How to Put ISIS on the Run
By Robert H. Scales
December 22, 2015
The National Review
During the last Republican debate, nearly every candidate promised, if elected, to defeat, crush, and destroy ISIS, though none offered any suggestion about how that might be accomplished. Perhaps this newfound bellicosity reflects the growing sentiment among the American people that the ISIS scourge should be confronted decisively even if “boots on the ground” are necessary.
If the United States goes back to the Middle East in force, how will it do so? Certainly no one hears any thoughts on the subject from the active military. Just the mention of a ground plan — or a Plan B, as it’s secretly termed inside the Pentagon — is a sure ticket to Diego Garcia.
But as politicians will learn, the gods of war are a perfidious lot. In the end, what soldiers call “ground truth” will prevail over politics, hope, wishful thinking, and the punditry of Republican candidates. If ISIS continues to grow and prosper, and if (God forbid) it continues to kill Westerners in their homelands, then inevitably the call to respond decisively will become too shrill and demanding to ignore.
So, how might a ground campaign against ISIS be done? That depends. First, nothing will happen on the ground until our creeping air effort is completely discredited. The hope still remains inside the Pentagon that ISIS is more “brittle” than previously thought and that a few additional hundred tons of bombs will break the will of ISIS and allow the Syrian resistance and our Iraqi allies to finish the job.
Second, no ground offensive will happen until the United States cobbles together a coalition that includes at least one Sunni Arab state and a few European states — perhaps France, and perhaps Great Britain — that feel increasingly threatened by ISIS. Nothing will happen on the ground unless Turkey agrees to provide sanctuary while the ground coalition assembles on its southern border.
Third, none of this will happen on Obama’s watch unless ISIS succeeds in committing a huge and bloody atrocity against our homeland. But such an attack would have to be catastrophic to overcome the administration’s notion, to which it is ideologically wedded, that an American incursion into Syria or Iraq would only serve to strengthen the ISIS narrative. To avoid any chance of ordering a land campaign, Obama has built a “gold watch” narrative suggesting that such an incursion would cost 100 lives and ten billion dollars a month. Of course, a well-planned and -executed ground campaign would not cost anywhere near that much.
Let’s postulate that ISIS’s growing excesses are bloody enough to bring together a military coalition under the leadership of the United States. As in all proper campaigns, coalition planners must begin by determining how the plan would end. The proposed end would be that ISIS was on the run, robbed of sovereignty after losing the caliphate. Like al-Qaeda in its early days in Afghanistan, ISIS enjoys legitimacy that comes from owning territory. Its center of gravity (the source whence all power emanates) is nested in the city of Raqqa, the ideological heartland of the terrorist enterprise. Once denied sanctuary and legitimacy, ISIS doesn’t disappear but becomes a force on the run, just another international pariah stripped of the glitter and magic of the caliphate.
From a purely military perspective, taking Raqqa is not as big (or deadly) a challenge as President Obama suggests. Raqqa is relatively self-contained and geographically defined. It sits on an open plain only a day’s march from the Kurdish enclave that forms a parallel strip in Syria on the Turkish border. Unlike most Middle Eastern cities, Raqqa has clearly defined city limits, with its southern third bordered by the natural moat of the Euphrates River.
In American doctrine, the solution for surrounding (or “investing”) “urban terrain” and collapsing it is to establish a loose cordon around the city. A cordon operation reduces the risk of street-by-street fighting, which ISIS would welcome and would be loose enough to allow civilians to escape to safe havens outside. A few ISIS leaders would find their way out as well. But most would be trapped, ready and waiting to kill coalition intruders, just as al-Qaeda did so spectacularly against our Marines in Fallujah.
The campaign would begin in cyberspace. Special-operations forces would conduct raids to cut fiber-optic cables and knock out cell towers and emitting sites inside Raqqa. NSA and the Pentagon’s cyber command would cause the ISIS propaganda machine to go “black,” as its social-media presence disappears from the Web. The active part of the information campaign would be prosecuted by regional-state media outlets that inundated the cyber-sphere with videos depicting the brutality of ISIS toward innocent civilians trapped in the city.
The killing would start from the air. Dozens of drones orbiting overhead would establish an “unblinking eye” that kept ISIS indoors and away from trenches, windows, fighting vehicles, and artillery. As the coalition began its day-long march from the Kurdish enclave to Raqqa, hundreds of aerial strikes would pummel ISIS positions.
