WASHINGTON (AP) — Foreign fighters are streaming into Syria and Iraq in unprecedented numbers to join the Islamic State or other extremist groups, including at least 3,400 from Western nations among 20,000 from around the world, U.S. intelligence officials say in an updated estimate of a top terrorism concern.Read the entire story but focus on the numbers. Depending on the source I've heard it estimated that ISIS numbers between 30K and 60K fighters. TOTAL!
Intelligence agencies now believe that as many as 150 Americans have tried and some have succeeded in reaching in the Syrian war zone, officials told the House Homeland Security Committee in testimony prepared for delivery on Wednesday. Some of those Americans were arrested en route, some died in the area and a small number are still fighting with extremists.
The testimony and other data were obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.
Nick Rasmussen, chief of the National Counterterrorism Center, said the rate of foreign fighter travel to Syria is without precedent, far exceeding the rate of foreigners who went to wage jihad in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen or Somalia at any other point in the past 20 years.
U.S. officials fear that some of the foreign fighters will return undetected to their homes in Europe or the U.S. to mount terrorist attacks. At least one of the men responsible for the attack on a satirical magazine in Paris had spent time with Islamic extremists in Yemen.
Meanwhile, the White House circulated a proposal Tuesday that would have Congress authorize the U.S. military to fight Islamic State terrorists over the next three years. A formal request for legislation is expected on Wednesday.
Think about that for a minute. The US and its allies have organized a coalition of the most modern forces on this planet to fight at most two or three reinforced divisions worth of troops....poorly trained troops (for the most part) at that. The biggest part of ISIS (from my arm chair) is made up of highly motivated criminals.
Yet the US Central Command, NATO, and our Middle Eastern allies are all being fought to a basic standstill by these animals?
Something is very wrong with the way that we wage war. This would be a simple tactical problem to a WW2 General and his staff. Why is it so hard for us today?
Political risk aversion? Lack of leadership? Those two come to mind. But I suppose mostly we're not committed. We don't know, as a coalition whether or not we want to be involved in the middle east, how we should be involved, who we should be involved with, and to what purpose our involvement should achieve.
ReplyDeleteWe've been in that bloody sandbox so long we've forgotten why we're even there. Until we decide on a strategic outcome for the middle east, fighting ISIS with drones is just a farcical side show.
that makes total sense James. but you do get where i'm coming from on this. looking at the numbers involved, destroying ISIS should be simplicity itself...especially if you loosened up the rules of engagement just a tad.
Deleteeven as things stand now, it still should be relatively easy. i was just wondering why such a minor foe could have us tied up as much as they have.
Yeah, I'm totally agree with James, this is a political show.
DeleteIt's a bit hard if you don't want to go down the genocide route. Think of it as hostage taking on a grand scale. In war, it's easy to see who the enemy was as he wore uniforms. Unless you want to "kill em all", you can't simply shoot any civilian you see.
DeleteAt least not until you shoot every reporter you see in one fell swoop.
Because in WWII we were allowed to carpet bomb the entire area the enemy was in.
ReplyDeleteGood point. The concept of acceptable loss also changed a lot.
DeleteIndeed, sol. Or decades of coin warfare produces weak leaders and generals (cos i have no doubt US has very good soldiers) or IS isn't a real enemy (maybe an US-allies creation to fight assad and secure some pipes through the region?) ...
ReplyDeletePlease note that 30k can't fight forever in a wide front (hundreds of km) without rotation, fuel, ammo, payment, etc ... even assuming their T3R are the most eff in the world, it stills, its a very low density of troops to fill the long suply lines ...
So, even a 3rd rank serious force could and should cut it (suply lines) with bde size forces, specially along air supremacy all the way and electronic warfare in place ... do your calcs, they (IS) can't sustain the entire front with company size units ... we may need a diferent explanation ... it's not a militar issue, rather politic ...
Allies can have their own agenda, sometimes ... who knows? IS doesn't have heavy hardware (but lew legacy US tanks without munition ever time) ... nor space assets and so ... it smells like a farse and we may never know whos exactly behind it ...
In short: coin aproach for so long (in a anti-terror warfare) can blind many, and I hope the coalition decide to really battle them --- even agains the background of bad reactions from sunny dinasties or crowd, not to tv shows but in real world politics) ...
