Pentagon: more ISIS victories in our future

From the Washington Times, Rowan Scarborough reports that the pentagon is admitting that airstrikes alone won’t prevent more losses to ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State forces in Syria and Iraq.

The Pentagon on Wednesday made the sobering prediction that more towns in Syria and Iraq will fall to the Islamic State in the coming weeks, and that air power alone is not going to be enough to prevent the fall of the Syrian city of Kobani near the Turkish border.

It also raised the prospect of Islamic State terrorists marching on Baghdad, a fear that lawmakers and former top military officials say can only be addressed by ground forces.

Yeah, well as long as those ground forces aren’t US troops, fellas. In fact the Turks are a helluva lot closer than we are, and they don’t seem all that worried about the proximity of ISIS to their own country. In fact, the UN begged them to send troops to Kobani the other day, but I guess they were perfectly comfortable sitting on their hands.

The assessment came before President Obama met with his top military officers and National Security Council at the Pentagon. Mr. Obama emerged to tout his confidence in the progress that coalition efforts are making. He made no note of increasing calls for sending U.S. ground forces, and instead addressed the need to better train and arm Syrian opposition groups that the U.S. hopes will fight the terrorists on the ground.

“This is not something that can be solved overnight,” Mr. Obama said. “Our strikes continue, alongside our partners.”

Since everything turns out completely backwards from the President tells the public, I suppose there are combat forces gearing up right now for their deployment. Personally, I’d prefer Turks because they will be authorized to actually kill the enemy and they won’t be hamstrung by restrictive rules of engagement (ROE) unlike our folks.

Category: Terror War