Category Archives: defense policy

Gradual Escalation

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We’ve been taking potshots at ISIS targets, ostensibly to bring relief materials to the Yezidis trapped on mountaintop in northern Iraq. The potshots, though, are having a different effect.

Islamic militant forces in northern Iraq appear to be shifting tactics….

[U]ntil now [ISIS] was behaving like a well-organized army, moving with strategic intent and pursuing military objectives. Now, officials are seeing at least a partial shift to classic insurgency tactics, as militants begin to blend in among the population, making targeting more difficult.

“One of the things that we have seen…is that where [ISIS] have been in the open, they are now starting to dissipate and to hide amongst the people,” LtGen William Mayville Jr, Director of Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said. “The targeting in this is going to become more difficult.”

This, of course, is the result of having ignored the lessons of Viet Nam, specifically the failure of gradual escalation, which leaves the enemy room and time in which to adapt and respond. It also continues to underestimate ISIS: they’re maintaining their strategic intent and military objectives they’ve always had; they’re only changing tactics—just like in Vietnam.

These initial air “attacks” should have been massive and sustained, destroying the terrorists’ formations over a broad swath and while they were still in the open, still concentrated, and still easy targets. Moreover, such a heavy, sustained campaign would have made the Kurds’ Peshmerga’s task easier.

“[M]ilitants can be hard to discern from civilians,” said Michael Rubin, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“Are you going to risk having someone come on to a helicopter or into a crowd that’s actually a suicide bomber?”

This is the situation into which Obama’s…tactic…has placed the Peshmerga—and us.

[I]n order for the airstrikes to be effective at this stage, US ground forces would be needed to permanently push the group formerly known as ISIS back—something that has been ruled out by Obama administration officials.

This is not the case, and it’s a surprising misunderstanding by Jennifer Griffin, the author of the above linked article. Ground forces—the Peshmerga—already are in place; US ground forces aren’t needed, and the Kurds aren’t asking for them. All the Peshmerga need are those weapons and ammunition that have been “promised”—an Obama-style commitment—and that still are being withheld.

This business of gradual escalation—or of a too light response—is a lesson writ large from our gradual escalation failure in Vietnam. This is a lesson of which the present administration is fully aware and is studiously is ignoring, since to acknowledge the prior failure would be to acknowledge the failure of the present administration’s disdain for US military power in any place in the world.

There is no military solution? Tell that to tomorrow’s historians studying how the extermination of the Yezidis came about. Tell that to the daughters of the surviving Kurds, living—sort of—as ISIS sex slaves. That will be, after all, the outcome of the current decision to ignore that lesson and to allow, thereby, ISIS to continue its…advance.

Or we don’t escalate at all, we stay with the pin pricks, we don’t try to get ahead of the terrorists’ evolving tactics, and we meekly accept defeat.

Negotiate with Terrorists?

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Democratic Party Presidential contender and current Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) had some thoughts from the Progressive side of the situation unfolding in Iraq. In supporting President Barack Obama’s tepid moves vis-à-vis ISIS, the Yezidis, and the Kurds, Warren said this:

It’s a complicated situation right now in Iraq and the president has taken very targeted actions to provide humanitarian relief that the Iraqi government requested, and to protect American citizens. But like the president, I believe that any solution in Iraq is going to be a negotiated solution, not a military solution. We do not want to be pulled into another war in Iraq.

Warren added this, exposing Progressives’ misunderstanding, generally, of what is required to destroy a terrorist entity:

It’s a very complicated situation in Iraq. The president has now taken two very targeted actions, and those two actions will change the mix of what’s happening in Iraq, and we’ll have to just monitor it[.]

Of course it’s wholly insufficient for us to toss our shoes onto the field and expect the terrorists to cut and run. A cynical man might suggest that the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party is projecting its own world view onto hardened thugs.

And just to seal the muddle, Andy Metzger of MassLive, summarized Warren’s position thusly, taking her at her word that she actually was serious:

While calling for a negotiated solution, Warren said the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is a terrorist organization and the US does not negotiate with terrorists, while leaving open the possibility the US could assist the Iraqi government negotiating with ISIS.

How, indeed, does one negotiate with terrorists? Never mind that this administration has brought this on the Iraqi people, the Kurds, and itself when it abandoned Iraq three years ago under its disingenuous claim that it was “leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.”

We’re entering a very dangerous period in the life of our nation. The Progressives of the Democratic Party simply are unable to see the error of their ways, and they want, post-2014, post-2016, to continue the obviously disastrous policies of the Obama administration.

Lasting Solutions

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President Barack Obama has said, in defense of his inaction against the current and planned atrocities of ISIS, that there can be no lasting solution in Iraq until the Iraqis have resolved their governmental failures and impasse—a true national reconciliation.

