Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen Tom McInerney says the U.S. has no strategy yet in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), is about to arm the wrong people in Syria and that our efforts are headed for disaster if President Obama calls the shots on when and where to bomb.
In congressional hearings this week, Pentagon and State Department officials tried to make the case for the Obama vision of a fight against ISIS, from building a coalition to arming Syrian rebels to insisting no American troops would be involved in ground combat. Lawmakers in both parties expressed skepticism that the strategy was clear or likely to be effective.
“Well, we don’t have a strategy. That’s why they’re not impressed. What is the strategy? We’ve flown 176 missions in thirty-some days and we have attacked a few piddling targets. We ought to be flying 200 sorties a day and hitting 200 targets a day. So. we don’t have a strategy,” said McInerney, who rose to U.S. Air Force Assistant Vice-Chief of Staff during his distinguished career.
“The president talks about degrading and destroying ISIS. Right now we’re irritating ISIS, but we certainly don’t have a campaign to degrade them and clearly don’t have a campaign to destroy them,” he said.
McInerney’s frustration with administration is only compounded by Thursday’s Wall Street Journal report suggesting Obama plans to be personally involved in plotting any air strikes against ISIS inside Syria.
“The U.S. military campaign against Islamist militants in Syria is being designed to allow President Barack Obama to exert a high degree of personal control, going so far as to require that the military obtain presidential sign-off for strikes in Syrian territory,” reported the Journal.
“I had to fly missions into Hanoi during the Vietnam War that had that same kind of oversight by Lyndon Johnson. It is doomed to failure. The president ought to give clear guidance of what he wants to do, not how to do it,” said McInerney.
However, the general does believe U.S. air power can do 90 percent of the work needed to eviscerate ISIS.
“If you look at the lines of communication that they have, they are clearly in a very vulnerable area. There’s not a tree from the Syrian border to Mosul. It’s not much different from the Iraqi border up to Raqqa (Syria), which is the headquarters for ISIS. This is ideal for our precision strike and our air dominance,” said McInerney, who says the U.S. needs to go all out in destroying our enemy.
“I’m not saying we don’t need ground forces, but I am saying that we have the intelligence. We have weapons that we can put in the right window and the left window and we need to change the rules of engagement and have ‘shock and awe’ if you will and go violently against them and not be overly concerned about the collateral damage,” he said.
McInerney is not holding his breath. He does not expect Obama to embrace a full-out assault on ISIS anytime soon.
“The president has a campaign that is a political campaign. He does not have a campaign that destroys ISIS. The generals are talking about a campaign to destroy ISIS. Until they get in sync, until this election is over. I don’t see them doing anything that is really satisfactory,” he said.
On Thursday night, the U.S. Senate approved a continuing resolution that includes funding for the arming and training of “moderate” Syrian rebels. The House of Representatives backed the plan on Wednesday.
McInerney says experts like retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely tell him that the U.S. is planning to arm the wrong rebels but that there are trustworthy factions trying to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The general says previous efforts to arm the rebels have only made ISIS stronger.
“Remember, we ended up sending weapons from Benghazi to Turkey to Syria that ended up in ISIS’ hands. we helped create ISIS and we do not want to duplicate that again, i.e. supply weapons to radical Islamists,” said McInerney.
Even if we arm reputable Syrians, McInerney sees two major problems with the plan. First, the top priority of all rebels is to depose Assad, not to confront ISIS. Second, he says the 5,000 rebels we’re trying to arm and train are no match for an ISIS army that grows by the day.
“Five thousand is not enough to do this. They’re going against somewhere between 30,000 and I’ve heard a number as high as 50,000,” said McInerney. “So 5,000 Syrian fighters, that’s going to take six months to a year to arm, are not going to have an impact on any campaign.”
“We have got to be very careful who we align with in Syria, because there are too many pitfalls. We have seen we do not understand how that part of the world works very well,” he said.