RSS
Britain has now joined a US-led campaign to weaken and ultimately defeat Isis in which air power is very much the dominant component. The British contribution will not make much difference because there are already far more aircraft available than there are identifiable targets.
The coalition has conducted 59,015 sorties in Iraq and Syria starting in August 2014, of which only 8,573 have resulted in air strikes, indicating that the great majority of planes return to their bases without having used their weapons.
Even if Britain’s role is symbolic at this stage, it has joined a very real war against an enemy of great ferocity and experience, not least of air attacks. The highly informed Turkish military analyst Metin Gurcan, writing on Al-Monitor website, says that air strikes may have been effective against Isis communications and training facilities, but adds that “it is extraordinary that there is not a single [Isis] control facility that has been hit by allied air strikes”.
This is not for lack of trying and shows that talk of destroying Isis command and control centres in Raqqa is wishful thinking, given that 2,934 American air strikes in Syria have failed to do so over the last 14 months.
Air strikes have had an impact on Isis’s tactics and casualty rate, above all when they are used in close co-operation with a well-organised ground force like the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). Isis may have lost as many as 2,200 fighters at Kobani which is a small and closely packed city. On the other hand, the length of time it took to drive Isis out of it with 700 air strikes demonstrated their fighters’ willingness to die.
Many Isis commanders reportedly regard their tactics at Kobani as a mistake which cost the group too many casualties and which it should not repeat. To do so it sacrificed two of its most important military assets which are mobility and surprise. This does not mean that it will not fight to the last bullet for cities like Raqqa and Mosul, but it did not do so for Tikrit and Sinjar where it used snipers, booby traps and IEDs, but did not commit large detachments of troops.
Isis has modified its tactics to take account of the continuing risk of air strikes. It now has a decentralised command structure, with tactical decisions being taken by leaders of small units of eight to 10 men, whose overall mission is determined from the centre – but not how it should be accomplished. This limits the ability of its opponents to monitor its communications.
Its forces assemble swiftly and attack soon afterwards with multiple diversionary operations, as was seen when Mosul was captured in June 2014 and again when they took Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, this May.
They had been fighting their way into Baiji refinery, but this turned out to be a diversion and Isis units pulled back from there as soon as Ramadi fell.
Isis’s approach is to use a mixture of conventional, guerrilla and terrorist tactics, none unique in themselves, but they have never been used before in combination. Air strikes mean that it is less able to use captured tanks or big concentrations of vehicles packed with fighters. Instead it uses IEDs, booby traps, snipers and mortar teams in even greater numbers.
Public martyrdom as an expression of religious faith is such a central part of its ideology that it can deploy suicide bombers on foot or in vehicles in great numbers to destroy fortifications and demoralise the enemy. Some 28 suicide bombers were reportedly used in the final stages of the battle for Ramadi. Psychological warfare has always been an important element of Isis’s tactical armoury. It has sought to terrify opposition forces by showing videos in which captured Iraqi or Syrian soldiers are filmed being ritually decapitated or shot in the head.
Sometimes, the families of Syrian soldiers get a phone call from their son’s mobile with a picture of his body with his severed head on his chest. Mass killings of prisoners have taken place after all Isis’s victories (the al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Nusra Front, does the same thing).
Heavy air attack will increase Isis’s losses and it will be more difficult to bring in foreign volunteers through Turkey because most of the border is now closed. But Isis rules an area with a population of at least six million and conscripts all young men, who often want to become fighters because there is no other employment. Isis may have a fighting force of 100,000 men, as is strongly suggested by the very long front lines it holds and its ability to make multiple attacks simultaneously. Whatever Britain’s role, we will be fighting a formidable military machine.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
If treacherous Western elites weren’t determined to Invite the World, Muslims very much included, this would be a perfectly acceptable, if not downright advantageous, situation; Muslim fanatics are willing to die, we’re willing to oblige them with air strikes, we lose nothing but bombs, they lose nothing but excess thugs. Arms industry is obviously on board, as are the NeoKahns.
This was a big part of third generation warfare as practiced by the Germans in WWII. Giving low-level officers autonomy and highly goal-oriented orders meant a dramatically shorter OODA loop, and encouraged initiative, daring, and good morale. It’s a big part of why the Germans kicked so much ass. Judging by what I read, it’s anathema to our bureaucratic, red-tape-bound, CYA military, in the main.
This has a substantial cost. As word of their practices has spread, it has hardened their enemies and made them much more likely to fight to the death.
“The coalition has conducted 59,015 sorties in Iraq and Syria starting in August 2014, of which only 8,573 have resulted in air strikes, indicating that the great majority of planes return to their bases without having used their weapons.”
