Boots on the ground
The Washington Post publishes an opinion post from Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown who thinks that Obama’s promise of no “boots on the ground” is a bad idea, because it plays into ISIS’ hands;
I wonder what that pledge really means — and just why we’re supposed to find it reassuring. It’s a pledge that seems to have everything to do with politics and little to do with the imperatives of strategy or security.
Here’s what “no boots on the ground” apparently doesn’t mean: It doesn’t mean that no U.S. troops will be sent to Iraq or Syria. Reportedly there are already 1,600 U.S. military personnel in Iraq. True, they’re present in an “advisory” role, not in a combat role — but surely one lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan is that combat has a habit of finding its way to noncombat personnel. Enemy snipers and IEDs don’t much care about a soldier’s mission or occupational specialty, and you can bet that fighters of the self-proclaimed Islamic State would be content with the heads of a few American advisers.
Here’s a story from Stars & Stripes where that happened to some advisers in Afghanistan who hadn’t planned on being boots on the ground in a firefight against some Taliban fellows;
When early success against the militants left the Afghans with more territory than they could control, Gen. Abdul Raziq asked the Americans to cover for the last days of the mission.
The Americans agreed to help, and their advise-and-assist mission quickly turned to open combat.
“Our role wasn’t really to fight,” said Lt. Graham Hennig, a platoon leader with Dragon Troop. “It just so happened that the fight crept it’s way up to us.”
Yeah, that happens, and it will happen in Syria and Iraq. But the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey says that his plan will involve training 15,000 Syrian rebels, so he doesn’t need American troops, well, except the American trainers, says Stars & Stripes;
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the assessment to reporters a week after Congress approved a plan to begin training and equipping 5,000 moderate Syrian rebels to take on the Islamic State, which has seized about a third of the territory in Syria and neighboring Iraq.
“Five thousand has never been the end state,” Dempsey said. “Twelve to 15,000 is what we believe they would need to recapture lost territory in eastern Syria” that the Islamic State controls.
Yeah, a few hundred advisers and several thousand rebels, with no real allegiance to anything in particular who are supposed to be married to the idea of defeating ISIS. By the way, the Syrian rebels, who are fighting the Syrian government are supposed to fight against ISIS who is also fighting against the Syrian government. And Dempsey says that one of the jobs those advisers will be taking on is to help form political loyalties among the rebels. While a Syrian government still exists. And the Iranian clients, Hezbollah are in that mix – the same Hezbollah who blames us for the existence of their mortal enemies, the Israelis. A perfect situation for a lot of green-on-blue deaths.
Category: Terror War
Dempsey is more of an obama political hack than a military leader with honor and integrity.
He has been a disapointment on many levels, militarily, politically and as an Army Officer.
“It just so happened that the fight crept it’s way up to us.”
To paraphrase Frost’s poem again, war creeps in on little cat feet.
IS it juts me, or does this entire thing seem like a completely bad idea? And maybe we should just pull back, regroup and go for what ISIL/IS really wants – an all-out war, but one in which we win and they lose?
Silly question: is all this just a distraction to hide what is really going on? No, I don’t think they’re that clever.
Ex, we expect to have to deal with the Fog of War, what we don’t expect is to have that fog Generated by the National Command Structure.
What national command structure?
I don’t think it exists. I think everything about this is being pulled out of the ‘good ideas this week’ box and that’s what they go with.
ISIL/IS wants to have an all-out war. They are manipulative, vicious, amoral, and ruthless. They have a bloodlust that makes gladiatorial combat look like a high school cheerleading session. They are on a bender with weapons pointed straight at anyone who belongs to the ‘west’, and it will creep up into Central Asia, maybe even into China, and likely into Russia, too, if they have their way.
Afghanistan? Hell, that was just a dress rehearsal for this.
Remember Vlad the Impaler and how he got that name? He knew he had to be ruthless, or the Turks and their infidel backup would overrun his country. That was his message to them: “I can be just as vicous as you are”, and it wasn’t just because of what happened to his wife.
Umm, aren’t there already boots on the ground in Iraq, despite what some are saying?
I don’t care if there’s one troop or 1600 troops in Iraq, that’s still boots on the ground (not even including the unpublicized Special Ops units).
Anyways, this ‘strategy’ for dealing with ISIS is exactly what some are predicting will lead to disaster.
“Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey says that his plan will involve training 15,000 Syrian rebels, so he doesn’t need American troops”
Great, just great! How soon they forget. It was sure effective training and equipping all those Iraqi soldiers, only to see their resolve when tested by ISIS. Yep, training them has been such a great program thus far! NOT!!!
No sh!t, Professor Brooks. The fact that this Administration’s “no boots on the ground” pledge is for political vice strategic or security reasons is glaringly obvious to anyone with 3 or more working brain cells. Hell, even Stevie Wonder can see that clearly – and he’s freaking blind.
Are you just now figuring that out?
David Ignatius published a column claiming that “ISIS'” strategy is to suck the US into an extended war in the ME by way of acts of savagery that are intolerable to all civilized people. They calculate that any response by the US and its allies will be inflammatory to Muslims, enough so to result in a very long-term, ruinous war (as with Russian in Afghanistan.)
The book is apparently downloadable for free. I’m not going to bother. What interests me is what the broad outline of the “strategy” says about their idea of “Muslim” character.
They think Muslims have an impaired sense of justice and morality. They think this defect is so severe that they can win a world war.
I get sick to my stomach thinking about president mom-jeans deciding to start up an overseas adventure. This is EXACTLY how we got sucked into Vietnam, and that was under John Kennedy, who even though a Democrat, was light years above our current resident.
F@ck putting troops on the ground. We have, still, a large number of B-52’s, B-1’s & B-2’s. We don’t need to bomb them back into the stone age. They pretty much live that way anyway. But we can replicate operations ARC-LIGHT & Rolling Thunder and make them feel the real might of the US. Hit their oil production facilities. Hit their training camps. Hit any frikkin’ city where they take up shop and turn it into rubble. Treat them as Rome treated Carthage.
Building more 500 & 1000lb iron bombs is significantly less expensive than one American troop. If we need to, we have plenty of tactical nukes laying about as well. Load the BUFFS up with all-napalm and send a couple dozen at one time to bring fire & death onto the bastards. Keep some attack planes handy so whenever you find a column out on the road, turn it into a highway of death like we did in the first Gulf War.
I am simply tired of risking American troops to destroy 7th century barbarians. They have never seen the sort of hurt our airpower can bring to them. Let the local citizens understand that as long as they support these monsters, as long as they refuse to fight back, then we’ll continue to rain hell down upon their farms, their towns, their cities, their factories, their bridges, and anything else of value.
Turn the whole area into a wasteland so bad that, as a Union General once quipped “A crow flying through it will need to carry his own rations”.
…even before Kennedy. US troop presence in Indochina during Truman/Eisenhower Admin.
Devtun: that is true – technically. However, in Jan 1961 our commitment in Vietnam was so small (about 900 troops) as to be effectively negligible; it was still a conflict we could have avoided. By January 1965 – and arguably by January 1964 – we’d passed the point where we could cut losses at low cost by leaving.
It was JFK who began the process of massive escalation of the US commitment in South Vietnam while being less-than-candid about same (see the entry for 15 Jan 1962). As noted above, there were roughly 900 US “advisors” in South Vietnam when JFK took over as POTUS. When he was assassinated, there were nearly 16,300 (end of 1963) – with plans to go to 23,300 by the end of 1964 (Johnson didn’t change JFK’s planned levels of troop commitment to Vietnam until 1965).
That’s an increase of 2,588.9% (yes, a factor of almost 25.9x) during the 4 years between Jan 1961 and Jan 1965. Even LBJ didn’t increase US troop strength by that much, percentage wise, between Jan 1965 and Jan 1969.
http://www.americanwarlibrary.com/vietnam/vwatl.htm
LBJ indeed gets the blame for getting the US into a major war in Vietnam – and the bastard did it via stealth, without telling either Congress or the US public what he was doing until it was already a fait accompli. But JFK started us down that path – and with Diem’s assassination, that path became effectively irreversible. So JFK gets some of the blame for Vietnam, too.
Fight to win, with no limitations, or stay home. It really is that simple.
This voluntary submission to death by a thousand cuts is insane. And stupid.
The B. Hussein 0bama administration has been like the RMS Titanic going at full throttle without a rudder since day one. The only things each and every member of that gaggle cares about are themselves, their political agenda, as well as acquiring and keeping as much power and control over as many other people as they can, and then keeping it by any means possible. These so-called “moderates” in the ME will change sides and loyalties anytime or anywhere like militants did during the anarchy following the USSR’s pullout from Afghanistan. They’ve been like that over the millennia, switching loyalties is nothing new to people in that part of this world! B. Hussein 0bama& Company, especially B-HO himself rarely care about little more than what helps them right here, right now, and little else just like a spoiled kid! B-HO is probably the most arrogant, narcissistic, hypocritical, incompetent, and criminal POTUS in US History, it will likely take decades to undo what he and his crew have done, and more if American voters elect another incompetent liberal POTUS or two.
