Should We Fight ISIS? (3)

Before we seriously engage ISIS in combat (which we haven’t yet), we should think a bit about our capability to do so. My own experiences as a junior artillery officer in Vietnam tell me that if we are greatly superior to an enemy in the sources of combat power (firepower, mobility, communications, and supply), then we should be able to destroy even a numerically superior  enemy.

I do not think that anyone would dispute that the U.S. armed forces have a tremendous technical superiority over the ISIS forces in each of the sources of combat power listed above. Whether we would have enough resources to engage ISIS sufficiently to destroy them, without at the same time opening ourselves up to other foreign threats, is beyond my knowledge. Hopefully, however, this is a question whose answer is well known by the professionals of the Defense Department. If all we had to contend with is ISIS, we surely have more than enough forces to put ISIS out of business, at least for a time. At the same time however, we have to worry whether or not Russia, or China, or Iran would take advantage of our preoccupation with ISIS to harm us or our allies elsewhere.

I trust you noticed the phrase about putting  “ISIS out of business, at least for a time.” If all we do is to destroy the current ISIS forces, there is always the chance that some remnant or group of like-minded individuals might regrow ISIS or create another jihadist group with the same proclivities and ambitions. Our own long-term survival would require us to find some way to channel Sunni moslems from jihad on the West to  building and developing their own societies. I know that “country-building” is in ill-repute, but can anyone think of a better alternative? Nevertheless, before we can think of this long-term problem, we must first destroy the current threat.

If we do not have the total number of forces to meet all these threats, I would suggest we have no choice as a society but to obtain them somehow. Make no mistake about it. If we do not destroy ISIS over in the mideast, then by their own declaration,  they will take great pleasure in coming to our country and killing as many of us here as they can (see here and here and here and here). If we ignore them, eventually they will infiltrate their agents across the porous U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada to launch suicide bomb attacks among our civilians here. I suspect that most of my fellow citizens would find thousands of dead and wounded American civilians from suicide bombs in malls, theaters, concerts, restaurants, and other public places to be totally unacceptable. If we do not kill them over there, they will most assuredly kill us here.

In fact, I do not believe that it is the material means of warfare that is our greatest barrier to destroying ISIS. Our greatest stumbling block is the will to fight. In almost every major war since World War II, the United States has limited itself in some major way from destroying its enemy. (The first Gulf War is an exception.) The Vietnam war is emblematic of these failed efforts. As I related in my own experiences while attached to an ARVN Airborne battalion, we must not grant an enemy a safe area across some border that we will not cross. If we do, the enemy can drag  out the war as long as they want, until finally the American public becomes entirely weary of bearing the many costs of war. If the public perceives a war to be unending, it is almost certain they will withdraw their support. If we enter a major conflict with ISIS, our leaders starting with the President had better be willing to have our forces follow the enemy anywhere until the enemy is destroyed.

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