Peter1469
09-08-2014, 05:53 PM
Air Power alone can’t defeat IS (https://medium.com/war-is-boring/how-not-to-defeat-the-islamic-state-ff1f0e0cb248)
This debate is back again. Air power advocates think that they can win a war on their own.
One Air Force ex-general thinks the air war against Islamic State militants—133 air strikes and counting—is far too few to defeat it. But what he advocates instead would embroil the United States into a protracted war in Syria and Iraq.
That’s a bad idea, especially since he argues that aerial bombing alone is all we need to do the job.
“IS cannot be reasoned with—they must be terminated (http://breakingdefense.com/2014/09/how-to-defeat-isil-its-all-about-the-strategy/),” writes David Deptula at the Web site Breaking Defense. Deptula was the principal planner for the Air Force’s 1991 bombing campaign against Iraq, and he proposes a three-step plan to blunt Islamic State advances in both “Iraq and Syria,” attack its command and control systems and make the terror group “ineffective.”
The method is lots of aerial bombing—without the need to deploy ground forces. “To accomplish these objectives we need to begin with an aggressive air campaign,” Deptula writes.
This debate is back again. Air power advocates think that they can win a war on their own.
One Air Force ex-general thinks the air war against Islamic State militants—133 air strikes and counting—is far too few to defeat it. But what he advocates instead would embroil the United States into a protracted war in Syria and Iraq.
That’s a bad idea, especially since he argues that aerial bombing alone is all we need to do the job.
“IS cannot be reasoned with—they must be terminated (http://breakingdefense.com/2014/09/how-to-defeat-isil-its-all-about-the-strategy/),” writes David Deptula at the Web site Breaking Defense. Deptula was the principal planner for the Air Force’s 1991 bombing campaign against Iraq, and he proposes a three-step plan to blunt Islamic State advances in both “Iraq and Syria,” attack its command and control systems and make the terror group “ineffective.”
The method is lots of aerial bombing—without the need to deploy ground forces. “To accomplish these objectives we need to begin with an aggressive air campaign,” Deptula writes.