 minutes.
What coremelt is saying is that one could speed the process up by having flights of already armed close air support craft constantly orbiting near the battlefield to be called down to strike targets quickly, but that comes at a significant cost - both in money expended on fuel and in additional risk to the life and limb of the pilots.
I don’t know the reasons that US commanders have opted not to use orbiting close air support in Iraq, but it is entirely plausible that if I considered everything they’re thinking about, I would agree with their decision - i.e. I do not feel well enough informed about the war in Iraq to have a solid opinion of disagreement.
That’s exactly the problem. If I look out my bedroom window and notice that ISIS has conquered my next door neighbor, and they’ve put up the ISIS flag and are singing the ISIS anthem and have a bunch of technicals parked in the driveway, what next? If I want to call in an airstrike, how long will it be between when I pick up the phone and the first explosion?
Look at the post to which I was responding. That post claimed that as soon as planes arrive, the military parade would scatter. Now - which version above is applicable to such a situation?
Why should the locals have to detect anything? Doesn’t the U.S have some sort of intelligence gathering apparatus? You know - reconnaissance units, surveillance drones, wiretaps, double agents, stuff like that. How can ISIS organize a parade without the U.S. knowing about it in advance?