He’s right about the need for political resolution—for Iraqis. What Obama carefully elides, though, is the lasting solution that will occur vis-à-vis Yezidis and Kurds if we continue our inaction.

And continue to do nothing we are. Oh, much is made of our having dropped blankets, water, tents, and tens of thousands of meal rations onto a mountain top for the trapped Yezidis. But British estimates range from 50,000-150,000 Yezidis trapped—all of whom must have food for several days. “Tens of thousands” of rats won’t feed all of them for a single day if the British estimates are anywhere near accurate.

And the American air strikes? We’re continuing to shoot up individual artillery guns, the odd APC, an occasional convoy. There is, though, no deliberate, focused, active air campaign of any sort with a view to destroying ISIS’ forces as they continue to press the Yezidis and the Kurds’ Peshmerga—and then the Kurds themselves.

We’ve begun flying arms to the Kurds? We’ve begun “expediting” arms deliveries from third parties; maybe we’ve authorized the CIA to engage in arms trafficking with the Kurds. But these typically are small arms—of little use against the captured American APCs, tanks(!), artillery, etc being used by ISIS.

The lasting solution that will result from Obama’s reluctance to act absent a lasting solution is the extermination of the Yezidis and the enslavement of surviving Kurds. The lasting solution we should be putting in place is the destruction of ISIS.

By the time we elect a new President, though, it may well be too late.

Ukraine, Russia, and the US

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Matthew Rojansky, Director of the Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center, had some thoughts on this during a live interview on Fox News, and repeated in Fox’ online feed. These remarks were made in the context of a warning that Russia will use the Russian surrogates’/Ukrainian separatists’ situation as a pretext to invade Ukraine to resolve a cynically made-up “humanitarian crisis.”

We don’t want a war. We cannot win a war against Russia. You know, this is not Al Qaeda. This is not the government of Saddam Hussein. This is the Russian Federation, the inheritors of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal. We cannot get dragged into this war. But by the same token, the Ukrainians can’t win it by themselves.

If we keep going with sanctions, it’s a dead-end process. We can continue to do it for moral reasons to show that we’re doing something, but we’ve also got to have an endgame negotiation that the Russians are part of.

He’s right, and he’s wrong. He’s right that we don’t want war; no sane nation does. He’s right that Ukraine can’t win their current war by themselves.

But he’s terribly wrong where it counts. Of course, we can win a war against Russia. Indeed, he implies that Ukraine can win such a war, if only they’re not alone. No, the only way we could not win would be for us to give it up before it starts—”we can’t win” is just a dangerously defeatist mindset.

It’s that mindset, too, that is contributing so heavily to Ukraine’s current strait. Russian President Vladimir Putin has the measure of President Barack Obama and of Obama’s key cabinet players, and Putin is confident he can act as he pleases and the US will make no meaningful response. Putin is confident that we’ll do something “for moral reasons to show that we’re doing something” but that something will be confined to more wrist-slap sanctions. Putin most carefully has observed the American administration’s penchant for “leading from behind,” which many people more accurately identify as leading the retreat.

Rojansky also is wrong that the endgame negotiation must be something of which the Russians are part. Certainly, it would be nice if the Russians were part, but they really have very little useful to say in the matter until they stand down from Ukraine’s eastern border; until they stop shooting at the Ukrainian army from within Russia; until they stop supplying the…separatists…with arms, artillery, SAMs, ammunition, and so on; until they withdraw from their occupation of Crimea.

No, the right answer is to ratchet up the economic pressure on Russia with real sanctions and openly and effectively helping Ukraine (and Europe) find non-Russian sources of oil, gas, and other goods, and to ratchet up the pressure on Russia by supplying Ukraine with arms and ammunition.

And to openly and publicly recognize that the Russian nuclear threat has only the credence we choose to give it. If we’re not threatened by it, it is no threat. It is no threat because Russia does not want a war with us, either, and especially, Russia will not go nuclear over eastern Ukraine.

Update: Corrected the second paragraph, beginning “If we keep going with sanctions…,” to indicate it was part of Rojansky’s remarks, and not part of my writing.  I apologize for the error.

Pivoting to Asia

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But on our heels, not our toes….

Last month, Commander US Pacific Command Admiral Samuel Locklear talked about the People’s Republic of China’s action of sending along a spy ship to shadow a RIMPAC exercise (to which the PRC also had sent four combatant ships at RIMPAC’s invitation to participate. Among other things, Locklear thought the spy ship’s appearance was good news.

It’s a recognition, I think, of acceptance by the Chinese that what we’ve been saying to them for some time is that military operations and survey operations in another country’s [maritime zones] are within international law and are acceptable.

As AEIdeas‘ Michael Auslin put it in that linked-to article, though,

…it is a far greater admission that Beijing views the United States with precisely the deep and enduring distrust that America’s senior military leaders have hoped to dispel….

Because, pivot.