I am somewhat surprised that you couldn’t conclude from those numbers that the U.S., the lead dog in the “war” against ISIS, has been conducting a phony war to “degrade, defeat and destroy” ISIS for the past year and a half. All you have to consider is that the U.S. never bothered to attack the long line of oil tankers carrying oil from ISIS to Turkey until the Russians started attacking those tankers like the sitting ducks they are. (So simple, even a caveman can do it, as the TV commercial had it.) The excuse previously given, that the drivers were civilians and not connected to ISIS, was immediately discarded when the Russians started showing the U.S. how simple it was. The failure to strike ISIS’s main source of revenue speaks volumes about the insincerity of the U.S., especially when you consider how ready the U.S. is to impose financial sanctions against any country that earns its ire. That is the U.S.’s first weapon of choice.
Another example of the U.S.’s insincerity in waging the war against ISIS was the failure to attack ISIS on the one road leading to Palmyra because the U.S. didn’t want to be seen aiding Assad. Thus, ISIS was permitted to haul men and weapons and supplies to Palmyra and conquer that precious city. Thus, through its inaction against ISIS, the U.S. allowed ISIS to take over a precious archeological site and destroy valuable remnants of an ancient civilization. I don’t know who is more barbaric, ISIS or the U.S. for allowing such destruction to take place.
If you add one item to another to another, then you can only conclude that the U.S. “war” against ISIS is phony and aimed more to the replacement of the legitimate government of Syria than the defeat of one of the most barbaric organizations in the world.
Another hilarious excuse was that attacking IS-controlled oil wells would cause too much environmental damage.
There are real airstrikes – which the Russians carry out – and fake airstrikes – which the Americans and their allies are expert at. And it is ridiculous to confound the two.
If you wish to know what the real progress has been, check out the detailed reports by the Iranians at http://english.farsnews.com/
They tell you on an almost daily basis how the progress has been – village by village.
The Russians and Kurds are busy sealing the border with Turkey. As soon as that has been accomplished, they will destroy the terrorists who are trapped in Syria. The Iranians and the Lebanese are helping the Syrian army and Russia has already effectively created a no-fly zone over most of the country. They are busy building up some more airbases in the center of Syria, to make it easier to turn around their aircraft.
No one can fight in the desert without supplies and without air cover. The game is over and the West and all its private armies of jihadis and mercenaries has lost. Shooting down that Russian bomber and the explosion on the passenger plane were an admission of defeat.
enlightening essay, for which thanks. I would only add that Britain’s “airwar against ISIS” will be as phony as that so far conducted by America and France. ISIS is no more and no less than Israel’s Sunni stormtroopers aimed at taking down Assad’s regime and so breaking the Shi’a Crescent. Just the other day Iraqi troops captured an ISIS unit that included…an Israeli Golani Brigade Colonel. That’s why America – and Western Europe – being Zion’s bitches, will do nothing substantial, now or ever, about ISIS. In fact the Judeo-globalists will continue to do everything possible to frustrate Russia’s anti-ISIS operations. This is another reason why we should all vote for Mrs. Clinton: she’ll attempt to “no fly zone” the Russian Air Force in Syria. At which point most of the northern hemisphere will become highly radioactive…or the debtbuck Empire will back down and shortly thereafter collapse. I’d bet on #2
Not surprising. We carpet bombed Vietnam and Laos with B-52 strikes and the North Vietnamese Army was able to sustain its forces albeit with heavy losses of men and material when the bombers found their mark. It took the mining of North Vietnamese ports and sending the B-52’s over the North’s cities to paralyze the North’s ability to supply its forces in the South.
I have no idea how ISIS obtains its munitions but if air power of the sort we are deploying is to be effective against them its must be used to deny them this material. As noted ISIS makes much use of large suicide IEDs. Cars and trucks loaded with 1000 lbs of explosives used to blow holes in enemy defenses seem to be their ‘cruise missiles’. Drying up their access to such large supplies of chemical explosives would be effective in limiting ISIS combat power but how to do it?
You seem still to be under the illusion that you won that war.
The last US forces withdrew from Vietnam on March 29,1973. Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army on April 30, 1975. Obviously the North Vietnamese were not engaged in combat with American forces during that two plus year interval though we had promised air support as part of the Paris Peace Accords.
Doesn’t really matter anyhow since the whole of Vietnam ( 100 million people) is allying itself with the US now and the US Navy will be back in Cam Rahn Bay soon.
ISIS is a mercenary force dependent on support of the Ango/Zio Empire. Withdraw that support and ISIS is no more.