The investment force would consist of about five mounted brigades supported by an artillery brigade and at least one special-forces group consisting of elite forces from all coalition members. Before the march begins, U.S. Special Operations “tier one” forces (SEALS, Delta, Rangers) would have completed their clandestine killing campaign to take out ISIS leaders. The maneuver force would consist of perhaps two American armored brigades. The other three might be French, British, and one brigade from a Sunni state — which one that would be would depend on politics and the skill of a future administration in recruiting a willing Sunni contributor. In military terms, the most effective candidates would be Jordan, then Turkey, and, much lower down the capabilities scales, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.
Total American commitment inside Syria: about 12,000.
Once the cordon is in place, the time advantage shifts to the coalition. Patience is vital at this stage. Spotting from the city’s edge and from drones overhead, the artillery brigade and perhaps attack helicopters would slowly take down Raqqa’s water and food supplies. Precision aircraft strikes would drop bridges and crater roads.
ISIS has already turned Raqqa into a fortress similar to the extensive bunkered and underground defenses the Israelis discovered in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014. Going to school on the Israeli experience, a coalition would precede a careful and limited ground intrusion with very close-in airstrikes dropping very, very big bombs to cave in tunnels, crush bunkers, and bury the defenders under tons of rubble. After each foray, the coalition ground forces would move back, listen, observe, and continue the process repeatedly, over many days, wearing down and killing ISIS fighters with very few losses to the coalition side.
The campaign against Raqqa might take months. But as long as the cordon holds, the outcome is ordained. Only the cost in time and in lives are in question. The coalition would know the battle had culminated when the remaining ISIS fighters attempted to scatter into the desert.
Once the battle culminated, the Westerners would go home — first to Turkey, then out of the theater entirely. Sunni armies would clean up the city with our aerial support and occupy the city until the Syrian civil war ended.
Would the campaign destroy ISIS? Of course not. But like al-Qaeda and al-Nusra, fractured terror groups denied sovereignty, ISIS would become a stateless enterprise on the run, more concerned with survival than with fomenting terror in the West. A victory? No. But a decisive blow that would transform the ISIS threat from a global menace to a police problem.
That’s about as much as any military operation can hope to achieve in this new era of long wars against radical Islamic enemies.
The National Review
During the last Republican debate, nearly every candidate promised, if elected, to defeat, crush, and destroy ISIS, though none offered any suggestion about how that might be accomplished. Perhaps this newfound bellicosity reflects the growing sentiment among the American people that the ISIS scourge should be confronted decisively even if “boots on the ground” are necessary.
If the United States goes back to the Middle East in force, how will it do so? Certainly no one hears any thoughts on the subject from the active military. Just the mention of a ground plan — or a Plan B, as it’s secretly termed inside the Pentagon — is a sure ticket to Diego Garcia.
But as politicians will learn, the gods of war are a perfidious lot. In the end, what soldiers call “ground truth” will prevail over politics, hope, wishful thinking, and the punditry of Republican candidates. If ISIS continues to grow and prosper, and if (God forbid) it continues to kill Westerners in their homelands, then inevitably the call to respond decisively will become too shrill and demanding to ignore.
So, how might a ground campaign against ISIS be done? That depends. First, nothing will happen on the ground until our creeping air effort is completely discredited. The hope still remains inside the Pentagon that ISIS is more “brittle” than previously thought and that a few additional hundred tons of bombs will break the will of ISIS and allow the Syrian resistance and our Iraqi allies to finish the job.
Second, no ground offensive will happen until the United States cobbles together a coalition that includes at least one Sunni Arab state and a few European states — perhaps France, and perhaps Great Britain — that feel increasingly threatened by ISIS. Nothing will happen on the ground unless Turkey agrees to provide sanctuary while the ground coalition assembles on its southern border.
Third, none of this will happen on Obama’s watch unless ISIS succeeds in committing a huge and bloody atrocity against our homeland. But such an attack would have to be catastrophic to overcome the administration’s notion, to which it is ideologically wedded, that an American incursion into Syria or Iraq would only serve to strengthen the ISIS narrative. To avoid any chance of ordering a land campaign, Obama has built a “gold watch” narrative suggesting that such an incursion would cost 100 lives and ten billion dollars a month. Of course, a well-planned and -executed ground campaign would not cost anywhere near that much.
