Martin Dempsey Explained Why Airstrikes WILL NOT Work

[morningfog]

Dempsey not only said that he would request ground troops is the air war failed, but the also explained yesterday why airstrikes will fail. It is only a question of when he will request the ground troops.

Gen. Dempsey: Islamic State dispersing into urban areas in Iraq

Militants in Iraq are seeking to blunt the effectiveness of U.S. airstrikes by dispersing their forces into urban areas and increasingly adopting terror tactics such as suicide attacks and bombings, says a senior American military officer.

“What we’ve seen so far is a lot of the black flags have come down, a lot of the convoys have dispersed, a lot of the assembly areas have been moved into urban areas,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a small group of reporters Tuesday. “We’ve seen an increase in the number of improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks.”

The shift in tactics by Islamic State militants in Iraq comes less than a month after the U.S. began airstrikes. Iraqi and Kurdish troops with backing from U.S. advisors are seeking to eject an increasingly shadowy enemy from towns and cities while defending against attacks.

Dempsey said the dispersal of militants into urban areas will make it “a little tougher” for U.S. warplanes to target them. In more than 160 airstrikes, U.S. aircraft and armed drones have attacked large convoys of vehicles and groups of fighters displaying black flags that made them easily identifiable from the air.

Dempsey spoke to reporters as he headed to Paris for talks about Iraq with French officials. France has said it would consider joining the U.S. in carrying out airstrikes in Iraq.

* * *

How far the Obama administration is prepared to go in Syria remains murky. It may take several years to defeat Islamic State in Iraq and "several more years than that" to defeat the group in Syria, Dempsey said. If the U.S. launches airstrikes in Syria, he said, it will be "to put pressure on" Islamic State militants until the U.S. and Saudi Arabia can train moderate rebels who can fight them on the ground.

http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-dempsey-islamic-state-20140917-story.html

[morningfog]

1. Also: Half of the Iraqi Army cannot be counted on or trusted.

About half of Iraq's army is incapable of partnering effectively with the U.S. to roll back the Islamic State group's territorial gains in western and northern Iraq, and the other half needs to be partially rebuilt with U.S. training and additional equipment, the top U.S. military officer said Wednesday.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former wartime commander of U.S. training programs in Iraq, said a renewed U.S. training effort might revive the issue of gaining legal immunity from Iraqi prosecution for those U.S. troops who are training the Iraqis. The previous Iraqi government refused to grant immunity for U.S. troops who might have remained as trainers after the U.S. military mission ended in December 2011.

"There will likely be a discussion with the new Iraqi government, as there was with the last one, about whether we need to have" Iraqi lawmakers approve new U.S. training, he said. He didn't describe the full extent of such training but said it would be limited and he believed Iraq would endorse it.

"This is about training them in protected locations and then enabling them" with unique U.S. capabilities such as intelligence, aerial surveillance and air power, as well as U.S. advisers, so they can "fight the fight" required to push the Islamic State militants back into Syria, Dempsey said. He spoke with a small group of reporters traveling with him to Paris to meet with his French counterpart to discuss cooperation in the conflicts in Syria and Iraq and other issues.

French military surveillance aircraft on Monday began flying intelligence-gathering flights over northern Iraq in support of the U.S.-effort to counter the Islamic State forces, and a French official said Wednesday that those flights will be conducted daily for an indefinite period. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss intelligence matters by name. The French government has said it would be willing to participate more broadly in military action against the Islamic State in Iraq but it has not yet conducted airstrikes.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/dempsey-half-iraqi-army-us-partners-25556618

[ladjf]

2. Sooner or later, they will have to come out. That's when we will nail them.

In Iraq they only have two places to be, (1) hiding out in houses and (2) outside in plain sight. They can't do any serious offense while hiding out and if they come out, they are dead ducks.

[morningfog]

4. Which requires intelligence and ground troops to conduct.

[ladjf]

6. About thirty loitering drones plus a couple of stationary satellites might get the

job done.

[KG]

3. bad idea, isn't going to work.

once again the US finds itself in deep shit through short sighted foreign policy

[Lurks Often]

5. In theory, the Kurds, Shi'ia militia and any functioning Iraqi Army units

will serve as the ground troops and having ISIS move into urban areas will reduce much of their advantage in artillery and other heavy equipment allowing the lighter armed Kurds & Shi'ia to fight on more equal terms.

Of course that is dependent on whether the Shi'ia militia and the Iraqi Army will fight and fight effectively.