Of course ISIS won’t be defeated from the air. It will be defeated by combining mobile firepower from the air with sustained effort on the ground. IEDs and suicide bombers can wreak havoc on soft targets but they’re not a difference maker in battle. That said, it’s likely to be a very slow moving war that could last years.
So in your cartoon calculus, the fact that the Yanks ran away before Saigon was over-run means that they didn’t ‘lose’ VietNam. That’s laughably idiotic.
On that basis, the French never lost Paris so long as they ran away before the opposition was taking advantage of their women.
You seriously have to twist yourself into epistemological knots to be able to continue your stupid childish hagiography of US meddling in other peoples’ business.
Kratoklastes, you can get a real measure of a man whose comments are A. ad hominem attacks involving the use of the word ‘idiotic’ etc. B. Have nothing to do with the topic of a thread D. Are entirely argumentative.
In your case they reveal a low income , low status male of no consequence.
” The highly informed Turkish military analyst Metin Gurcan, writing on Al-Monitor website, says that air strikes may have been effective against Isis communications and training facilities, but adds that “it is extraordinary that there is not a single [Isis] control facility that has been hit by allied air strikes”.
This is not for lack of trying and shows that talk of destroying Isis command and control centres in Raqqa is wishful thinking, given that 2,934 American air strikes in Syria have failed to do so over the last 14 months.”
—-
Cockburn is a cowardly farce. He reveals that not one ISIS control Centre has been hit by the West in years. Then HE desperately and staggeringly tries to cover up that ISIS ARE the Wests proxy terrorists, by saying it was not for lack of trying by the West. Amazing.
Russia has hit it plenty of ISIS control centres in mere months. Something that Cockburn refuses to compare for the fear of exposing his cowardice.
I’ve never understood why target governments don’t destroy the reputations of the “martyrs” by using the same methods that are often used against regular and legitimate political opponents. You know, every man is a homo and every woman is a slut. Think about it. They want to leave glorious reputations. Destroy those reputations and others think twice about following in their footsteps.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/arab-paper-claims-israel-biggest-buyer-of-islamic-state-oil/
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/04/putin-must-seek-justice-for-peshkov/
Having a reliable and powerful customer helps . comfort and succor comes from unexpected quarters in such extraordinarily difficult times for ISIS. Turkey,S Arabia,Jordan,Qatar can supply false flags,criminals ready to die but one needs more than raw angry stupid emotional jihadist to survive like airstrikesagainst Syrian military and oil sales without traceable receipt .
US can finish IS in few weeks if it wants . But that would a permanent breach of confidence and would prevent future jihadism in countries not eager to follow US ways of doing business .
Isis is not a formidible fighting force, they have yet to go up against any Euro or Eurasian formal military, they like the US and its allies get glory from killing poorly train ed militias made up of desperate people.
Even the Kurd Peshmerga which is the best trained ME or African military ha e never formed a true Unitary Command Structure among its far flung outpost.
The Kurds cannot take losses such as could be absorbed by Euro Centrics and so they sally forth fire as many bullets and artillary rounds as the can , hoping to hit enough bad guys or at least scare them then they go home for tea and dinner.
Unleash the full killing prowess of either US or Russias trained militarys combat officers, no Borders, and Isis could not find enough survivors to bury the dead and its upper payrollmasters could be individually hunted down by bounty hunters.
the small arms have almost no effect upon US grunts in their armored mobile, fixed and helo winged aircraft and US heroes troop with body armore that bounces 7.62 x39(45) or 7.62×54 R off of them like a bb.
MILLION IRAQ AND AFGHANS DIED BEFORE THEY FIGURED OUT SHOOTING AT US IS SUICIDE SO OW THEM UP INSTEAD.
In the nearly year and a half since Obama declared that he was going to “degrade, defeat and destroy” ISIS, American planes, which as Mr. Cockburn pointed out have flown more than 59,000 missions over Iraq and Syria, did not hit one oil tanker carrying oil that ISIS had stolen to Turkey, thus leaving untouched ISIS’s main source of revenue. Once the Russians started attacking those trucks, showing it could be done, the Americans decided suddenly to attack those trucks as well. What does that tell you about the Americans’ sincerity in wanting to “degrade, defeat and destroy” ISIS? Couple that with the Americans’ failure to attack the command and control centers of ISIS, and one can only conclude that the U.S. and its “allies” do not want to do anything that will prevent the flow of money coming in to support ISIS and do not want to do anything to impair ISIS’s ability to communicate with their men in the field. That seems like a hell of a way to “degrade, defeat and destroy” ISIS.