Somewhere between WWII and now, we lost the will to fight an enemy. We have lowered ourselves to fighting at their level instead of fighting them at our level. We have the technology, the ability, and the equipment to fight this at a major conflict level but for some ungodly reason, we put restrictions on ourselves to hinder the completion of the mission.
ReplyDeleteCan you magine Roosevelt limiting LeMay? or Patton? or the Mighty 8th Air Force?
WE (our current political climate) are to blame why a basically untrained, non-cohesive, non-integrated rabble of 60K can cause us such concern.
It took the US Army three or four years to pacify and control one city, Baghdad. I even wrote a long poem about it, which I won't bore you with, which featured General Casey who eventually got replaced and booted up to chief of staff. Okay, a taste -- the poem "Casey at Bag-Dad" included the stanzas:
ReplyDelete...Casey said that the next six months will be decisive, and will determine Iraq's fate.
What a man! What a call!
Inspirational and moving, and none other could speak as great.
Except maybe Casey himself, in his last bogus pre-election prediction.
"We'll have the majority of the country pacified by New Year's" was that years fiction. . . .
Money perhaps? constant terrorist treat is a good excuse to spend money on something.
ReplyDeleteDover test.
ReplyDeleteIt would be easy to US Military send ISIS back to hell. But it would take some boots on ground, and some body bags, sadly. I don´t think US are ready for another war in Middle East...
How many divisions (or less?) and in what capacity would they be utilized in order to destroy 60,000 crum bums?
ReplyDeletewith air power, just one :)
ReplyDeleteyou can cut IS in 3-4 pockets in a single day ...
then, achieve local superiority even with less than that ...
also, you dont really need to take em cities, just dislog it entirelly and ... jackpot! ... they will fade away ...
denying IS movements is the key, as you may not hurry to "liberate" cities fully of sunnys ...
but, back to the point: is it worthing, because it will only help assad and iran and hesbolah ...
the endgame losers can be friends (so, that's, maybe the real oposition on the table) ...
your answer: one reiforced regiment of cav could easilly strips anything on its way with constant air cover, cas and suport, specially on that terrain and without the need to "release" all the cities
Its because we have leaders that consider themselves world citizens and not americans. If we had US leaders a ole school punitive action. We could walk across these guys with a division of men if we had one directive to just attack and break their hold. Take the city break their main forces putting them back into a insurgent grouping then give it to the Kurds in the north, IA around Baghdad, and Sunni moderates everywhere else (if GSC will not fill or cannot form this mythical group then split the territory between IA and Kurds while we turn our heads so they can do what arabs understand the ancient way pacification).
ReplyDeletePowell and his "you break it you own it" mentality should be torn off the wall and pissed on as the idiocy it is. It should be clear that unless X nation is a state or wishes to be a state we have no obligation to rebuild or pacify. Very simply clean your own yard or if it starts to threaten ours we will come run the bush hogs over it and give it to someone else to maintain.
I scoff at the notion ISIS has only between 30k qnd 60k troops. i'm thinking 100k at a minimum.
ReplyDeleteThey had even lesser than that when they started. The impression of "a lot of troops" is an artifact of media hype. My money is actually on only 10k "real" troops and a lot of other opportunists or survivors who declare for them to avoid getting the chop.
DeleteAh, optimism over US military capabilities is inspiring, however it disregards abject US military failures against paramilitaries in Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan etc.
ReplyDeleteIt's important to recognize that war is not what it used to be. Its character has changed, along with weaponry. The obstacles to success in Afghanistan were snipers and especially fertilizer-powered land mines. The US was defeated.
Weapons are important, but the primary cause of failure is that military action in these new situations is always unsuccessful unless accompanied by diplomacy. All the top generals have said that, but it doesn't happen. The big thinkers always (and fruitlessly) believe that a big army gets big results. It's not true, as has been demonstrated over and over. But there's so much profit in it -- why change?
that is complete and utter bullshit.
Deleteeveryone of the instances of combat you've listed was accompanied and finally overcome by the desire to nation build. additionally the rules of engagement and the desire to win hearts and minds has so strangled military operations that a cop on the streets of America have more lee way in dealing with criminals than a Soldier or Marine when it comes to killing the enemy.
on this one you're dead wrong.
Well, yes, actually they were billed as "counter-insurgencies" which is a bullshit description. But the point is, using military force against a resistant populace didn't work, just as it wouldn't work against you and me if the Chinese army occupied out home-towns. Neither of us would just say 'what's the use, they are too powerful' and hide under the bed. We would resist with anything we had. It's basic human nature.