The vast majority of these militants are savages that enjoy wanton mass murder, you cannot reason or negotiate with them, the only way to deal with them is wipe them off the face of the Earth, and stay ready to do so again, all they understand is savagery and vience.
Probably the worst ???
Hands down the absolute worst. I am convinced that the reelection of him was a fraud. The lib’s unloaded bus after bus after bus in Milwaukee of voters from Chicago.
Finally there is finally voter ID in WI now. That will cut back on the fraud quite a bit.
Ain’t no probably about it, the worst…
Those bused-in voters you mention are the reason why liberals perpetually screech and bawl for the removal of Voter ID Laws, it hampers their efforts to steal elections the same way that Voter Roll Purges do. Just think what it would do to demo-rats in office just in Chicago alone if they were to go through voter registries and delete all of those voters that are known to be deceased!
From Wikipedia:
“International law does not prohibit the use of napalm or other incendiaries against military targets,[21] but use against civilian populations was banned by the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) in 1980.[22] Protocol III of the CCW restricts the use of all incendiary weapons, but a number of countries have not acceded to all of the protocols of the CCW. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), countries are considered a party to the convention, which entered into force as international law in December 1983, as long as they ratify at least two of the five protocols. The United States signed it almost three decades after the General Assembly adopted it, on January 21, 2009: President Barack Obama’s first full day in office. America’s ratification, however, is subject to a diplomatic reservation that says it can disregard the treaty at its discretion if doing so would save civilian lives.”
It took ups thirty years to ratify that protocol and this amiture ratifies it on HIS FIRST DAY IN OFFICE! That pretty much sums up this administratio. He cancels both Tomahawk missile and F-22 fighter production to buy votes from the non productive classes.
Let’s not forget that B. Hussein 0bama pretty much shut NASA and gutted it as well, most likely thinking of that as more money for his vacations as well as more handouts for the flunkies and dropouts!!
However, as in WWII where both the Germans and the Japanese placed military HQ’s, troop quarters and armaments factories in the middle of populated areas, the terrorist barbarians do the same thing. They move into a populated area, set up shop in schools, hospitals and mosques.
As soon as they do that, those areas become a valid military target and we should have no qualms about attacking them. The blood of innocents is not on OUR hands, but on the hands of those who use them as unwilling human shields.
I also find it interesting that the libs are either in complete denial about the fact that this war is going to escalate or they still blame Bush but at some point they are going to have to own it.
With the Taliban just beheading a bunch of women and children in Afghanistan and an RPG being launched at our embassy in Sa’naa I see no end of continued conflict or escalation. I suspect the Afghan draw down and pullout will be re-looked at,sooner or later there will likely be American military casualties, and it doesn’t take a genius to understand that lone wolf attacks will increase in frequency in Nations supporting this “new” war.
My biggest fear is that when the going gets tough we will bail on the whole deal just like we did in Somalia instead of waging an all out effort to actually succeed.
Yeah, what could possibly go wrong with this genius plan ??????????
Rosa Brooks is married to one of my SAMS seminar mates. He’s a Special Forces LTC who just finished a battalion command in Afghanistan. As such, I think that she has a slightly different perspective on the military then the rest of her friends at the Post.
Entirely possible. In that case, it’s obvious she likely realized long ago that this so-called “strategy” of the current Administration is little more than spin, deception, and political maneuvering.
Perhaps it just took her this long to get fed up enough to risk being ostracized by her professional peers. Because you know at this point she’s almost certainly persona non grata in her department in Georgetown.
She was on the NSC staff during a good portion of his first term, and has at times been very publicly critical of the thinking withing the inner circle for a while.
Her being ostracized by any remaining of her still cool aid drinking peers will be short lived.
This activity – the fanatics poking at western nations, particularly the US – is going to continue into March 2015. This is no time to be taking risks in places like that.
Expect to see something happen — I think something really bad, not sure what just yet – on or around November 11, and another event on or around March 11, 2015. Keep your eyes and ears open.
This is just going to get worse. Things will not get back to ‘normal’ (whatever that is) until 2020 to 2022. I would not waste my time kidding about this.