Defense Secretary Ash Carter on Monday dismissed President-elect Trump’s criticism of the offensive to liberate Mosul, Iraq, from the grip of the Islamic State, saying there’s no way forces could have conducted a surprise attack on the city.
It’s a criticism Trump repeated last night in an interview on the CBS news program “60 Minutes,” when he declined to answer a question about his strategy for defeating the Islamic State.
“I don’t tell you that. I don’t tell you that,” Trump told CBS’s Leslie Stahl. “I’m not like the people going in right now and fighting Mosul and they announced it four months before they went into Mosul and everybody now is — it’s a tough fight because, number one, the people from the leaders of ISIS have left.”
Carter, who assiduously avoided saying anything that could be seen as taking sides during the campaign, rejected Trump’s notion that a sneak attack would have caught the Islamic State by surprise.
He noted that while aspects of the Iraqi campaign are kept under wraps, the broad objective of liberating the Islamic State’s de facto capitals in Iraq and Syria was not something that could, or should be a secret.
“It’s actually important that the enemy know that — and that the — that ISIL [knows] that we intend and will destroy them,” Carter said at a forum hosted by The Atlantic Magazine and the venture capital firm 1776. “There are secret tactics involved there, but the fact that we’re going to Mosul and Raqqa is clear because they’re the two biggest cities.”
Other military experts have cited Trump’s criticism of the Mosul assault as evidence that he doesn’t have a grasp of military tactics, in particular the difference between tactical and strategic surprise.
Last month, retired Army Col. Jeff McCausland, a former dean at the Army War College, told the New York Times, “What this shows is Trump doesn’t know a damn thing about military strategy.”
