As Much As I Hate to Admit It, A Ground Invasion of the Islamic State Makes Sense

The Kurds can't really advance outside their own lands without making the local Arab populace rise up against them and join the Islamic State. The Iraqi Army is totally inept and the only people able to do jack (*)(*)(*)(*) are the Iranian Quds Force and their Iraqi militia puppet. The Syrian Army will never be able to seriously challenge the Islamic State for a long time because half of it has been destroyed, which is why Iran, Russia and Hizbu'llah are pouring their own forces in to back them up. The Syrian rebels are infected with Islamists and co-operate with al-Qaeda. Using local forces to do the job is not cutting it.

I'll say it straight: we need NATO (which implies, for the most part, the US Army) to go in there and completely (*)(*)(*)(*) these guys over. Go in, destroy the entire organization, occupy all their territory. In Iraq, you can then hand all the territory over to the Iraqi Army (which is more than large enough to occupy it effectively); in Syria, you may have to occupy it for a bit longer until the Syrian Army is sufficiently strong enough to police the area. Either way, once the Syrian government is able to control the area, you hand it over to them and you pull out. You don't stay there for 10 (*)(*)(*)(*)ing years. You offer and provide special forces to assist in seek and destroy missions against insurgents that continue the fight after the Islamic State is dismantled, but you don't occupy the territory longer than necessary.

Wish there was another way but clearly the purported effectiveness of the air campaign is false, because if you really were killing as many IS troops as they claim they should have lost half their army by now, but they haven't. And the local forces are either too incompetent, too weak or not of the right ethnic group. We have to do this ourselves.

If the US Army was in the Islamic State right now, al-Raqqa would probably already be taken and Mosul, while a quagmire, would be taken in the near future as well. The IS controls no other large cities, so after those two strongholds fall the rest is mopping up little towns in the middle of what is largely uninhabitted desert.

Because as any military strategist will tell you, air forces cannot win a war.

 

As the Turks say, you don't take a bath in the same water twice.

 

It's not the same water. That's a very common fallacy used to argue against this idea.

 

It's just another case of the West invading Muslim land. That failed when Saladin kicked you out, and it failed when the US withdrew from Iraq.

 

Did I say we should stay? No I didn't. I said we should destroy the Islamic State. The Islamic State exists in a physical place. To destroy it, we have to go there.

 

And what exactly is going to fill the void? Sykes-Picot is dead, so what do you propose?

 

I said right in the OP who I'd hand the Islamic State's territory back to the governments they took it from, did you not even read what I said?

 

LOL ISIS is nothing you can destroy with weapons and bomb, it needs to be destroyed ideologically.
If you just going to invade then count with even more people joining them.

 

And I told you Sykes-Picot is dead.

 

it would be another Vietnam, I support lending air support and that is it

i do not mind the occasional conflicts we may assist with, but none of this door to door like Iraq

.

 

What exactly do you think happened following the Iraq war? Whenever you hand it over to the Iraqis and end your occupation, the region will devolve into a hellish state. There are more serious issues at play here than the ability of the Iraqi army and police to effectively maintain control of the country - when people are motivated by strongly held beliefs there is no head of the snake you can cut off - they simply become martyrs and someone else takes over.

 

If they really wanted to and stopped worrying about "the environment", the USA and NATO could do a lot of damage to ISIS. Look at this image of ISIS controlled territory (ISIS actually controls a lot of territory around these areas, but these are the critical areas):



That's clearly a road based strategy, they are following roads because of the terrain and the scattered population centers, and they don't have the vehicles to move significant troops off-road. That means they are concentrated, destroy everything on those roads including oil trucks carrying ISIS oil, cut the roads, isolate the ISIS forces in various towns, cut their supply lines. Destroy every transportation hub in ISIS territory, even the ones in towns and cities.

That won't win the war, but it will knock them back and make life hard, and a lot easier when troops go in.

 

I think the West should invite all Christians from the Middle East to come into their countries and then nuke the the entire region.

 

If Saddam was in charge there wouldn't be such a problem with keeping the Islamists down. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a huge mistake and is the biggest problem with trying to get rid of the IS. Assad will gladly keep them cowering in their basements while his thugs patrol the streets, but the Iraqi government doesn't do that because it doesn't really care about the Sunni areas of Iraq, it's content to stay in the Shia areas and simply defend them.

