Air power alone doesn’t win wars, military history shows.
That fact was the basis for Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey’s statement last week that he would recommend sending U.S. combat troops back to Iraq if it were the only way to defeat Islamist extremists.
Though his answer to a question from Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., was widely seen as a gaffe — and quickly repudiated by the White House — it was, in fact, a very possible worst-case scenario.
Though President Obama has insisted he will not introduce U.S. combat troops into the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, his strategy does not depend only on airpower. But it does depend on a potentially weak link: the commitment and capabilities of the troops who are in the fight — the Iraqi military, Iraq’s Sunni tribes, Kurdish fighters and Syrian resistance troops who will soon begin receiving U.S. arms and training.
As promised by Obama, the United States widened its air campaign against the Islamic State Monday night, striking targets inside Syria early that included the extremist group’s stronghold of Raqqa.
Though officials celebrated the effect of the attacks, which were carried out in conjunction with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan and Qatar, they’re not likely to be decisive unless those forces can exploit the openings the airstrikes create.
“The best way to show that they do not have the ‘mandate of heaven’ … is to start taking territory from them,” said James Jeffrey, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq.
That may be easier said than done.
In Iraq, government forces continue to suffer reversals and many potential Sunni Arab allies are sitting on the sidelines waiting to see if the new Shia-led government of Prime Minister Haider al Abadi is less sectarian than that of his predecessor, Nouri al Maliki.
Most of the 190 U.S. airstrikes since Aug. 7 in Iraq have been aimed at helping Iraqi and Kurdish forces hold their ground against the extremists while they regroup and the political process plays out. More than a third have been in the area around the Mosul Dam, a key strategic target. The airstrikes first helped Kurdish and Iraqi forces recapture the dam and are now needed to help them hold it.
“One of the really important assumptions of this campaign is that we can, in fact, separate the moderate Sunni tribes from the [ISIS] ideology. If that proves untrue, we’ve got to go back to the drawing board,” Dempsey told senators at the Sept. 16 Armed Services hearing.
In Syria, the Obama administration faces a similar dilemma to the one it faced a year ago: Where to go after the airstrikes?
Though the enemy last year was the government of President Bashar al Assad rather than the Islamic State, the U.S. still has no local partner to exploit the damage from its aerial attacks. Congress has authorized the arming and training of Syrian rebels in Saudi Arabia, but Pentagon officials have said it would be at least a year before the first group of 5,000 can get into the fight.
And those rebels, as Dempsey noted, need to be controlled by an indigenous political structure that is capable of replacing the Assad government.
A good example of what happens when allies on the ground prove unreliable can be found in Libya, where violence between rival militias — and even rival governments — has undone much of the hoped-for progress since the 2011 allied air campaign that ousted longtime dictator Moammar al Gadhafi. Secretary of State John Kerry hosted a meeting Monday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York that produced a joint communique calling on all parties in Libya to accept a ceasefire and admonishing them that “there is no military solution to this conflict.”
In lieu of combat forces to fight the Islamic State, the U.S. has to give something else of value: an open-ended commitment to the effort, Ryan Crocker, a veteran diplomat who has served as ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait and Lebanon, told the House Intelligence Committee on Sept. 18.
“It’s going to take time to build and solidify this coalition, and in order to do that they have to be sure that we are committed … for the long haul,” he said.
When asked Tuesday how long the U.S. air campaign might last, Lt. Gen. William Mayville, director of operations for the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replied: “We’re thinking in terms of years.”
