It’s fashionable in the past couple of months to say that air
power is ineffective against ISIS. The
effectiveness of air power depends on the rules of engagement, which are set by
the White House. The White House has decided that it's more important to avoid
civilian casualties than it is to defeat ISIS. There is no way that ISIS should
be able to move vehicles with troops and supplies on desert highways in the
face of US total air dominance. The fact that ISIS is moving troops and
supplies means that the rules of engagement are too restrictive to allow
victory.
Given how many
civilians ISIS kills when they take over an area, it seems to me that even in
humanitarian terms restrictive rules of engagement are self-defeating. Even if
attacking ISIS targets means some civilians will die, far more will die if ISIS
is allowed to continue its rampage across the Middle East.
I think any vehicle
convoy which includes military vehicles should be a free fire zone. Military
vehicles should be defined to include armored vehicles, Humvees, pickup trucks
with mounted machine guns, or civilian vehicles with a lot of gun barrels
pointing out all of the windows. Even if these convoys contain civilian human
shields, attacking them will prevent ISIS from killing a lot more people when
they overrun the next town.
The same policy should
be extended to bomb factories. If we know that ISIS has a lot of explosives in
a residential neighborhood, we should still bomb the building. If ISIS uses the
explosives to take another town, they will kill hundreds or thousands of
civilians themselves. The casualty count will be a lot lower from the secondary
explosion of the bomb factory.
In the long run, it's them or us. ISIS has made it clear they plan to attack us and kill us if we don't convert to their brand of Islam. We should take them at their word and stop them now, before they become an existential threat to the US. The leaders who did not believe Hitler meant what he said lived to regret it.