U.S. Generals Blast Obama’s "Pinprick" Iraq Airstrikes

by JASmius

Remember what these pinpricks are for, Generals: media cameras.  Creating the false narrative that Barack Obama is "doing something" about ISIS's systematic multi-faith genocides, when he is, in reality, gleefully doing nothing of the sort.

Or just...nothing:

Three generals agree that if President Barack Obama is serious about addressing the threat posed in Iraq by the militant group the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), he must do more than the mere "pinpricks" of targeted airstrikes.

Lieutenant General Tom McInerney told "Fox & Friends" the limited airstrikes the United States began on Friday against ISIS forces were "less than pinpricks," and said it would take a broader air campaign strategy to hinder the advancement of ISIS militants.

When General McInerney says "pinpricks," he's giving Barack Obama a robust benefit of the rhetorical doubt:

"What kind of strategy? Five targets? No, I am not happy. That's not a strategy. Those are less than pinpricks. We need to be hitting at least 200 targets a day. And it must be a very offensive air campaign, and it's an easy air campaign for U.S. forces," McInerney, a retired Air Force lieutenant general, said Monday.... 

He said time was critical in stopping the advancement of ISIS because of the threat it posed if left unchecked.

"If we don't stop it now and protect the Kurds, we have a huge problem, not only in the Middle East, but globally," he said.

Indeed.  Five sorties is enough for the nightly network newscasts.  It isn't within a country parsec of what it would take to degrade ISIS's military capabilities and even slow down their advance across the Middle East, let alone stop and reverse it.

But than, as any student of even rudimentary military history knows, air power alone does not and cannot win wars - especially counter-insurgency conflicts:

General Jack Keane told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" on Monday that intensive airstrikes could stop ISIS, but ground troops would be needed to defeat them.

"To take [their initiative] away from them, the president has to order the military to conduct offensive airstrikes, where we could simultaneously attack ISIS in multiple locations. That would stop them. To defeat them . . . and to push them back from current locations and to push them into Syria, we would need....ground forces," said Keane, a retired four-star Army general.

Both General Keane and retired Major General Bob Scales refer to the Kurdish "Peshmerga" army and providing them massive air support against the Islamic State.  Which, given the woebegone condition of the U.S. military in general and in the Middle East in particular after the decimations it has suffered at the hands of the Obama Regime, is probably the best that can be done for a long, long time to come.

The problem is, even in terms of air power, and even if we had an American president giving the orders, we only have approximately 150 combat aircraft combined between Air Force and Navy (about a quarter of what we deployed in Desert Storm), and since O's withdrawals have cost us pretty much all the military bases in the area that we used to have, all of those remaining warplanes will be flying from the USS George H.W. Bush, the lone carrier we have in the Persian Gulf.  200 sorties a day sounds awfully ambitious for a force that small.

But then, while the Kurds' "enthusiasm" for the task of battle ISIS can be assumed, their martial skills cannot.  They'd be a better fighting force than the pathetic, treacherous Iraqi Army, to be sure, but would the Peshmerga army be good enough to drive ISIS fighters back into Syria?  I have my doubts.  It may well be that the only way of truly, comprehensively defeating ISIS is to redeploy  thousands of American troops to Iraq - or, as I've said, rolling the status quo ante back to the one President Bush handed off to Red Barry on January 20th, 2009.  Since that's a pipedream, the cold, hard, brutal reality is that ISIS is, for all intents and purposes, unbeatable, and their "confrontation" with the United States here in the homeland inevitable.

There is another army besides the Kurds' that might have the motivation and capabilities to complicate the Islamic State's inexorable, bloody blitzkrieg: their next-door neighbor to the east, Shiite Iran.  And then we'd be looking at the same conflict in Iraq as we did in Syria a year ago: Shiite jihadists battling Sunni jihadists, both of whom hate us more than they do each other.  And enemy fighting an enemy, our only interest that they'd destroy each other.  Only this time, one of the parties would have nuclear weapons.

And if the warring parties reached a modus vivendi instead, and joined forces against us?

Awfully hard it is to throw anything bigger than pinpricks when pinpricks are all one has left.  Somehow that term seems unlikely to describe what they've got in store for us.