September 1, 2016
Former US Commanders Take Increasingly Dim View of War on ISIS by Mark Thompson,Time Magazine
It’s a most peculiar war: rarely has the U.S. been killing so many while risking so few. The U.S. is beating ISIS handily, judging by Vietnam’s body-count metric. The total number of ISIS battlefield deaths claimed by U.S. officials has jumped, from 6,000 in January 2015 to 45,000 last month—a bloodbath for an enemy force estimated to number about 30,000. Three U.S. troops have died. That’s an eye-watering U.S.-to-ISIS “kill ratio” of 15,000-to-1. “We’ve got good momentum going,” General Joseph Votel, chief of U.S. Central Command, who is overseeing the war, said Tuesday. “We are really into the heart of the caliphate.”
But some of his predecessors disagree. James Mattis, a retired Marine general who commanded Central Command from 2010 to 2013, says the war on ISIS is “unguided by a sustained policy or sound strategy [and is] replete with half-measures.” Anthony Zinni, a retired Marine four-star who held the same post from 1997 to 2000, says he doesn’t think he could do so today. “I don’t want to be part of a strategy that in my heart of hearts I know is going to fail,” he says. “It’s a bad strategy, it’s the wrong strategy, and maybe I would tell the President that he would be better served to find somebody who believes in it, whoever that idiot may be.”
Day after day, American warplanes, sometimes joined by allies, have been attacking individual ISIS targets, down to backhoes and foxholes. ISIS has lost 40% of its Iraqi territory, the Pentagon says, and 5% in Syria. It doesn’t seem to have lost any of the terrain it has staked out on the internet. That’s slow progress by a 27-state military alliance against a two-year-old rump state…
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