Dempsey was not prepared for fall of Mosul

Andy11M sends us a link to the Yahoo News report that Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey admits that he and his staff had done no contingency planning which resulted in fall of the Iraqi city of Mosul to ISIS last June;

“So, look, there were several things that surprised us about ISIL,” Dempsey adds. “The degree to which they were able to form their own coalition, both inside of Syria — and inside of northwestern Iraq; the military capability that they exhibited — the collapse of the Iraq Security Forces. Yeah, in those initial days, there were a few surprises.”

Dempsey’s frank comments would appear to raise fresh questions about the performance of U.S. intelligence agencies in tracking the rise of IS as well the state of planning inside the Obama administration as it continues to grapple with a war against the Islamic State terrorists.

That is a pretty stunning admission, especially if you remember that just four months before the fall of Mosul, we witnessed the fall of Fallujah. The Obama Pentagon promised weapons and training in February that still hadn’t arrived by the time ISIS overran Iraq troops in Mosul. So, it really wasn’t a lack of planning as much as it was a lack of a sense of urgency. They weren’t prepared for the fall of Ramadi nearly a year after the fall of Mosul, either.

In a link that Chief Tango sent us from the Washington Post, they say that Dempsey is just being cautious in regards to the war against ISIS;

“Dempsey had been a strong voice for the limits that should be placed on U.S. military power,” said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a senior officer.

For the general, the caution is hard-won, derived from his own history in Iraq and across the Middle East.

Unlike in the last war in Iraq, when U.S. troops bore the brunt of the battle against insurgents, Americans would remain in the background this time. Against the Islamic State, Dempsey believed that “the only way there’s a sustainable defeat is if the Iraqis feel the real weight of the problem,” the official said.

While I would agree that the Iraqis need to make the hard choices and they must commit to the war, they also need to know that they can depend on the application of US firepower to the conflict. I’m certainly not recommending sending US ground forces to the country again, but we have the firepower and the technology to defeat this enemy in a force-on-force conflict, without our own ground forces, as opposed to the insurgency that we were forced to fight in the last Iraq War.

George B. McClellan was a cautious commander, too, and probably the worst general in the Union Army because of it. George G. Meade’s caution allowed Robert E. Lee and his army to escape across the Potomac from Gettysburg and sentenced the country to two more years of the Civil War. I’m not sure that ISIS is willing to wait while Dempsey prepares to retire. Dempsey should be replaced immediately and in the dark of night.

We’ll probably need a Chairman who can tell the President that there’s a war against terror going on, though. From the Associated Press;

President Barack Obama on Monday saluted Americans who died in battle, saying the country must “never stop trying to fully repay them” for their sacrifices. He noted it was the first Memorial Day in 14 years without U.S. forces engaged in a major ground war.

The Pentagon and Dempsey aren’t the whole problem, apparently.

Category: Terror War