The administration on Tuesday pushed back against suggestions that it needs to be more aggressive bombing the Islamic State’s oil fields, saying that strategic strikes are a better way to disable their network.
“There’s been a lot of suggestions by experts on the outside to simply bomb it. The problem is it’s not that easy, it doesn’t work that way. You can’t simply bomb a well,” a senior U.S. official said. “It’ll probably cost us more to take that facility out than it’ll be to rebuild it.”
The U.S. has been hitting the terrorist group’s oil infrastructure over the past several weeks in an operation called Tidal Wave II, named after the first Tidal Wave to take out Nazi oil assets during World War II.
GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump had said he would “knock the hell out of them, take their oil,” and took credit for the U.S. campaign to disable the Islamic State’s oil network once it began.
“They laughed at me when I said to bomb the ISIS controlled oil fields. Now they are not laughing and doing what I said,” the businessman said on Twitter last month.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has also promised a more aggressive bombing campaign if elected as the next commander in chief, saying he would “carpet bomb them into oblivion,” during a speech in Iowa this month.
“I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out,” Cruz said.
The official, however, said that could raise major environmental and humanitarian problems, as well as the issue of fixing infrastructure after the conflict to give Syrians the assets to rebuild their economy.
“If you want to carpet bomb the entire operation, that would have a certain value. It’d also have a lot of costs,” the official said.
Trump, Cruz and the other Republican candidates will get to prove whether they are qualified to be the next commander in chief at a debate Tuesday night that’s expected to be national security-heavy following terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino.
The official said simply bombing wells could incapacitate equipment in the short term, but that it could quickly be rebuilt by the terrorist organization. Instead, the military has taken a more strategic view to slow oil production and decrease the amount of revenue the terrorist group can collect from it.
The raid that killed Abu Sayyaf, a senior adviser of the illicit oil operation, this year yielded a lot of detailed information on how the Islamic State operated their energy sector, the official said. This intelligence allowed the U.S. to find better value targets that were harder to rebuild and would deliver more of a lasting blow to the Islamic State.
“It enabled us to be more strategic in our countereffort,” the official said. “That raid was a critical point for us to be able to understand this better. We made a lot of assumptions before. I have to say much of it was accurate, but some of it was not.”
The strikes have hit refineries, forcing the Islamic State to sell the lower-quality oil at a cheaper price, and taken out trucks, making it more difficult both to move product and recruit locals to drive for the terrorist group, the official said.
While it’s still early, the official said the administration is beginning to see effects of the operation, like trucks grouping farther away from oil wells and drivers who are willing to work for the terrorist group charging more. There is also anecdotal evidence of fuel shortages within the terrorist group.
