“A Strategy to Defeat the Islamic State,” by Kimberly Kagan, Frederick W. Kagan, & Jessica D. Lewis. A must read for those contemplating how to win in the Middle East.
Here’s the executive summary of the report:
The Challenge:
• The Islamic State poses a grave danger to the United States and its allies in the Middle East and around the world due to its location, resources, the skill and determination of its leaders and fighters, and its demonstrated lethality compared to other al Qaeda-like groups.
• In Syria, the Assad regime has lost control of the majority of the state, and the regime’s atrocities and sectarianism have fueled violent Islamists, particularly ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra (JN).
• In Iraq, the government has lost control over large portions of territory that the Iraqi Security Forces and Kurdish Peshmerga are incapable of retaking without significant foreign support.
• The Sunni Arabs of Iraq and Syria are the decisive human terrain. Al-Qaeda and similar groups can only flourish in distressed Sunni communities. Any strategy to counter al-Qaeda requires working with these communities, as the U.S. and the Iraqi government did during the Awakening in 2007.
• Having neglected Iraq and Syria, the U.S. currently lacks the basic intelligence and contextual understanding to build a strategy. The U.S. must adopt an iterative approach that tests assumptions, enriches understanding, builds partnerships with willing Sunni Arabs, and sets conditions for more decisive operations.
Four Strategic Objectives for the Region:
• Defeat and destroy ISIS and JN; defeat or reconcile their locally-focused partners.
• Restore sovereign, legitimate states in Iraq and Syria so they can prevent the reconstitution of al-Qaeda-like
groups reject Iranian political control and Iranian military forces on their territory.
• Prevent Iran from achieving regional hegemony to preserve U.S. allies and lessen regional sectarianism.
• Ensure the survival of sovereign states currently threatened, especially Jordan and Lebanon.
Proposed Political-Military Operations:
• An initial military movement-to-contact phase has the following goals:
o Find and fix the enemy in order to
Prevent ISIS from renewing offensive operations to take the Euphrates River Valley from Haditha to Ramadi, the area south of Samarra along the Tigris River, the Bayji oil refinery, and Baghdad itself.
Force ISIS to culminate before taking Aleppo or the key opposition supply lines from Turkey.
Establish positions from which to launch subsequent operations.
Prevent genocide.
Set conditions for subsequent operations.
o Disrupt the enemy, including its leadership.
o Reconnoiter the human terrain to identify potential acceptable local partners and develop relationships with them.
o Prevent the ISF from eroding further and understand its command and control, particularly with respect to external actors, including Iran.
• Politically, the U.S. must use its leverage to continue to shape the emerging Iraqi government to be as inclusive and non-sectarian as possible.
• The U.S. must also engage in developing an inclusive government-in-waiting in Syria, unifying the ‘Alawite community with other minority groups that can work with moderate Sunni leaders.
• This phase will require as many as 25,000 ground troops in Iraq and Syria. Decisive efforts will belong to Special Forces and special mission units, numbering in the low thousands, in a dispersed footprint.
• Support of at least a U.S. Army Combat Aviation Brigade (about 3,300 soldiers) is needed. Two battalion-sized quick reaction forces (QRF) will need to be available at all times, one in Iraq and one in Syria. Two brigades, perhaps 7,000 soldiers in all, are needed to provide these QRFs. Additional forces will be required to secure temporary bases, provide MEDEVAC coverage, and support necessary enablers.
• Subsequent operational phases will depend on validating the assumption that the Sunni Arab communities in Iraq and Syria are willing and able to fight alongside the U.S. and our partners against ISIS.
• Though this strategy contains a high risk of failure and the near-certainty of U.S. troop casualties, the outcomes of ISIS retaining control of the territory it has seized, an escalated sectarian war, more foreign fighters, and the largest al-Qaeda safe haven it has ever known outweigh those risks.