Let’s postulate that ISIS’s growing excesses are bloody enough to bring together a military coalition under the leadership of the United States. As in all proper campaigns, coalition planners must begin by determining how the plan would end. The proposed end would be that ISIS was on the run, robbed of sovereignty after losing the caliphate. Like al-Qaeda in its early days in Afghanistan, ISIS enjoys legitimacy that comes from owning territory. Its center of gravity (the source whence all power emanates) is nested in the city of Raqqa, the ideological heartland of the terrorist enterprise. Once denied sanctuary and legitimacy, ISIS doesn’t disappear but becomes a force on the run, just another international pariah stripped of the glitter and magic of the caliphate.
From a purely military perspective, taking Raqqa is not as big (or deadly) a challenge as President Obama suggests. Raqqa is relatively self-contained and geographically defined. It sits on an open plain only a day’s march from the Kurdish enclave that forms a parallel strip in Syria on the Turkish border. Unlike most Middle Eastern cities, Raqqa has clearly defined city limits, with its southern third bordered by the natural moat of the Euphrates River.
In American doctrine, the solution for surrounding (or “investing”) “urban terrain” and collapsing it is to establish a loose cordon around the city. A cordon operation reduces the risk of street-by-street fighting, which ISIS would welcome and would be loose enough to allow civilians to escape to safe havens outside. A few ISIS leaders would find their way out as well. But most would be trapped, ready and waiting to kill coalition intruders, just as al-Qaeda did so spectacularly against our Marines in Fallujah.
The campaign would begin in cyberspace. Special-operations forces would conduct raids to cut fiber-optic cables and knock out cell towers and emitting sites inside Raqqa. NSA and the Pentagon’s cyber command would cause the ISIS propaganda machine to go “black,” as its social-media presence disappears from the Web. The active part of the information campaign would be prosecuted by regional-state media outlets that inundated the cyber-sphere with videos depicting the brutality of ISIS toward innocent civilians trapped in the city.
The killing would start from the air. Dozens of drones orbiting overhead would establish an “unblinking eye” that kept ISIS indoors and away from trenches, windows, fighting vehicles, and artillery. As the coalition began its day-long march from the Kurdish enclave to Raqqa, hundreds of aerial strikes would pummel ISIS positions.
The investment force would consist of about five mounted brigades supported by an artillery brigade and at least one special-forces group consisting of elite forces from all coalition members. Before the march begins, U.S. Special Operations “tier one” forces (SEALS, Delta, Rangers) would have completed their clandestine killing campaign to take out ISIS leaders. The maneuver force would consist of perhaps two American armored brigades. The other three might be French, British, and one brigade from a Sunni state — which one that would be would depend on politics and the skill of a future administration in recruiting a willing Sunni contributor. In military terms, the most effective candidates would be Jordan, then Turkey, and, much lower down the capabilities scales, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.
Total American commitment inside Syria: about 12,000.
Once the cordon is in place, the time advantage shifts to the coalition. Patience is vital at this stage. Spotting from the city’s edge and from drones overhead, the artillery brigade and perhaps attack helicopters would slowly take down Raqqa’s water and food supplies. Precision aircraft strikes would drop bridges and crater roads.
ISIS has already turned Raqqa into a fortress similar to the extensive bunkered and underground defenses the Israelis discovered in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014. Going to school on the Israeli experience, a coalition would precede a careful and limited ground intrusion with very close-in airstrikes dropping very, very big bombs to cave in tunnels, crush bunkers, and bury the defenders under tons of rubble. After each foray, the coalition ground forces would move back, listen, observe, and continue the process repeatedly, over many days, wearing down and killing ISIS fighters with very few losses to the coalition side.
The campaign against Raqqa might take months. But as long as the cordon holds, the outcome is ordained. Only the cost in time and in lives are in question. The coalition would know the battle had culminated when the remaining ISIS fighters attempted to scatter into the desert.
Once the battle culminated, the Westerners would go home — first to Turkey, then out of the theater entirely. Sunni armies would clean up the city with our aerial support and occupy the city until the Syrian civil war ended.
Would the campaign destroy ISIS? Of course not. But like al-Qaeda and al-Nusra, fractured terror groups denied sovereignty, ISIS would become a stateless enterprise on the run, more concerned with survival than with fomenting terror in the West. A victory? No. But a decisive blow that would transform the ISIS threat from a global menace to a police problem.
That’s about as much as any military operation can hope to achieve in this new era of long wars against radical Islamic enemies.
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