The Obama administration’s bombardment campaign against the Islamic State is incredibly soft, according to a former general.
Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, who oversaw the air campaign for Desert Storm, said that while hundreds of daily airstrikes aren’t necessary to bring ISIS to its knees, there’s a large gap between that figure and the current U.S. Central Command practice of just six airstrikes a day in Syria, The Washington Times reports.
Part of the reason for the six strike limit, Deptula said, is that the Pentagon wants zero civilian casualties.
That goal appears to have some amount of flexibility, however, as the recent hit on an ISIS bank definitely did result in casualties, which the Pentagon predicted would occur. Intelligence from drone surveillance determined that a strike during dawn, so as to avoid the greatest number of civilians in the area. But still, the strike killed an estimated 5-7 civilians. The military was willing to tolerate up to 50 civilian deaths.
“This nonsense that this is going to take years — it only takes years if you want it to take years,” Deptula told The Washington Times. “We can put together an operation that can have such a devastating impact on the Islamic State. It would cause them to stop being able to function as they have been.”
International law, according to Deptula, understands the necessity of at least some civilian casualties during a time of conflict, so it’s perfectly legitimate to target ISIS where it hurts most. In the meantime, weak air campaigns will result in more civilian deaths because ISIS continues its onslaught unstopped.
“The logic that is being applied with these excessive restrictions is actually creating greater civilian casualties because it has allowed the Islamic State to exist and to continue their heinous operations of killing innocent men, women and children,” Deptula said. “Drawing out of a campaign, with the anemic, absolutely ridiculous low level of effort that [has] been conducted, is creating greater civilian casualties.”
Excessive restrictions mean that the U.S. has left crucial facilities like headquarters buildings, electricity generators, prisons and police stations totally untouched. This frustration is starting to wear on pilots, who repeatedly receive instructions to hold off targeting important ISIS assets.
Even the successful targeting of oil trucks was only approved two months ago. Deptula noted that notifying oil truckers with leaflets is not at all a necessary component of the laws of armed conflict. Defense Secretary Ash Carter tried to maintain that intelligence only grasped how to target oil trucks recently. Yet, Carter’s explanation didn’t hold any water with GOP Sen. John McCain.
“We knew those fuel trucks were moving back and forth,” McCain told Carter. “We saw them through ISR [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance], and the decision was not made in the White House to attack them or not. You can’t tell me they were moving all that stuff back and forth for over a year and we didn’t know about it. I mean, it’s just not possible given our technological capabilities.”
Other officials have complained that the Obama administration is holding back. In December, one official told The Free Beacon that 60 ISIS training camps in Syria and Iraq, which produce around 1,000 fighters every month, have been largely left to fester. Only 20 camps have taken hits.
“These camps give them a continuous, fresh flow fighters, and little is being done to destroy them,” one official told The Free Beacon.
Still, the airstrikes are having some effect. ISIS recently cut the salary of its fighters by 50 percent, due to airstrikes continuing to hit the group’s revenue sources. Additionally, the plummeting price of oil, such that the cost of a barrel now exceeds the price of the oil itself, has hurt ISIS badly.
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