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French getting another round of "inshallah"
- Thread starter picklesuit
- Start date
Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
Good question. Right now the Obama administration seems content to spend millions to kill a single IS militant. Best I can gather is that they are hoping that a country in the region eventually steps up to restore order.
The problem is that none of those nations have the capability to launch an offensive land campaign, even with U.S. air support.
Even if you want to argue that IS is a traditional nation-state (which I do not concede), their ideology has proven to transcend national borders. So, if you're going to embark on an old school WWII style campaign, which I would argue is not possible with the way our military is configured today, how do you define your AOR? What do you do after Syria and the surrounding IS areas are pacified? How do you handle the IS force flows from ungoverned areas in Turkey or if they establish sanctuaries in Saudi Arabia? Set up a theater-wide garrison like in post-war Japan for a decade? How many ground forces do you envision being required for this task? How'd that garrison thing work out for us in Iraq?
707guy
"You can't make this shit up..."
Then there's this: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/11/15/french-jets-target-isis-in-raqqa/
I don't think it's a question of capability, It's more a matter of will. The last thing an Arab military wants to do is fight a war. That's bad for business. There's no profit in that, and who's to know how much of any of those military's officer corps is sympathetic to IS.
Operation ENDURING CROISSANT is underway!
Very good article in the Atlantic with a most important difference between Al-Qaeda and ISIS. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/
Al‑Qaeda is ineradicable because it can survive, cockroach-like, by going underground. The Islamic State cannot. If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and Iraq, it will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground movements, because territorial authority is a requirement: take away its command of territory, and all those oaths of allegiance are no longer binding. Former pledges could of course continue to attack the West and behead their enemies, as freelancers. But the propaganda value of the caliphate would disappear, and with it the supposed religious duty to immigrate and serve it.
That said, let the Russians and Iranians spend money and fight ISIS.
Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
No, capability. The largest "friendly" (read: Not Iranian) Middle East military is the Saudi. According to Wikipedia they have 192,000 troops and according to another source they have 233,000. If they committed 100% of their Army to the fight they still would fall short of the coalition forces that invaded Iraq in 2003, and that's not accounting for the woefully inadequate amount of personnel MNF-I had to conduct post-invasion operations. That's aside from the fact that they own territory in a volatile region and have to maintain the capability to defend their borders.
Officers of questionable loyalty and operational/tactical ability would also fall under the 'capability' category.
An invasion of the region by a Middle Eastern country would take a coalition effort, and these countries tend not to play nice with each other to begin with.
I'm not sure I agree with Wood's assessment - it's a bit simplistic. The idea of a caliphate can be just as powerful a motivator as a literal caliphate. The space IS occupies in Iraq and the Levant is massive and ungovernable. I don't think we will see any meaningful eradication of IS from that geography. Even if a post-Assad Syrian government gains widespread legitimacy in the years ahead, there just aren't enough resources in the area to exercise the degree of control that would be required to completely evict IS.
Ya, your right. I was making the point that arab militaries operate more like organized crime that an army. But that would directly be related to their capability.
And don't underestimate the power of thousands of sexually repressed 20 somthings desire to get their rape on. My take on the article (I rad it when it first came out, so maybe a re-read is in order) was to argue that IS is a pure form of Islam at a time when the White House and other Western leaders were stating that IS wasn't Islamic at all (and are still sticking to that narrative).
We made them play together relatively well for Desert Storm. You can argue how effective they were, but several did participate from one degree to another. Window dressing, sure. But they did contribute. You can't say it won't happen again. ISIS is fast becoming an existential threat to some middle east countries. That is a real motivator. A coalition including Arab nations could be formed. It just takes LEADERSHIP. Something we have seen scant example of lately.
Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
IS seems to do a decent job governing their territory. I buy that it would take a lot of manpower and resources to uproot ISIS, to include a multinational effort, but it's not insurmountable.
Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
Fair enough that they played together in OIF, but that was a significantly smaller scale than what would be required here. It would take at least 3 Middle Eastern countries committing sizeable forces to the region and then peacefully dividing the territory post-war. This is, of course, assuming that the U.S. doesn't bear the brunt of the forces committed like in OIF. I just don't see that happening.
Meh.........the windsurfer from Beacon Hill is no James Baker.