DeleteImprisoning military-age males, torture, sniping, road-blocks, air-raids -- none of it worked. One alternative that has been mentioned in to carpet-bomb the country in question, which might work, say, against us too. But that's hardly a proper solution, is it.
So I'm open to suggestions -- what should the US have done in the places I mentioned, which were all military failures? What strategy, what tactics?
Indeed, Sol. Open terrain with intel cover 24/7, standoff, cas, etc ... just stay outside cities in the first place, avoid urban warfare and let the tribes leaders turns again to a new master ... as I stated before: coin stricty vision (taking every city) will ruin US army anytime ...
DeleteYou dont need that much to deny enemy its vital suplies in a desert like scenario :p
We no longer declare war. We pass out "authorizations of the use of force". That is the same terminology police departments use when they send in a SWAT team or a riot squad, they authorize the use of force. When you won't even say we are going to war, you aren't. ISIS cannot be defeated by trickles of military power hamstrung by ROE that most civilians on the street are shocked to find out the troops fight under. A lot of non-military folk walked out of American Sniper wondering why snipers were so restrained instead of simply going hunting.
ReplyDeleteIF we declared war as defined by the US Constitution, and with allies that also declare war the same way they did in WW2, and went to WAR it would be different. We would roll in and destroy the enemy. We would be heeding the words of General George Patton (who helped WIN a war):
"No poor dumb bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for their country."
During WW2 we killed the enemy. period. We flushed out Japanese "insugents" out of holes on Iwo Jima and Okinawa by burning them alive with flamethrowers. when we cleared a room in house to house fighting in France, we threw in a grenade and sprayed with BAR fire. When the war was over, we took the leaders of Nazi Germany responsible for war crimes and HANGED them. We fought a WAR. We won a WAR. We were not nice. Yes, we followed a code of conduct. But we didn't restrain or hold back. We mourned the loss of civilian life but were not paralyzed by the fear of inflicting civilian casualties.
Imagine for one moment fighting ISIS that way. We do nothing for a few months, let them gather all the foreign fighters they want. Let them feel secure, let them feel they are winning. Let them form armies instead of shadowy insurgents....Then suddenly we are at war. Hundreds of thousands of Marines and Army with full tank support pushing as fast as they can.Going in like locusts and destroying their oil, all of their communications tower, all of their electricity, and killing everyone with a gun in their hand that isn't wearing a US/Nato uniform. Then we take any terroists caught alive, put them on US military trial, and had them hung, preferably with a female hangman as they would be especially humiliated dying that way. We didn't spare the feelings of Germans after WW2. We rubbed their noses in the horror of the Holocaust. And we wouldn't spare the feeling of those who supported the crimes of ISIS.
But would we ever do that, ever again? What I described sounds horrible to some. Yes, it is. War is horrible. that is why reasonable people avoid it. That is one reason why the Cold War never went hot on the East German border. Nukes aside, neither the US nor Russia wanted the horror of a full on conventional war. Too many remembered what happened in WW2.
Yes, we have the potential to totally defeat ISIS. But at the moment ISIS is undefeatable because only WAR can defeat them.
TOTALLY AGREE!
DeleteCoffeeMan, Edison Jr., C-Low and yourself get it (if i left anyone out apologies). we are not and have not been trying to win wars for a long time now. the last time is Gulf War 1 and it was a success. every since then we've been involved in actions (like you said). if you need the sign of a broken Democracy and a govt that has been taken over by lawyers then i present this to you as exhibit number one.
additionally it would allow for the full mobilization of US industry AND keep defense spending from exploding like it has. but that would cut into profits for certain corporations.
i really believe that we're living in the stupid time of this nation. everyone is focused on silliness instead of serious issues. the way we conduct so called war is one of those things.
I do disagree with some of the points, the US had massive firepower superiority in Vietnam and the Viet Cong were not really effective, but the inability to identify an enemy to kill often resulted in a lot of firepower sitting around.
DeleteI particularly love this set of pics, shows how much firepower the US had to kill one guy, but in the end, the US still lost Vietnam, though it was more "abandoned" than lost.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2345454/Vietnam-War-photos-reveal-moment-U-S-troops-unleashed-hell-Viet-Cong-sniper-hills-Army-camp.html
Ignore the fact that it came from a paper some call the "Daily Fail".
" Let them form armies instead of shadowy insurgents."
