The Faltering “Operation Inherent Resolve’

By Max Boot, COMMENTARY

If you want a laugh, go to the Central Command website and click on their press releases. Every day there is a new dispatch about the anti-ISIS air campaign in Iraq and Syria known incongruously as Operation Inherent Resolve. The latest release is from October 28: “U.S. military forces continued to attack ISIL terrorists in Syria Monday and today using attack and fighter aircraft to conduct four airstrikes. Separately, U.S. and partner nation military forces conducted nine airstrikes in Iraq Monday and today using attack, fighter, and remotely piloted aircraft against ISIL terrorists.” What’s so funny here? The fact that Central Command is trumpeting a mere 13 airstrikes, which only highlights how anemic this whole air campaign remains.

Between October 7, 2001, and December 23, 2001—a period of seventy-five days—U.S. aircraft fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan flew 6,500 strike sorties and dropped 17,500 munitions. By contrast, between August 8, 2014, and October 23, 2014—a period of seventy-six days—the United States conducted only 632 airstrikes and dropped only 1,700 munitions in Iraq and Syria.

What’s more, the U.S. has dispatched only 1,400 personnel to Iraq and prohibited them from embedding with units conducting combat operations, which greatly limits their ability to call in air strikes or provide effective advice.

Little wonder, then, that there might be grumbling in the military about micromanagement and insufficient commitment from the White House–both complaints aired in this Daily Beast article by Josh Rogin and Eli Lake. “One senior defense official” is quoted as saying: “We are getting a lot of micromanagement from the White House. Basic decisions that should take hours are taking days sometimes.”

Among the illogical constraints imposed by the president and his advisers is that the American general in charge of building up forces in Syria must “build a new rebel army from scratch but is not permitted to work with existing brigades, meaning he must find and vet new soldiers, mostly sourcing from Syrian refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. What’s more, the size of the program will produce only 5,000 fighters a year after the training begin, most of whom who will serve as ‘local defense forces’ and not actually go after ISIS, according to two officials briefed on the plan.”

No doubt White House spinmeisters will be able to quibble with this detail or that in this article, thus deflecting the criticism. But the complaints expressed here sound entirely credible and legitimate to me. This military operation would more aptly be named Operation Infinite Confusion.