No I agree, military action will never get rid of the idea of Jihad. But keeping them scattered, always on the run, and as unorganized as possible decreases their ability to actually DO anything in the meantime. The Islamic State is the biggest, most organized and thus most dangerous Jihadist group in the world. People will still become Jihadists after we get rid of the IS, but getting rid of the IS gets rid of the command structure, the unity, the communication and the resource pooling a state allows. Until the Muslim world becomes less fundamentalist and less willing to wage holy war, suppressing the threat is the best we can do. We cannot control people's minds, so we cannot actually get rid of it.

 

Infantry brigades deployed to al-Raqqa and Mosul would eliminate the only real strongholds they have, as the area contains no other large population centers that the Islamic State owns. Armoured Brigades with air support would easily mop up the road connections between the scattered settlements and take the smaller settlements. The hardest part is the part we're closest to: Mosul and al-Raqqa are very close to the Kurdish frontline. With those taken, nothing of significance could be used to defend with. Deir ez-Zour COULD be, but they haven't managed to take it from the Syrian Army. The IS is only a real threat to the comparatively primitive local military forces. A 'proper' military could easily dismantle the entire thing in a month as long as they're willing to get into some dirty urban combat in Mosul and al-Raqqa.

 

True, if the military was just pointed and released, they would end this quickly. But we have a spineless fool as commander in chief and he will tip-toe into it hoping it will go away without any real commitment, or he can delay real action at least until he leaves office. He might make a real go at an air campaign, but he won't want to put a real ground force in.

 

The Chiefs of Staff need to sit Obama down and ask "Do you want to destroy the IS?". He will obviously say yes. Then they should say "Then we have to send in the army. You cannot win a war with airplanes and militia." This was proved in WW2 (before WW2 air gurus often insisted the air force could win the war by itself) - the nuking of Japan was an exception, because they were nukes. Conventional bombing has never destroyed an enemy force or forced them to surrender.

 

To the same governments who have shown themselves to be incapable of controlling their territory, and whose oppression and corruption is a major source of jihadism? The very inept governments who basically caused all this? What could go wrong... genius solution

 

Air campaigns can destroy an enemy. The problem with this air campaign (and ALL since Korea) is who is deciding where the bombs drop. Politicians need to ONLY politic and leave the military to do it's military things.
As long as politics guide the military, a ground force will do no better than an air campaign! Except for the fact that MORE young men and women of the USA will be killed and maimed...........

 

As I said during the second Iraq war, ........... we cannot afford it. I have no problem with the morals of it but we need to keep the oil this time or something.

 

Well someone has to occupy the territory and there are no alternatives except....well, the Islamic State.

Honestly the only other defensible option is to do nothing at all.

 

there were mass ISIS defections as soon as they saw Russia wasnt (*)(*)(*)(*)ing around. But you are correct, the ideology needs to also be eradicated. Thats step2. That onus is on muslims. Step1 however is to decimate them to remove the immediate threat in order for the muslim population to correct their radical issues.

 

The United States can't go at it alone. It has to be a coalition of several countries with a serious commitment.

 

syrian and iraqi sunnis are never going to be fine with being ruled by shias. If you let the shias rule them things would turn to (*)(*)(*)(*) again in a few seconds, and likely be even worse than before. For Syria, Assad simply has to go. Non-shia Syrians will never accept rule by him or anyone close to him. Sunnis hate shias to the point that they'd rather be ruled by the IS, and IS is kept alive by that shia-sunni conflict. For both Iraq and Syria, some federal system with great autonomy to the various minorities is probably the only solution. or have both states dismantled and create new states, but other countries doesn't want that, and Turkey certainly doesn't want a kurdistan there.

 

I don't think the US's allies in the region would appreciate that. Israel to start with. Neither would the Kurds - they don't want to live in the West, they want an independent Kurdistan. In the North of Iraq. It's sort of hard to avoid nuking their land if you intend on nuking ISIS.

Why not just skip to the logical conclusion of your ideas and erect a global institution for the purpose of systematically and summarily exterminating all individuals with Islamic faith, or who look vaguely Middle Eastern. That would have the added benefit of avoiding killing Jews or Kurds. Plus, you'd get all of the Muslims in the West too. It's just a more efficient means to your stated ends.