Delete“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
you want to talk Vietnam? really? seriously? ok. i'll play. first it was probably the first hybrid war with serious interplay between the US, China and Russia. with the two latter nations supply the Viet Cong and advising them in the field. additionally the terrain was extremely complex with the VC crossing borders to avoid decisive confrontations. next you can point to the fact that known supply areas were never touched. a certain harbor comes to mind that remained untouched because of fear of escalation. the same conditions that are happening in Iraq happened then. restrictive rules of engagement, silliness when it comes to fear of escalation...safe havens for the enemy...lack of comitment to win (especially our ARVN allies) all add up to a nation that was bound to fail.
DeleteWE CAN'T FIGHT FOR PEOPLE THAT WON'T FIGHT FOR THEMSELVES!!!!!
Milspecmusings- Exactly, right on.
DeleteSol - not to mention our domestic politics at the time, congress cutting the South off from supplies after we left
Josh, exactly, which was why I said abandoned, not lost.
DeleteSolomon, my point is that unless you accept that you have to depopulate an area to kill all your enemies, insurgents can hide among the population and you won't know who to shoot. That is their unfair advantage that counters all the amount of firepower you can bring. In a conventional war, your enemy has uniforms and carry weapons openly. In COIN, everyone looks alike, innocent or guilty. Worse in a country with a hunting culture, they can carry weapons openly and you can't even tell if they are hostile or friendly until they open fire. Bad situations.
not so. if the US operated under the same rules as we have today we would never have seen London bombed, Dresden or TOkyo.
Deleteit is almost a given that major industrial capacity will be placed in civilian areas. whether thats to build Tiger Tanks or IEDs its to be expected. what should also be expected is the understanding that in order to save a civilian population, you might have to kill the civilian population.
"WE CAN'T FIGHT FOR PEOPLE THAT WON'T FIGHT FOR THEMSELVES!!!!!"
DeleteThe reason that the US has failed is that people DO fight for themselves, against the US that is, because the US has one objective and they have another. Vietnam was your "nation building," going against the 1954 Geneva Agreement that Vietnam ought to be one country, and trying to sustain a corrupt "Republic of Vietnam" in the south.
Why don't our guys fight like their guys? Because their guys fight for their country and our guys fight for us. It doesn't work.
That was an awesome post.
DeleteIll add my 2 cents, which is:
The US wants to have its cake and eat it too.
The "elites", and indeed, many regular americans, want to maintain the hegemon. With hegemon, you have many benefits, to include comparatively low costs for products, a say in "whos who" in the world of geopolitics, and the ability to bitchslap somebody that is not in line* (more to follow on that last point)
Now, here's the tricky part. Most in the US have forgotten what empires did (and really, what we did), to maintain the hegemon, and what price we were willing to pay for it. They have forgotten that our way of life and standard of living was created because of our complete willingness to use force.
In conclusion, we cannot abide by casualty aversion, pleasing everybody's sensibilities, trying not to piss off others, and painting the picture as the saint-like benevolent force on Earth so long as the desire to maintain the hegemon exists.
It is the typical political posture of bureaucrats and cowards speaking through both sides of their mouth. They dont want to piss off "those people" by us using actual, credible military force, but they need credible military force in this instance to alleviate the pain in the ass. So they do something they feel appeases both sides: airstrikes (which seems to be the US answer to everything, the air force agrees, although history has not been kind to such stupidity)
The political shit storm following OIF didn't help, most certainly.
But hey, you either shit or get off the pot.
Just throwing this out there... Lindsey Graham (chairman of Armed Services Commitee) stated tonight that 10,000 swingin dicks would be appropriate to bring the pain on IS. This is according to his advisors assessments. So if you are including support units, two brigades and a MEU, possibly. Thoughts??? Also in my opinion these guys are not insurgents...take the attorneys out of the equation (lol) and deal appropriately.
ReplyDeleteThe sad thing is the world is focusing on ISIS which consists of maybe 50k soldiers which in reality can't really do too much harm while ignoring the real culprit, China, who has been spending billions to upgrade its military and is almost ready to expand its borders.
ReplyDeleteThe basic fact is that these faraway countries have nothing to do with U.S. security, do they. It is all a terrible game that wastes lives and dollars for the profit of a few. The average American couldn't care less.
ReplyDeleteWorks for me!
DeleteYou naughty "isolationist" you! ;)
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ReplyDelete