We’re Not Fighting DAESH and Iraq Is Losing

I think I’ve mentioned before that I had seen David Kilcullen’s picture when he was an infant decades ago—long before he came to prominence as a Middle East expert. He’s the godson of a dear old friend of ours and there’s a picture of him held in his parents’ arms on her mantle. In this piece at National Journal Dr. Kilcullen gives a pretty good précis of the situation in Iraq:

Anyone reading this already knows much of the history, but to recap: ISIS exploited Iraqi government ineptitude and sectarian division after US forces left in 2011, and used the sanctuary created by the Syrian civil war to grow from an urban guerrilla group—small cells, civilian clothes and vehicles, light weapons, operating mainly by night with asymmetric (i.e. terrorist) hit-and-run tactics—into something more like a conventional light armored cavalry.

By late 2013, when ISIS fighters mounted a major push against the Iraqi cities of Tikrit and Fallujah, their tactical style had settled into a pattern. A main force, often comprising dozens of trucks and troop-carrying technicals, would move in compact formation on highways and secondary roads. Ahead of it, and to the flanks, a swarm of gun trucks—technicals with anti-armor weapons, heavy machine guns, radios and a few dismounts—ranged widely across the landscape, scouting routes, securing chokepoints, and looking for targets of opportunity or soft spots. When they spotted one, they would either “bounce” and overwhelm it with their own resources, or pull the main column onto it using radio and cellphone messages. Teams of two to three technicals, each carrying six or eight fighters ready to dismount, would swarm onto a target, coordinating their fire to overwhelm it. This is classic maneuver warfare—in the business, it’s known as “recon pull”—and it looked a lot like Soviet-style mission tactics, which was unsurprising given the number of Ba’athist officers now on the ISIS payroll.

Read the whole thing. I have one substantial problem with his exposition and it’s with the title: we’re not fighting DAESH and Iraq was never ours to lose. We were never willing to occupy Iraq indefinitely which is what repelling DAESH would have required. How anyone could ever have believed the American people were prepared for such an occupation baffles me.