There’s no power in airpower

We are losing the war against the IS for one simple reason: We cannot win. No strategy, no technique, no technological breakthrough, no use of force, no alliance structure the United States employs will win this war. We might as well be shooting blanks; at least then we couldn’t shoot ourselves in the foot.

The U.S. thinks it can defeat IS using airpower and friendly troops on the ground. This is fundamentally wrong. Airpower is an exceptionally weak tool of war, and our partners on the ground are unmotivated troops from an opposing ethno-religious group who will be more likely to ignite a religious war than to defeat IS.

There is remarkably little power in airpower during war. When fighting the Nazis in World War II, the Allies destroyed over 40 percent of Germany’s 70 largest cities and much of the country’s industrial base. But that didn’t stop the Nazis from making five times as many tanks and four times as many weapons in December 1944 than they made in February 1942.

In Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, the U.S. dropped three times as many bombs than they did during the whole of World War II. To this day Laos remains, on a per capita basis, the most bombed country in world history. Despite even these efforts, the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam.

More recently in Afghanistan, when the Taliban returned in 2006 the U.S. carried out 2,100 airstrikes in six months, more than the combined number of airstrikes in the first four years of the whole war. But not even this could stop the advance of the Taliban, which now controls large portions of the country.

Airpower will not win this war either. So now the question is, “Can our allies?” The answer to this has to be “no.”

Even before the onslaught of IS, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, said, “Iraqi military and police forces lack cohesion, are undermanned, and are poorly trained, equipped and supplied.” And this is after years of attempts by the U.S. to train and build-up the Iraqi military.

Then, when IS began overrunning Iraq, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said, “We overestimated the ability and the will of our allies, the Iraqi army, to fight.” If the U.S. alone couldn’t defeat the Iraqi insurgency, how can we possibly expect the poorly-trained and unmotivated Iraqi army to do so?

Not only are these soldiers bad troops, but they are almost entirely Shia and would be more likely to start an ethno-religious war with the Sunni than to liberate them from the Islamic State. When we work with these Shia forces, we create more Sunni hatred against us, ultimately making it harder to win the war against IS. As one former Sunni resident of Mosul put it, “If the Shiite militias and the military come to Mosul, all the people of Mosul will fight them. The people are afraid of the militias and the army now more than they were afraid of ISIS.”

Our current strategy also makes the Shia forces, and Iran, stronger. This comes at the expense of the country’s Sunnis. IS exists because of Sunni marginalization within Iraq. Like another Iraqi Sunni said, “There is no ISIS. They are just Sunnis who have been oppressed.” This should make us focus more on ending Sunni oppression in Iraq than on further fighting IS with Shia troops. Clearly this strategy is not working.

It is time we rethink our strategy against the Islamic State. We might consider pressuring the Iraqi government to give the Sunnis in western Iraq something similar to what the Kurds in northern Iraq enjoy, a great degree of independence from Baghdad. Not only would this stop the crisis and allow moderates to assert themselves, it would also create a buffer region between the Shia and Sunni in Iraq and between Iran and the greater Sunni Middle East.

Connor Ryan is a researcher in defense and foreign policy in Washington, D.C. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.